Film Screening—Deepa Mehta's Midnight's Children
This blog is based on Midnight's children by Salman Rushdie and also film screening and this task was assigned by Dilip Barad sir.
Belonging in a Postcolonial Nation: Reflections on Midnight’s Children (Film & Novel)
Pre-Viewing: Setting the Lens
Before approaching the film, I engaged with three central questions that shaped my critical perspective:
-
Who narrates history?In most official accounts, history reflects the voices of those in power. In Midnight’s Children, however, Saleem reclaims history for the displaced, the overlooked, and the forgotten. His narrative reminds us that memory especially the memory of the marginalized is a powerful corrective to the silences of state-approved histories.
-
What makes a nation?The film suggests that India cannot be defined solely by geography, governance, or political institutions. Rather, it emerges as a patchwork quilt of cultures, religions, languages, and memories often contradictory, sometimes conflicting, yet bound together by shared moments of trauma and triumph.
-
Can language be decolonized?Rushdie’s “chutnification” of English blends Indian idioms, food metaphors, and vernacular rhythms into the colonizer’s tongue, transforming it into something hybrid, resistant, and unmistakably local. The act of “chutnifying” English becomes not just a stylistic flourish but a form of political resistance against linguistic dominance.
While-Viewing: Observations
-
Biologically: Each boy inherits a genetic lineage meant for the other.
-
Socially: Saleem is raised in wealth despite his poor origins, while Shiva grows up in poverty despite his privileged birth.
-
Politically: Their personal fates are altered by a private act of rebellion against class inequality.This mirrors Bhabha’s “Third Space,” where identity is formed in the overlap of competing cultural and historical forces.
Post-Viewing: Themes and Analysis
1. Hybridity and Identity
Saleem and Shiva are living embodiments of hybrid identity:
-
Saleem is culturally privileged but biologically poor.
-
Shiva is biologically privileged but socially marginalized.Their lives reveal hybridity not as confusion or dilution, but as a space of possibility where contradictions coexist, producing new forms of selfhood.
2. Narrating the Nation
Through Saleem’s memories, the film rewrites the history of India in a non-linear, fragmentary form. It resists Eurocentric models of nationhood that rely on linear progress, territorial uniformity, and rigid binary identities (e.g., Hindu/Muslim, colonizer/colonized).
Historical–Personal Timeline
Critical Insights: Film as Text, Text as Protest
1. Hybridity as Power, Not Confusion
The film's central birth switch isn't just a plot device; it’s an allegory for postcolonial hybridity. Saleem and Shiva one rich by accident, the other poor by fate embody Bhabha’s notion of the Third Space, where identity is negotiated, not inherited (Bhabha 112). Their destinies challenge essentialist notions of culture, class, and even nation.
2. Narrating the Nation Through a Child's Eyes
Saleem's unreliable but eloquent narration subverts official history. His magical realism fractures linear storytelling, echoing Chatterjee’s claim that Indian nationalism diverges from European models and must account for inner contradictions (Chatterjee 5). The personal becomes political and vice versa.
3. Language as Resistance: The Chutnification of English
Rushdie's language, both in the novel and film narration, is a rebellious stew of English, Hindi, and Urdu. The film continues this chutnification, defying linguistic purity and colonial hierarchy. As Rushdie writes, “We are not your monkeys anymore” (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands). His English is no longer the Queen’s it’s India’s.
3. Chutnification of English
Rushdie’s prose in the novel and dialogue in the film mix English with vernacular languages, food metaphors, and cultural idioms. Describing memories as “pickled” resists the flat neutrality of standard English. Translating such phrases into “proper” English removes not only cultural flavor but also political force showing that chutnification is an act of reclaiming and reshaping linguistic power.
When the Personal Is Political
What happens when history isn’t just a backdrop, but something you're born into quite literally? This is the central premise of Midnight’s Children (2012), Deepa Mehta’s ambitious film adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s landmark 1981 novel. As part of our postgraduate curriculum on postcolonial cinema and literature, this screening served not merely as entertainment or literary translation, but as a pedagogical journey into the politics of identity, language, and nationhood.
With a screenplay by Rushdie himself and narration that reimagines the novel’s metafictional framework, the film weaves magical realism into the gritty fabric of Indian history. It captures the oscillating fates of individuals handcuffed to the whims of national destiny all through the eyes of Saleem Sinai, a child born at the stroke of India's independence in 1947.
Adaptation & Aesthetic: What the Film Gains and Loses
The film though ambitious inevitably compresses the novel’s vast sprawl. Subplots are trimmed; minor characters disappear. The result is a narrative that sometimes feels rushed. Yet what is gained is visual lyricism: the lush cinematography of Kashmir, the rich mise-en-scène of 1940s Bombay, and the symbolic imagery (like the pickle jars and Shiva’s boots) all convey what words cannot.
The brief appearance of the Mother India (1957) poster is no accident. If Nargis's iconic film celebrates a stoic, suffering Bharat Mata, Midnight’s Children offers a cosmopolitan critique urban, skeptical, and politically astute. Mehta and Rushdie challenge not only colonial power but also nationalist sentimentality.
Final Scene: Chutney, Memory, and New Beginnings
The final scene Saleem tasting a familiar chutney and reuniting with Mary circles back to the idea of memory as preservation. Just like chutney pickles flavor and keeps perishable items, Saleem’s narration pickles history, capturing its contradictions, stings, and sweetness. His son Aadam’s first word signals the possibility of renewal a new story, a new India, still gestating.
Final Reflection: A Nation in Fragments, a Story Whole
Watching Midnight’s Children is like tasting a spice-laden curry overwhelming, messy, yet unforgettable. The film reminds us that postcolonial identity is not a resolution but a dialogue, often painful, always evolving.
Rushdie and Mehta have not merely adapted a book. They have filmed a nation’s fractured soul its hope, horror, and hybridity through magical realism and cinematic boldness.
Conclusion: Belonging in a Colonizer’s Tongue
To belong in a postcolonial nation is to inhabit multiple, often conflicting histories some inherited, others resisted. Midnight’s Children demonstrates that English, once a colonial instrument, can be transformed into a vehicle for resistance, creativity, and cultural self-definition.
Rushdie’s narrative refuses purity, embracing instead the messy, overlapping realities of memory, identity, and language. In this context, belonging is not about singular origin but about constant negotiation between past and present, self and nation, tradition and change.
In telling his own story in his own rhythm chutnified, metafictional, and unapologetically hybrid Saleem Sinai embodies the act of political defiance that defines postcolonial identity. He reminds us that fractured identities do not silence us; they give us more voices with which to speak.
References :
Midnight's Children, Directed byMehta Deepa, David Hemilton Doug Monkoff Steven Silver Neil Tabatznik Andrew Spaulding, 2012.
Mullan, John. "Salman Rushdie on the writing of Midnight's Children,The Guardian, 26 July 2008.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. Jonathan Cape, 1981.
Comments
Post a Comment