Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

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Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
 
 
Why I chose is that it won the Booker of Bookers and the Best of Booker awards. It portrays India's 
transition from the British colonial rule to the independence and the partition of India. It is 
considered an example of postcolonial, postmodern.
The story wilfully defies description. Roughly speaking, it's the biography of Saleem Sinai, a child 
with unusual psychic and (later) olfactory powers, born on the stroke of midnight on August 15 
1947. His destiny is inextricably linked with that of India, the country that came into independent 
being at the exact same time as he did. But the narrative is so jammed with contradictions, 
digressions, deliberate false steps and allegorical insinuations. It is entertaining, intelligent, 
informative, progressive and even funny. It is an astoundingly well balanced epic that captures the 
birth of a new independent nation. The children are all fractured and divided. They are born into a 
new country that is yet to define itself in the wake of colonialism. It has no universal language, 
religion or culture.