Midnight's Children Imperialism

In Salman Rushdie’s story Midnight’s Children, offers an overview of events in India immediately following the nation gaining independence in 1947. Within the context of the novel, The Midnight Children are the inheritors of India’s lasting promise, and the evidence of its lasting strength. They each have an unusual power, which not only provides them protection, but more broadly signals India’s ability to rise, in a post-colonial era. It is their magic, that becomes the strongest thread for Salman Rushdie’s allegorical exploration of the events that occurred in India, just following their declaration of independence. Midnight’s Children, is therefore significant as a historical portrayal of India, and the impact of British colonialism on the …show more content…
This is, according to Jean-Pierre Durix, a literary scholar who studied the use of magical realism in Midnight’s Children, significant because it allows Rushdie to not only present a novel with referential qualities, but also draws attention to Rushdie’s own attitudes toward history, or what message India would want represented as it relates to those events (Durix 57). In other words, while the text does contain a chain of real historical events, the author uses magical realism to provide an indirect commentary on those events (Durix 57). This is fitting when considered in connection with Neil T. Kortenaar’s review of the book and its purpose. Kortennaar studied Rushdie’s construction of allegory, within the text, and how it connected to India’s postcolonial history. Within this study, he holds that while the book must be read as fiction, it cannot be dismissed as non-referential, because it is within the most clearly fictional elements, in this case the elements of magical realism, that the historical events are most meaningfully represented (Kortnenaar 41). This is because the use of magical realism, as allegory, demands that the reader approach the history with greater