Hello friends ! I am Bhavna Sosa.This blog is about Thinking Activity on Midnight's Children. This task is assigned by Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad sir. So, let’s start making this blog task.
About author and novel :-
Salman Rushdie, in full Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie,Indian-born British writer whose allegorical novels examine historical and philosophical issues by means of surreal characters, brooding humour, and an effusive and melodramatic prose style. His treatment of sensitive religious and political subjects made him a controversial figure.His work, combining magical realism with historical fiction, is primarily concerned with the many connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, with much of his fiction being set on the Indian subcontinent. His second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be "the best novel of all winners" on two occasions, marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize.Here we talk about 'Midnight's Children', Saleem Sinai, the narrator of Midnight’s Children, opens the novel by explaining that he was born on midnight, August 15, 1947, at the exact moment India gained its independence from British rule. Now nearing his thirty-first birthday, Saleem believes that his body is beginning to crack and fall apart. Fearing that his death is imminent, he grows anxious to tell his life story. Padma, his loyal and loving companion, serves as his patient, often skeptical audience. Midnight's Children is a loose allegory for events in India both before and, primarily, after the independence and partition of India. The protagonist and narrator of the story is Saleem Sinai, born at the exact moment when India became an independent country. He was born with telepathic powers, as well as an enormous and constantly dripping nose with an extremely sensitive sense of smell. The novel is divided into three books.
1.Narrative technique (changes made in film adaptation for eg. absence of Padma, the Nati, the listener, the commenter,what is your interpretation interpretation?)
In the movie ‘ Midnight’s Children’ so many changes had been made by the director which were not described in the novel. In 'Midnight's Children' Salman Rushdie uses the first person narrative through Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of the novel. Rushdie also makes good use of the device of Magic Realism in Midnight'sChildren. Further Rushdie's use of cinematic elements can clearly be seen in the novel. All this shows Bombay Cinema's influence on Rushdie and Rushdie's Use of Indianized English is his biggest achievement. In the original text the story is told by the protagonist himself and the story is listened to by Padma.
Salman Rushdie uses the lots of narrative technique in Midnight’s Children.
Russian Dolls :-
We seeRussian Dollst are doll within the doll and in novel and film of the story within the story.
Chinese Boxes:-
In literature a Chinese box structure refers to a frame narrative, a novel or drama that is told in the form of a narrative inside a narrative, giving views from different perspectives. Examples like Mary Shalley's Frankenstein and Heart of Darkness.
Indian Oral Narratological methods Panchatantra:-
In the Panchatantra, there are the stories of animals (Fables) to teach the princes of the King Sudarshan and Amarshakti like three sons named Bahushakti, Ugrashakti and Shakti.
Vishnu Sharma (Brahmin) is there to teach them the morals and lessons to helping them to build up the ability of ruling because they were the dumb by their early childhood. Here the story is told in the frame and within the frame.
Kathasaritasagar: -
In the Kathasaritasagar, there is story also multiple layers of story within a story.
Baital - Pachisi:-
Twenty-five stories are there. These are the stories of legends within the frame story, from India. Basically, this is the story of Vikram Aditya promising a sorcerer that he will capture Vetala. Then the story starts with one frame.
There is also the story of Sihasan Battisi and in that also many stories exist. As all thirty-two dolls tell the stories.
AlifLaila-Arabiand Nights:-
In this story we find references of Arebian nights, which is a story about the one thousand one hundred stories in that book. Here we can find many examples and connect it with our narrative because here the speaker Shahrazad is telling the stories to the listener Shahryar, same like in Midnight’s Children, the speaker Saleem and the listener Padma.
Ramayana and Mahabharata:-
Valmiki is the narrator of Ramayana and Ved Vyasa is the narrator of Mahabharata. We find that Ramayana and Mahabharata both are books related to story within a story .
In the movie ‘ Midnight’s Children’ so many changes had been made by the director. So many characters are not included and there is also a slight change in narrative technique also. In the original text the story is told by the protagonist himself and the story is listened to by Padma. This technique is connected with Bharatmuni’s ‘ Natya Shastra. It means here Saleem is Nat and Padma is Nati. In film adaptation this method is changed and here Saleem tells the story but the audience plays the role of nati. This is a narrative technique of midnight's Children.
2. Characters (how many included, how many left out - Why? What is your interpretation?)
Here are the Characters in the movie...
Satya Bhabha as Saleem Sinai
Shriya Saran as Parvati
Siddharth Narayan as Shiva
Darsheel Safary as Saleem Sinai (as a child)
Anupam Kher as Ghani
Shabana Azmi as Naseem
Neha Mahajan as Young Naseem
Seema Biswas as Mary
Charles Dance as William Methwold
Samrat Chakrabarti as Wee Willie Winkie
Rajat Kapoor as Aadam Aziz
Soha Ali Khan as Jamila
Rahul Bose as Zulfikar
Anita Majumdar as Emerald
Shahana Goswami as Amina
Chandan Roy Sanyal as Joseph D'Costa
Ronit Roy as Ahmed Sinai
Kulbhushan Kharbanda as Picture Singh
Shikha Talsania as Alia
Zaib Shaikh as Nadir Khan
Sarita Choudhury as Indira Gandhi
Vinay Pathak as Hardy
Kapila Jeyawardena as Governor
Ranvir Shorey as Laurel
Suresh Menon as Field Marshal
G.R Perera as Astrologer
Salman Rushdie, Narrator.
The list of character from the novel who didn't appear in the film.
