Midnight's Children - Tribute
When reading the historical novels of James Michener, I'd always lament the fact he'd never bothered to write about my Bombay and my India, it was an aching loss, something I wanted to fix in good time, when I indulged in the fantasies of my own prowess as a spinner of tales. What I never really realized was that such a book had been written, only a few years following my birth, and it was a book I'd read too, but never grasped, not in the least. That book I've just finished reading, a second time, and the import of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, is heavy and obvious. Undoubtedly one of the great books of our generation, a brilliant work, acute and impeccable, it is an enthralling bit of literature, written with deep feeling and by an uncommon talent. The narration of the first thirty years or so of India's independence, the hopes that freedom and democracy brought, and the hopelessness that invariably accompanies those ideals are captured with a magical and apocryphal look at historical events, through the eyes of an observer who sees in him reflected his country's birth, adolscence and gawky jump into adulthood. Much water has flowed under the bridge since the novel was first published, the generation hinted at by Saleem Sinai, born of the late seventies and the early eighties, is today's yuppie, the generation of IT services and economic booms that don't reach the masses, the generation of a billion people, an immense teeming mass that is as yet uncertain about what which way to go, of changing city names and dreams of lunar travel, my generation. I've jumped ship, so to speak, and write while sitting in a city a full twelve hours behind the city of my birth, but the ties remain, strong as ever. I've said this before, and say it again, it is pitiful that such an important writer, important both to Indian as well as world literature, a man who has held up the mirrors we gaze our images in, has been treated like a pariah by the country of his birth and that of his fecund fantasy.
posted by ubaid - Saturday, June 12, 2004 at 1:10 AM - 2 comments - post anonymously