Rushdie's novel didn't exactly ask to be adapted

The story of story-telling in Midnight’s Children dares adaptation. But will the story itself find a political context in Deepa Mehta’s much-anticipated film? 

The Economic Times, 7 September, 2012

Barring a (Amit) Chaudhuri here and a (DJ) Taylor there, everyone told us it was sacred. The Best of the Booker and one of the greatest books of the century,Midnight's Children was nearly a decade into its existence by the time my generation was out of school and lesser readers like me acquired the patience and pertinence to approach its mysterious frenzy.

It was not easy. Most of my friends never finished it. Others did and marvelled equally at their own effort and that of Salman Rushdie's. More than magic realism or some such deft ploy of authorship, what befuddled and enchanted us in turn was Rushdie's confidence of "presumptuously and self-defeatingly" capturing the polymorphous chaos that is India. Our uncertain admiration was overcompensated by awe.

For generations handcuffed to Midnight's Children, Deepa Mehta attempting a movie out of its eclectic madness has been more than a mere curiosity even though such adaptations have become commonplace. Long before Vikas Swarup's Q&A or Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake were turned into blockbusters, we had Dev Benegal's teasing interpretation of Upamanyu Chatterjee's English August .

Around the same time, Ismail Merchant presented Anita Desai's In Custody . Then in 1998, we had the triple whammy of Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan , Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey and Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy-Man .

But Midnight's Children is not just another landmark novel but the watershed in Indian English literature. In the above list, only Khushwant's precedes it. Only one "Indian" writer - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - won the Booker in the 1970s. Since Midnight's Children so tyrannically broke away from the somewhat-EM Forster-induced classical poise of RK Narayan or Anita Desai, a host of Indian novelists have sought their own directions. A genre-redefining opus in its chaotic sweep, it is certainly not a novel asking to be adapted or retold - more so because it is also a story of story-telling.

Mehta herself has described Midnight's Children as "Salman's love letter to India" and her "responsibility of turning the Booker of Bookers into a film...pretty scary". But did not Rushdie himself tell us that he believed nothing was sacred except the absolute necessity of artistic freedom so that "within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way"?

The 1001 midnight's children heard those voices. Rushdie was writing about childhood, dreams, possibilities, innocence and waste. Of course, his novel was also about the imagination of nationhood, identities each of us is born into and identities each of us strives to acquire or disown.

Rushdie explored how the unity of a modern nation might handle diversity. How the very oneness of nationhood might turn authoritarian and seek to control dissent. Rushdie's alternative was liberal democracy. But the politics of Midnight's Children probably ended there.

Rushdie himself burdened literature with great responsibilities: "We may be heading towards a world in which there will be no real alternative to the liberal-capitalist social model (except, perhaps, the theocratic, foundationalist model of Islam)... the free world will require novelists' most rigorous attention... if democracy no longer has communism to help it clarify, by opposition, its own ideals, then perhaps it will have to have literature as an adversary instead." (Is Nothing Sacred?)

So where is the opposition in Midnight's Children?

It is against branding, and persecution, of individuals on the basis of identities they have no control over. It is against oligarchy and authoritarianism. But for all its laments over corruption, the novel is evasive on political economy, wishfully exhorting the virtues of fragile childhood to bridge social divides.

Protagonist Saleem Sinai's foster son Aadam belongs to my generation. Left in the custody of Picture Singh, a spent magician and one-time overlord of a Communist ghetto, Aadam's biggest inheritance from his father would be this amazing story. But would it have guided him find his feet in a post-liberalisation India still grappling to define its idea of nationhood and sovereignty? Would it have provided him with a context to wonder why economic growth and its promise of trickle-down benefits cannot check the growing numbers of the poor and conflict over resources?

If he is still alive and so inclined, Aadam can sift through the pages to find this exchange between his biological father and foster father.

Shiva: No, little rich boy; there is no third principle; there is only money-and-poverty... Things and their makers rule the world; look at Birla, and Tata, and all the powerful: they make things. For things, the country is run. Not for people...

Saleem: But people are not things; if we come together, if we love each other, if we show that this, just this, this people-together, this Conference, this children-sticking-together-through-thick-and-thin, can be that third way...

Shiva: Little rich boy, that's all just wind...

Or Aadam could just wait for winds of change, hoping Rushdie has allowed Mehta to question his father's destiny. Or maybe even his.