Thinking Activity: Midnight's Children

 This blog task as part of a Thinking Activity on Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children, assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad.

Video 1:- Narrative Technique—Midnight's Children

Video Description

This lecture examines the sophisticated narrative strategies Salman Rushdie employs in Midnight’s Children, focusing on its fusion of Western postmodernist techniques with Eastern oral storytelling traditions. It contrasts the novel’s complex, multi-layered structure with the limitations of its cinematic adaptation, which struggles to convey the depth and intricacy of the text.

The discussion explains how Rushdie constructs a “pickle jar” narrative — a metaphor for stories preserved, layered, and interlinked like Russian dolls or Chinese boxes. This structure reflects the influence of Indian and Middle Eastern traditions, such as the Panchatantra, Kathasaritsagara, Vikram and Betal, Arabian Nights, Ramayana, and Mahabharata, where frame narratives and episodic tales are used to convey multiple perspectives.

The lecture also contrasts Western narrative realism — built on cause-effect logic and linear probability — with Eastern modes that freely incorporate myth, fantasy, and non-linear storytelling. In Midnight’s Children, these traditions blend through magical realism and historical realism, creating a textured narrative where personal memories, myths, and national history intersect.

Attention is given to the role of the unreliable narrator, Saleem Sinai, whose shifting, self-contradictory storytelling reflects the novel’s postmodern skepticism toward absolute truth. The “chutney-fied” or “pickled” style of history in the novel symbolizes how facts, folklore, and memory are preserved together, producing a composite, culturally hybrid record of India’s past.

Overall, the lecture addresses the challenges of adapting such a layered text into film, arguing that the richness of its form and multiplicity of voices may be better suited to a long-form medium such as a television series.

Learning Outcomes

1. Explain Hybrid Narrative Techniques  Describe how Rushdie merges Western postmodernist devices with Indian and Middle Eastern oral traditions to create a culturally layered storytelling style.

2. Analyze Layered Story Structures  Interpret the “pickle jar” metaphor and the Russian doll/Chinese box model as tools for embedding multiple narratives within one another, offering diverse perspectives on history and identity.

3. Recognize Cross-Cultural Storytelling Influences 

Identify the structural and thematic contributions of traditions such as Panchatantra, Kathasaritsagara, Vikram and Betal, Arabian Nights, Ramayana, and Mahabharata to the novel’s form.

4. Differentiate Narrative Realisms 

 Compare the linear, cause-effect realism of Western fiction with the episodic, myth-infused realism of Eastern traditions, and explain how Midnight’s Children integrates both through magical realism and historical narrative.

5. Evaluate the Function of the Unreliable Narrator 

Assess how Saleem Sinai’s subjective and contradictory voice invites critical engagement with the nature of truth, memory, and historical representation.

6. Interpret the Metaphor of “Pickled” History 

Understand how the act of “pickling” stories represents the preservation and blending of cultural, historical, and mythical elements in postcolonial identity.

7. Critique Adaptation Limitations 

 Explain why the novel’s intricate narrative style challenges conventional cinematic adaptation and how alternative formats could better convey its complexity.

8. Connect Narrative Form to Themes  Articulate how Rushdie’s experimental narrative techniques are inseparable from the novel’s exploration of India’s plural, contested, and evolving national identity.

Video 2:- How a Bulldozer Became a Metaphor for Power 

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children employs the bulldozer as a powerful and multifaceted symbol to interrogate themes of political authority, historical erasure, and the duality of progress. Conventionally associated with construction and development, the bulldozer in Rushdie’s narrative acquires a darker connotation, embodying destruction, coercion, and state-sponsored intimidation. This symbolism gains sharp clarity within the historical backdrop of India’s Emergency period (1975–1977), when democratic freedoms were suspended and oppressive measures, such as slum clearance drives led by Sanjay Gandhi, displaced countless marginalized communities.

Rushdie enriches the metaphor with vivid and unsettling imagery—dust settling on individuals like ghostly shrouds, bureaucratic jargon concealing acts of violence, and fragile homes splintering under mechanical force. The loss of the narrator’s family heirloom, a silver spittoon, encapsulates the personal dimension of this devastation, representing the obliteration of identity, memory, and heritage. The bulldozer thus transcends its literal function to become an enduring emblem of authoritarian power and systematic erasure, compelling readers to critically evaluate rhetoric surrounding “beautification” and “improvement” projects, and to consider who bears the human cost of such so-called progress.

Learning Outcomes 

Understand Historical Context

Demonstrate an understanding of India’s Emergency period (1975–1977) and its socio-political consequences, particularly the impact of state-led slum clearance projects.

Evaluate the Intersection of Politics and Personal Narratives

Assess how political decisions can lead to personal loss, identity displacement, and the destruction of collective memory, as illustrated through the loss of the silver spittoon.

Critically Examine Rhetoric of “Progress”

Question narratives of “beautification” and “development” by identifying the human and cultural costs hidden beneath such rhetoric.

Develop Visual and Textual Analytical Skills

Interpret the interplay of visual imagery, narration, and historical reference to uncover deeper thematic meanings in audio-visual adaptations of literary works.

Reference 

DoE-MKBU. “How a Bulldozer Became a Metaphor for Power | Midnight’s Children | Salman Rushdie.” YouTube, 11 Aug. 2025, www.youtube.com/watch?v=88-t_lPnM_o.

DoE-MKBU. “Narrative Technique | Midnight’s Children | Sem 3 Online Classes | 2021 07 12.” YouTube, 12 July 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=opu-zd4JNbo.