Film Screening—Deepa Mehta's Midnight's Children
This blog, assigned by our Head of the Department, Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad Sir, engages with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and its film adaptation by Deepa Mehta through the framework of postcolonial theory. Drawing upon the works of Homi K. Bhabha and Partha Chatterjee, it reflects on questions of history, nationhood, hybridity, identity, and language. Structured into pre-viewing, while-watching, and post-watching activities, the blog highlights how personal memory and cultural hybridity intersect with the narration of a nation.
For further context, here is the link to the background reading: Click Here
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.
2. While-Watching Activities
1. Opening Scene — Nation & Identity in Saleem’s Narration
The opening of Midnight’s Children operates on a metonymic fusion of biography and historiography. Saleem claims he was born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the precise moment of India’s political independence. This alignment is not a mere coincidence; it functions as a symbolic conceit that allows Rushdie (and Mehta, in adaptation) to dramatize Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of “nation as narration” — the idea that the nation is an imagined construct constantly rewritten through personal and collective stories.
From the very first frames, the personal “I” and the collective “we” are inextricably bound. Saleem’s birth is framed as a historical event, and India’s independence is personified through him. This conflation reflects Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities”, where the nation is sustained through shared narratives rather than mere geography. However, Bhabha complicates Anderson by emphasizing that such narratives are hybrid, unstable, and marked by ambivalence — precisely what Saleem’s unreliable and fragmentary storytelling reveals.
In Mehta’s cinematic rendering, the retention of Rushdie’s own voiceover lends an aural authority to Saleem’s account, while the rich mise-en-scène situates his narrative within an India poised between colonial residue and postcolonial uncertainty. Thus, identity here is not a static possession but an evolving negotiation between personal memory and national myth-making.
2. Saleem & Shiva’s Birth Switch — Hybridization of Identity
The deliberate switching of Saleem and Shiva at birth by Mary Pereira serves as a narrative allegory for postcolonial hybridity.
- Biological hybridity: The two children’s origins cross religious (Hindu/Muslim) and class (elite/poor) boundaries.
- Social hybridity: Their upbringings invert their biological destinies — Saleem is raised in privilege without biological claim to it, Shiva in deprivation despite elite parentage.
- Political hybridity: Both are born at independence, making them “midnight’s children” whose identities are shaped by the political contradictions of the new nation.
In Bhabha’s “Third Space” framework, identity emerges from the intersection and negotiation of cultural difference. Saleem and Shiva embody the constructedness of social identity in postcolonial India — a rejection of essentialist notions of heritage.
The switch also mirrors Partha Chatterjee’s critique that postcolonial societies are built on rearrangements rather than total ruptures with the colonial order — the outward change in governance (the nation’s “outer domain”) coexists with deep structural continuities in inequality and division (the “inner domain” of social reality).
3. Saleem’s Narration — Trustworthiness & Metafiction
Saleem’s narration is openly subjective, digressive, and self-contradictory — qualities of an unreliable narrator in literary theory. He admits to compressing, exaggerating, and inventing, foregrounding the act of storytelling as much as the story itself. This is a hallmark of metafiction, which — in postcolonial contexts — becomes a political act: it resists the colonial historiographical model that presents itself as neutral and factual.
By destabilizing historical “truth,” Saleem enacts Bhabha’s concept of liminality: the postcolonial subject occupies a space between truth and myth, between memory and history. In Chatterjee’s terms, the narrator’s selectivity mirrors the selective nature of national histories, which privilege certain events and voices over others.
From an adaptation perspective, as Mendes & Kuortti note, Deepa Mehta’s choice to use Rushdie’s voice for narration sustains this metafictional intimacy, making the audience constantly aware that the film is mediated through one man’s highly personal — and politically inflected — lens.
4. Emergency Period Depiction — Democracy & Freedom
The film’s depiction of the Emergency (1975–77) is a pointed critique of the fragility of postcolonial democracy. Historical references to Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian measures — including mass sterilization drives, censorship, and slum demolitions — are presented as a betrayal of the ideals of independence.
Chatterjee’s framework helps explain this paradox: the postcolonial state inherits colonial mechanisms of governance, often retaining their coercive capacities in the name of modernization or national unity. What was once colonial discipline is repackaged as developmental policy.
Visually, Mehta juxtaposes the optimism of 1947 with the violence and fear of the Emergency, creating a historical arc from liberation to disillusionment. Thematically, the Emergency exposes the continuity of oppression, illustrating how postcolonial states can internalize the authoritarian habits of their colonial predecessors.
5. Use of English/Hindi/Urdu — Postcolonial Linguistic Identity
The multilingual texture of Midnight’s Children is more than stylistic — it is ideological. English is used for narration and elite discourse, while Hindi and Urdu dominate intimate and everyday exchanges. This reflects Rushdie’s “chutnification of English” (Imaginary Homelands) — the process by which colonial language is appropriated, blended with indigenous languages, and transformed into a vehicle for postcolonial expression.