Padma
Sonny Ibrahim
Commander Sabarmati
Lila Sabarmati
Homy Carrack
Alice Pereira
Nalikar Women
Ramram Sheth
3. Themes and Symbols (if film adaptation able to capture themes and symbols?)
Themes :-
1) British Colonialism and Postcolonialism
Born at exactly midnight on the eve of India’s independence from British colonialism, Saleem Sinai is the first free native citizen born on Indian soil in nearly a hundred years. After a century of British rule, in addition to a century of unofficial imperialism before that, Saleem’s birth marks the end of a two-hundred-year British presence in India. Using their considerable power and influence, the British impose their Western culture and customs onto the Indian…
2) Truth and Storytelling
Self-proclaimed writer and pickle-factory manager Saleem Sinai is dying—cracking and crumbling under the stress of a mysterious illness—but before he does, he is determined to tell his story. With the “grand hope of the pickling of time,” Saleem feverishly pens his autobiography, preserving his stories like jars of chutney, searching for truth and meaning within them. Born at the precise moment of India’s independence and endowed with magical powers Saleem’s remarkable story begins long.
3) Sex and Gender
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is a harsh critique of the gender-related power struggles of postcolonial Indian society. After generations of purdah—the belief that Muslim and Hindu women should live separately from society, behind a curtain or veil, to stay out of the sight of men—postcolonial women are encouraged to become “modern Indian women” and remove their veils. Countless years in the domestic sphere has branded them as weak, demure, and dependent on men.
4) Identity and Nationality
From the moment Saleem Sinai is born on the eve of India’s independence from Great Britain, he becomes the living embodiment of his country. Saleem is India, and his identity metaphorically represents the identity of an entire nation; however, Saleem’s identity is complicated and conflicted. A nation, generally understood as the same people living in the same place, only loosely applies to India’s diverse population. Instead, multiple religions, languages, and political beliefs divide postcolonial India.
5) Fragments and Partitioning
Following their 1947 independence from British rule, India begins to break up in a process known as partitioning. British India splits along religious lines, forming the Muslim nation of Pakistan and the secular, but mostly Hindu, nation of India. India continues to fracture even further, dividing itself based on language and class. Meanwhile, Saleem Sinai, the living embodiment of India, is also cracking- and dying. Saleem,
6) Religion
Religion is at the forefront of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and it drives most of the narrative throughout the entire novel. Saleem Sinai, the narrator-protagonist, is born Muslim but lives most of his life in the Hindu-steeped culture of Bombay. His lifelong ayah, Mary Pereira, is a devout Catholic, and his sister, the Brass Monkey, ultimately joins a nunnery. In the religiously pluralistic backdrop of postcolonial India, Rushdie references several
Symbol :-
1) Pickles
Pickles are repeatedly mentioned in Midnight’s Children, and while they are often viewed as a phallic symbol, they are generally representative of the power of preservation within Rushdie’s novel. Saleem is the manager of a pickle factory, and he preserves pickles and chutneys each day. He also attempts to preserve his own life story like the pickles in his factory. Saleem largely manages to preserve his life through storytelling, offering a bit of immortality to a dying man, and he also labels and stores each chapter he writes in a pickle jar, so that they may be read later, by his son for example. This connection between pickles and the preservation of stories endures until the very end of the book, when Saleem ceremoniously labels his very last pickle jar as a way of closing out his story and his life as a whole.
2) Spittoons
In Midnight’s Children, spittoons initially represent Old India but grow to also symbolize Saleem’s identity, which is intimately linked to his country given that he is one of the children of midnight. Rani gives Mumtaz and Nadir a silver spittoon when they are married, and they frequently play hit-the-spittoon, an old-fashioned game in which they try to spit tobacco juice into a spittoon from various distances, similar to the old men in the town of Agra. After Saleem’s family is killed during the Indo-Pakistani war, he is hit in the head with the exact same silver spittoon, and he instantly forgets his name and his entire identity. However, even with amnesia, Saleem knows that the spittoon is important, and he carries it with him throughout the war. To Saleem, the spittoon represents his identity, and he carries it with him until it is lost in Indira Gandhi’s Emergency.
3) Noses
Saleem Sinai’s large, bulbous nose is a symbol of his power as the leader of the Midnight Children’s Conference, which is comprised of all children born on the moment of India’s independence from British rule. His nose makes his power of telepathy possible, and this is how he communicates with the other children of midnight (who all have varied powers of their own). Saleem inherits his rather large, and perpetually congested, nose from his grandfather, Aadam Aziz, who also uses his nose to sniff out trouble. Saleem’s nasal powers begin after an accident in his mother’s washing-chest, in which he sniffs a rogue pajama string up his nose, resulting in a deafening sneeze and the instant arrival of the voices in his head. Saleem’s power of telepathy remains until a sinus surgery clears out his nose “goo.” After his surgery, Saleem is unable to further commune with the other children. Ironically, after Saleem’s nasal congestion is gone, he gains the ability to smell emotions, and he spends much time categorizing all the smells he frequently encounters.
4. The texture of the novel (What is the texture of the novel? Well, it is the interconnectedness of narrative technique with the theme. Is it well captured?)
The film is not told in chronological order, but it is told in flashback. When Salim remembered something he told the audience and listener. And then come back to real life from that flashback. Whole story is told by Salim. And he described the things that he felt. This is my interpretation of the novel and film adaptation.
5)What is your aesthetic experience after watching the screening?
In my aesthetic experience after watching this movie is wonderful, as there are so many various scene in this movie. This movie in protagonist Saleem hearimg lots of voices. This movie in the speaking out against politics was a big challenge. Emergency was imposed by Indira Gandhi at that time. Midnight’s Children movie and novel both try to describe politicians. This movie adaptation such a wonderful.
Thank you
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