Midnight's Children

"It’s a good one to start with, because, for me, it was a great inspiration. I wasn’t planning to be a writer; I was planning to be a filmmaker. I still hope to make more films. I was house-sitting in New York after finishing college in Vermont, completely petrified of the Lower East Side. So, I got these books. One was One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the other was Midnight’s Children . I finished Gabriel Garcia Marquez first, then rapidly moved on. I thought to myself, how well Midnight’s Children sits next to Garcia Marquez. Yet it was different, as well. Both use a kind of magical realism . Both have the span of history. But in Midnight’s Children, here was somebody talking about my country in a voice that I recognized, not like the novels that had come before that about India —some of them very good, some of them harder work—which were all modelled on a kind of 19th-century realist novel, Russian or French or something. They all talked about India in a certain way. Whether it was an Indian writer or a foreign writer, there was a certain creation of Exotic India, a certain kind of decorum to the storytelling. Rushdie blows all that apart, and at the same time, starts hitting historical points. It starts in Kashmir, then we see Jallianwala Bagh , then it moves through the turmoil of the 1930s, and then finally arrives at 1947 and Independence. What a fraught and troubled independence that was! We see a kind of split independence, through the point of view of two characters. Rushdie then brings it all the way to The Emergency , the Bangladesh War, and all the way through. I thought it was fantastic. If he’d written a straight book, it wouldn’t have been so gripping. It’s gripping because of the magical realist elements, where he can freak out, take off, come back, play with language. All that was very, very inspiring. I wasn’t planning to be a writer, then. But I thought: if he can do this with a novel, I can probably do something as brave or as out of the box in a film, you know? That was the first book which triggered me to the idea of modern Indian historical fiction. The English readership in India in 1980 was much smaller, and the readership for serious fiction even smaller. Hundreds of thousands of more people read English now. When I got back from New York and talked about this book, people were like, ‘Yeah, I’ve heard of it. I’ve heard of the Booker Prize, yeah, interesting, I’ll read it.” There were definitely some people who had begun to read the book. In 1983, Rushdie was on a promotional tour and I interviewed him. I actually had to go to the newspaper editor and say, ‘Salman Rushdie is coming! He’s won this prize!’ The editor said, ‘You want to interview this guy? Okay, do it.’ I was a young freelance reporter. You’d imagine people would be fighting over each other to interview Rushdie, but nothing. I ended up having a long conversation with him and the paper published a full-page interview, which was lovely. “In India, you start seeing the novel form coalesce in the 19th century in Bengal and Gujarat” Then it grew. By the time 1984, 1985 came around, a lot of people were annoyed with Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay Gandhi. And Rushdie was seen as very critical of the Gandhis in his book. He makes fun of Indira and the Emergency. I think that found some traction. And he wrote Shame , about Pakistan, shortly after, which to me is not such a great book—he’s trying too hard, trying to force things—but it clicked into Midnight’s Children as a kind of twin set of historical books, and that again got more attention."

"Authors take very different approaches to historical fiction. Some, like Mantel, above, seek historical accuracy where possible—embroidering only in the gaps left in the historical record. Others take a very different and more fantastical approach."