By code-switching, the characters occupy Bhabha’s “Third Space”, where colonial and native cultures intersect, producing new, hybrid forms. Importantly, the film often leaves vernacular phrases untranslated, refusing to flatten linguistic difference for a global (especially Western) audience — an act of linguistic decolonization that asserts local authenticity over colonial accessibility.
Thus, language in the film is a site of resistance: it simultaneously acknowledges the colonial legacy of English and demonstrates how that legacy can be subverted to reflect India’s multilingual, hybrid identity.
3. Post-Watching Activities
Group 1: Hybridity and Identity
In Midnight’s Children, hybridity functions not merely as a state of fragmentation but as what Homi K. Bhabha, in The Location of Culture, terms a “Third Space” — a liminal zone where the negotiation of difference enables the emergence of new identities. Deepa Mehta’s adaptation visualises this space with striking cinematic devices, while Salman Rushdie’s voiceover narration infuses the narrative with the self-reflexivity of the novel. The intertwined trajectories of Saleem Sinai and Shiva become living embodiments of the postcolonial condition — culturally, religiously, politically, and existentially.
1. Cultural and Religious Hybridity in Saleem and Shiva
Saleem, the biological child of poor Hindu parents but raised in an elite Muslim household due to Mary Pereira’s deliberate baby-switch, is a palimpsest of cultural inheritances: his Muslim upbringing, Hindu biological roots, Anglicised education, and his exposure to India’s multiple linguistic and culinary traditions. He becomes a literal embodiment of syncretism — an “India in miniature.”
Shiva, conversely, is the biological son of the wealthy Sinai family but raised in poverty, developing into a hardened soldier whose political rise parallels the authoritarian turn of the nation during the Emergency. His hybridity lies less in religious or linguistic blending and more in his crossing of socio-political boundaries — from disenfranchised underclass to enforcer of state power.
Cinematic Evidence:
In the birth-at-midnight sequence, Mehta overlays the intimate cries of newborns with the grand fireworks and cheers marking India’s independence. The montage fuses the individual with the national, the personal rupture of mistaken parentage with the collective rupture of political transition. Costume contrasts — white hospital linens against bursts of tricolour fireworks — further underline hybridity’s simultaneous vulnerability and vitality.
Theoretical Link:
Partha Chatterjee’s critique of the “Eurocentric nation” applies here: Saleem and Shiva are not fixed emblems of a homogenised India, but fragments whose identities subvert the colonial binary of coloniser/colonised by embodying plurality within the self.
2. Symbolism of the Birth Switch — Postcolonial Dislocation
The hospital switch is more than a plot device; it is a metaphor for the violent re-mapping of identities under colonial and postcolonial conditions. Just as the 1947 Partition redrew borders overnight, displacing millions, Saleem and Shiva’s life trajectories are uprooted before they can form self-awareness. Their lives become an allegory for what Bhabha calls the translated subject — an individual “caught in-between” identities, shaped by displacement yet never entirely defined by it.
Cinematic Evidence:
Mehta frames Mary Pereira’s decision with tight close-ups, lingering on her moist eyes and trembling hands, then cutting to Nehru’s “Tryst with Destiny” speech. The juxtaposition binds personal moral crisis to national birth pains. The diegetic sound of Mary’s laboured breathing blends with the non-diegetic patriotic speech, creating an auditory hybridity that mirrors the visual one.
Comparative Reference:
This motif resonates with Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, where identity and belonging are violently severed by political events, leaving characters suspended between past affiliations and imposed new realities.
3. Hybrid Identity as Possibility
Bhabha warns against reading hybridity as the erosion of “pure” cultures; instead, it is a creative force. In Mehta’s film, hybridity is generative, not degenerative:
Saleem’s telepathic congress of the Midnight’s Children — each with a unique magical gift — mirrors the imagined nation as a federation of plural voices. It reimagines the body politic as a literal body composed of diverse, intersecting identities.
The Sinai household’s multilingual exchanges, interfaith rituals, and blended cuisines illustrate how hybrid spaces sustain creativity and resilience even amidst political and communal violence.
The interplay of English narration with Hindi and Urdu dialogue captures Rushdie’s concept of “Chutnification” — linguistic hybridity that refuses colonial purity and embraces the subversive pleasure of mixing tongues.
Cinematic Evidence:
Scenes in which characters switch fluidly between languages without subtitles for every phrase compel the audience to inhabit the hybridity rather than decode it. Camera pans between speakers in different languages without cutting, visually enacting the seamlessness of cultural negotiation.
Adaptation Theory Link:
Linda Hutcheon’s idea of adaptation as “repetition without replication” finds resonance here: Rushdie’s self-narration adds an extra-textual hybridity, combining the author’s literary voice with the film’s visual grammar. The result is a hybrid form — neither purely cinematic nor purely literary — that itself enacts the Third Space.
