Midnight's Children – review

You wait a year for a film version of a Booker prize-winning magical realist novel largely concerned with people from the Indian subcontinent and widely considered to be unfilmable. Then suddenly two come along: Life of Pi and Midnight's Children. The lesser of the two, though a movie of ambition and distinction, Midnight's Children was published in 1981 and is adapted for the screen by its author Salman Rushdie, who also delivers the eloquent narration, a reworking of the book's framing device. As a film and novel, Midnight's Children is a great baggy work covering over 60 years in the turbulent history of India and Pakistan from the end of the second world war up to Indira Gandhi's repressive "Emergency" of the late 1970s, as they affect five generations of a well-off Muslim clan and their associates in Kashmir, Agra, Mumbai, Karachi. It brings together Dickens, Kipling and Shakespeare, Christianity, Hinduism and Islam, comedy, tragedy and farce, and has as its moral and dramatic fulcrum the year 1947 when the misjudged partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan was insisted upon by the Muslims and acquiesced in by the departing British. Rushdie's brilliant insight was to bring together the private and public lives of those involved by inventing a mystical bond between the children born around the midnight hour of 17 August 1947. The narrator and central character famously remarks: "I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country." He and his peers are given special powers (prophecy, magic, metamorphosis) in exchange for terrible responsibilities, and they become the embodiment of the best hope of the two nations during a period of bad faith, violence and the betrayal of democracy. At the centre is a variation of Mark Twain's tale The Prince and the Pauper: a rich boy and the son of a street musician are swapped at birth in the early seconds of 18 August by a misguided midwife, who (following the political dictates of her communist lover) believes she is exercising benign social engineering. So the central characters have divided identities, a situation made even more complex by the concealed paternity (from a European source) of one of them. The lesser of these charismatic children suffers most through the dropping of sub-plots and the trimming of character and loss of nuance demanded by reducing the film to some 150 minutes. In the first post-Partition episode of Midnight's Children, we're briefly shown a poster of the 1957 film Mother India, the most popular and revered of all Bollywood movies. It features the monstre sacré, Nargis, the country's biggest postwar star, as a suffering peasant mother, a symbolic Mother Courage figure of independent India. This is a clear hint that the makers consider Midnight's Children a sophisticated urban riposte to Mother India's sentimental rural story. Deepa Mehta, born and educated in India, is an established film-maker living in Canada. Salman Rushdie, born in Mumbai and educated in Britain, is the subcontinent's most visible cosmopolitan exile. They are united by this film in both sorrow and anger for what their homeland is, and drawn together in hopeful anticipation of what it still might be.