ThAct: Midnight's Children
This task is given by Dilip Barad Sir,
In this task i explain two video lectures and learning outcomes from the discussion.
Video 1
Narrative Technique in Midnight's Children:
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children stands as a remarkable fusion of narrative traditions, blending the structural discipline of Western realism with the layered, fluid storytelling of Indian and broader Eastern oral traditions. While Western realism adheres to Aristotelian cause-and-effect logic and linear progress, Eastern storytelling embraces complexity through frame narratives and stories within stories—techniques seen in Russian dolls, Chinese boxes, and classical Indian texts like the Panchatantra, Kathasaritsagara, and Vikram-Betal. These traditions defy straightforward realism, inviting readers into a world of layered perspectives and shifting truths.
Rushdie’s novel channels this hybrid tradition to reflect the postcolonial identity of India—multiple cultural influences colliding and coexisting within a single narrative frame. The book’s structure becomes a metaphor for the nation’s own history: layered, fragmented, and resistant to any single, authoritative version of events. By weaving historical realism with magical realism and myth, Rushdie creates a narrative that mirrors the complexity of India’s political and cultural fabric.
Central to this approach is the use of unreliable narration. Saleem Sinai frequently contradicts himself, blurring the line between fact and fiction, and in doing so, undermines the mythic authority usually associated with epic narrators or official histories. This destabilization is heightened by Rushdie’s parody of myths—such as playful reimaginings of Ganesh—which transforms divine legends into human, malleable stories. The recurring image of pickle jars encapsulates the novel’s narrative philosophy: just as pickles preserve layers of spiced ingredients, the novel preserves intertwined layers of memory, history, and imagination.
The lecture also draws connections to Indian epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata, both of which operate as living, evolving narratives shaped by countless retellings. In embracing this tradition, Midnight’s Children foregrounds the act of storytelling itself as dynamic and subjective. Magical realism plays a pivotal role here, acting as a bridge between myth and history, softening the harshness of political realities while preserving the vitality of folklore and oral traditions.
However, the richness of this layered narrative poses challenges for adaptation. The cinematic version of Midnight’s Children struggles to contain the novel’s intricate web of timelines, perspectives, and thematic depth. The lecture suggests that a longer, serialized format might better capture the scope and spirit of Rushdie’s creation, allowing its narrative complexity to unfold in full.
Ultimately, Midnight’s Children is as much about how stories are told as it is about the stories themselves. By combining Western and Eastern techniques, Rushdie not only crafts a work of literary innovation but also offers a deeply resonant metaphor for postcolonial India—complex, hybrid, and ever-evolving.
Video 2
The Bulldozer in Midnight’s Children: A Symbol of Power, Erasure, and Resistance
In Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the bulldozer emerges as more than just a machine of construction—it becomes a layered metaphor for power, coercion, and the fragility of human identity. While in everyday life the bulldozer is often tied to notions of progress, in the novel it carries a darker double meaning: it builds while it destroys, embodies force as well as order, and promises improvement while erasing history. This duality is embedded in the term’s very etymology, which once referred to violent intimidation.
Rushdie places this symbol within the turbulent historical backdrop of India’s Emergency (1975–1977), when civil liberties were suspended under the leadership of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Sanjay Gandhi’s slum-clearance campaigns, justified under the rhetoric of “beautification,” are recast in the novel as brutal acts of erasure. Here, bulldozers flatten not only homes but also dignity and cultural memory, turning marginalized communities into collateral damage for the state’s vision of progress.
The novel’s imagery powerfully conveys this dehumanization. Rushdie describes dust clouds enveloping people, transforming them into ghostly silhouettes, and homes collapsing “like twigs.” Such scenes capture the invisible violence of authoritarianism—the way it reduces people to faceless obstacles in the path of development. This violence is reinforced through bureaucratic language: terms like “public eyesore” or “civic improvement” mask oppression with a veneer of order, revealing how political rhetoric can sanitize brutality.
Rushdie sharpens the emotional edge of the bulldozer metaphor through the destruction of a single intimate object—the silver spatoon. This loss is more than material; it is the obliteration of family history, the erasure of personal memory. By focusing on a deeply personal item rather than an abstract statistic, the novel makes political violence immediate and relatable, reminding readers of the individual lives hidden behind historical events.
Though rooted in the specific politics of the Emergency, the bulldozer’s symbolism remains strikingly relevant today. Around the world, state-led “development” projects often invoke similar language of progress to justify displacement, demolition, and cultural erasure. Rushdie’s bulldozer warns us to ask uncomfortable questions: Who benefits from this progress? Whose stories vanish beneath the rubble?
In the end, Midnight’s Children transforms a piece of heavy machinery into an enduring emblem of authoritarian power and its corrosive effects on memory, culture, and identity. Rushdie’s metaphor urges vigilance against official narratives that promise beauty but deliver erasure, and it invites us to see the human cost beneath the polished rhetoric of improvement.
Learning out comes:
Through the two activities—examining Midnight’s Children’s critique of Eurocentric nationhood and analysing the bulldozer as a political symbol—learners develop the ability to interpret postcolonial literature through historical, political, and narrative lenses. They can identify how Rushdie fuses Western realism with Indian oral traditions to challenge linear progress, territorial absolutism, and binary identities, and how symbolic objects or motifs, like the bulldozer, encode complex critiques of authoritarianism and cultural erasure. Students enhance skills in connecting narrative techniques to socio-political contexts, evaluating the role of unreliable narration and metaphor, and recognising how fiction reframes history to question official narratives and foreground marginalised voices.
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