Film Screening—Deepa Mehta's Midnight's Children

 1. Pre-viewing Activities 

A. Trigger Questions

1. Who narrates history — the victors or the marginalized? How does this relate to personal identity?

Homi K. Bhabha’s theory in The Location of Culture reminds us that historical narratives are not fixed but constructed within the “Third Space” — a liminal site where dominant and subaltern perspectives meet and challenge each other. Traditionally, history is framed by the victors, who control the apparatus of documentation, education, and dissemination. In colonial contexts, this meant that imperial powers recorded history in ways that justified their domination.

Partha Chatterjee’s The Nation and Its Fragments complicates this by noting that the postcolonial nation-state inherits some of these Eurocentric frameworks, often sidelining subaltern voices in the name of national unity. The marginalized — peasants, women, ethnic minorities — are relegated to the periphery of official history.

In Midnight’s Children, Saleem Sinai’s narration resists this victor-centered history. He positions himself as the voice of the “midnight’s children,” a generation born into freedom yet shaped by colonial residues. His fragmented, digressive storytelling creates a hybrid historiography — personal memory merges with political events. This reflects Bhabha’s idea of hybridity, where identity is formed through negotiation between multiple narratives. Saleem’s personal identity cannot be separated from the histories he inherits, both colonial and postcolonial, both privileged and marginalized.

2. What makes a nation? Is it geography, governance, culture, or memory?

Partha Chatterjee critiques Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities model for its Eurocentric bias — in colonial contexts, the “nation” is imagined not solely through print capitalism or shared governance, but also through anti-colonial struggle, cultural memory, and indigenous traditions. For Chatterjee, postcolonial nations have an “inner” (spiritual/cultural) domain and an “outer” (political/administrative) domain. While the outer domain may adopt Western modernity, the inner domain preserves cultural authenticity.

In Midnight’s Children, the nation is not simply defined by borders drawn at Partition. Instead, it emerges through Saleem’s memories — of family, language, festivals, migration, and trauma. The film’s portrayal of the Partition riots, linguistic conflicts, and political upheavals reveals that a nation is a layered construct. Governance and geography set the framework, but memory — both collective and personal — gives it emotional meaning.

Bhabha would describe this as a “nation as narration” — the idea that the nation is continually written and rewritten through the stories told about it. Saleem’s life story becomes a metaphor for the nation’s story, showing that cultural and personal memory are as important as political boundaries in defining national identity.

3. Can language be colonized or decolonized? Think about English in India.

Salman Rushdie’s essay Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist in Imaginary Homelands is key here. Rushdie argues that English in India, once a colonial imposition, has been transformed — “chutnified” — into a vehicle for expressing Indian realities. This involves mixing English with local idioms, grammar patterns, and cultural references, much like chutney blends multiple ingredients into a unique new taste.

Bhabha’s theory of hybridity applies here as well — when colonized subjects appropriate the colonizer’s language and infuse it with their own cultural rhythms, they create a hybrid form that destabilizes the authority of “standard” English.

In Midnight’s Children, the novel and film reflect this linguistic decolonization. Saleem narrates in English but peppers it with Hindi, Urdu, and cultural expressions, reflecting both colonial inheritance and postcolonial creativity. This hybrid language undermines English’s colonial purity, making it serve Indian, not British, purposes.