Comparative Reference:
Like Obi in Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, who straddles colonial modernity and indigenous tradition, Saleem embodies the burdens and freedoms of multiple inheritances. Similarly, Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy portrays hybrid identity as a site of resistance and reinvention rather than confusion.
Creative Task:
Take a paragraph from Rushdie’s prose or dialogue from the film and analyze how he “chutnifies” English.
... And here's the point: yes, it is guilt, because
our Winkie may be clever and funny but he's not
clever enough, and now it's time to reveal the first
secret of the centre-parting of William Methwold,
because it has dripped down to stain his face: one
day, long before ticktock and lockstockandbarrel
sales, Mr Methwold invited Winkie and his Vanita to
sing for him, privately, in what is now my parents'
main reception room; and after a while he said, 'Look
here, Wee Willie, do me a favour, man: I need this
prescription filling, terrible headaches, take it to
Kemp's Corner and get the chemist to give you the
pills, the servants are all down with colds.' Winkie,
being a poor man, said Yes sahib at once sahib and
left; and then Vanita was alone with the centre-parting,
feeling it exert a pull on her fingers that was
impossible to resist, and as Methwold sat immobile in
a cane chair, wearing a lightweight cream suit with a
single rose in the lapel, she found herself approaching
him, fingers outstretched, felt fingers touching hair;
found centre-parting; and began to rumple it up.
Translate it into “standard” English, and then reflect on what is lost.
Standard English Translation
Yes, it is guilt, because our Winkie may be witty and humorous, but he is not quite clever enough. Now it is time to reveal the first secret connected to William Methwold’s centre-parted hair, for it has left its trace upon his face. Long before the hurried sales of his estate, Mr. Methwold once invited Winkie and his wife Vanita to sing privately for him in what is now my parents’ main reception room. After some time, he said, “Listen, Willie, do me a favour. I need to have this prescription filled—I have terrible headaches. Please take it to Kemp’s Corner and ask the chemist to give you the pills. All my servants are ill with colds.”
Winkie, being a poor man, immediately agreed and left at once. That left Vanita alone with Mr. Methwold and his centre-parting, which seemed to exert an irresistible attraction upon her fingers. As Methwold sat motionless in a cane chair, dressed in a light cream-coloured suit with a single rose in the lapel, Vanita found herself moving towards him. Her fingers reached out, touched his hair, found the parting, and began to ruffle it.
What Is Lost in Translation
By simplifying into “standard” English, several important things vanish:
-
Rhythmic Energy and Voice
-
Rushdie’s style is breathless, piling up phrases without pause (“ticktock and lockstockandbarrel sales”)—this creates a sense of oral storytelling, immediacy, and playfulness.
-
The translation flattens this rhythm into orderly sentences, losing the urgency and personality of the narrator’s voice.
-
-
Local Colour and Code-Switching
-
Words like “Yes sahib at once sahib” carry the historical flavour of colonial hierarchy, the linguistic mixing of English and Indian idiom.
-
The standard version neutralises it into “immediately agreed,” which erases the texture of colonial subordination.
-
-
Comic Irony
-
“Our Winkie may be clever and funny but he’s not clever enough” has a sly, mocking intimacy.
-
The plain version makes it sound like a neutral assessment, losing the ironic bite.
-
-
Symbolic Repetition
-
The obsessive focus on the “centre-parting”—repeated and almost ritualistic—gets dulled in standard English, where it reads like a normal detail of appearance rather than a charged symbol.
-
-
Cultural Texture
-
Phrases like “ticktock and lockstockandbarrel” reflect both colonial commerce and playful linguistic excess. Replacing them with “hurried sales of his estate” reduces that rich cultural-linguistic layering.
-
In short: the “standard” English version makes the story more accessible, but it strips away Rushdie’s distinctive hybridity—the mingling of Indian idioms, colonial residues, satire, and oral storytelling cadences. The passage becomes clearer but also less alive, less mischievous, and less culturally resonant.
References :
Barad, Dilip. Postcolonial Voices: Analyzing Midnight's Children Through Theoretical Lenses. Aug. 2024. ResearchGate, doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.16493.1968. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/383399335_Postcolonial_Voices_Analyzing_Midnight27s_Children_Through_Theoretical_Lenses
Barad, Dilip. Worksheet on Film Screening Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children. August 2025. ResearchGate, doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.13686.31044. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/394324036_Worksheet_on_Film_Screening_Deepa_Mehta's_Midnight27s_Children
Mendes & Kuortti, Padma or No Padma: Audience in the
Adaptations of Midnight’s Children.
Rushdie, S. (1981). Midnight’s children. Jonathan Cape. Mehta, D. (Director). (2012). Midnight’s children [Film]. David Hamilton Productions.
No comments:
Post a Comment