General Resources
Movie Adaptations and theatrical productions
Authors’ Interviews
- Midnight’s Children Events: “Interview with Salman Rushdie & President Lee Bollinger”
- NL Interviews Salman Rushdie
- Salman Rushdie interview- Midnight’s Children
- Midnight’s Children: A Q&A with Salman Rushdie
- India Summit: Salman Rushdie on Contemporary Literature in India
- Salman Rushdie talks to James Naughtie at the Edinburgh International Book Festival
- James Naughtie with Salman Rushdie about his Booker Prize-winning novel Midnight’s Children.
- Salman Rushdie 2008 | Talks at Google
- A Conversation with Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie: Freedom to Write Lecture (2010)
- Approaching Midnight: The Adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Novel Midnight’s Children: Deepa Mehta
- Magic, Realism and After: Arundhati Roy
Video Lectures
- Magical Realism and Postmodernism: The Case of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
- NPTEL: Reading Midnight’s Children
- NPTEL: Reading Midnight’s Children 2
Study Guides
Scholarly Articles
Main Topics
- British Colonialism and Postcolonialism
- Magic relaism
- Racism, Sex and Gender
- Paritition and Independence
- Identity and Nationality
- Naming as an Identity
- The Unreliability of Oral Storytelling
- Boundaries and Borders
- The ‘Other’ in Midnight’s Children
- Midnight’s Children as Postcolonial novel
- Narrative technique of Midnight’s Children.
- Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as histogriographic metafiction
- Characterization: Saleem Sinai, Aadam Aziz, Ahmed Sinai, Mumtaz (Amina Sinai), Mary Pereira, Shiva, Parvati-The-Witch, Padma
Questions
- Why do you think Midnight’s Children is divided into three sections?
- What will the future of Aadam Sinai’s India in the novel look like? Will it be better than Saleem’s? Worse? What does it have to do with abracadabra?
- Why is time so disjointed in Midnight’s Children?
- Rushdie’s style has been called hysterical realism. Why do you think Rushdie uses this style to describe such a tumultuous time in India’s history instead of a more straightforward one?
- How would Midnight’s Children change if Saleem didn’t die? Does he have to die?
- Is Saleem a reliable narrator? Why or why not?
- Saleem’s death is pretty peculiar—he cracks into tiny fragments and is crushed. Why fragments? Does this have something to do with the structure of the novel?
- Midnight’s Children is a story within a story, and sometimes a story within a story within a story. Is it possible to tell Saleem’s tale as just a normal plot? How would that change the novel and its message?
- What do pickles represent?
- How important is the theme of identity to an interpretation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children?
- What are the aspects of myth and history in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children?
- How does Salman Rushdie explore the notion of ‘truth’ in the novel?
- What does the perforated sheet represent?
- How does Salman Rushdie rewrite or reclaim History in Midnight’s Children?
Tasks for students
- Prepare the questions and send your answers to TTM at ttm1974@gmail.com