The Fabric of Myth and Magic in Rushdie’s Midnight‘s Children

Abstract

This study addresses Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as a foundational postcolonial narrative that disrupts conventional chronological historiography by weaving ancient myth, fantastical elements, and oral modes of transmission. I examine Rushdie’s elaboration of a counter-historicist metafiction, observing how he transfigures Indian history and collective identity through Saleem Sinai, whose individual biography continuously reflects and refracts the trajectories of the subcontinent. I argue that the interpenetration of wonder and oral form serves not as a retreat from reality, but as a genuinely representational tactic that captures the splintered, syncretic, and contradictory conditions of post-independence India. Attention is given to Rushdie’s cinematic sensibility, his deployment of mythic reference, and his elaboration of political allegory—most notably concerning the 1975-1977 Emergency—demonstrating that Midnight’s Children simultaneously critiques the reductionist claims of unitary nationalism and affirms the fractal plurality of the polity. I further investigate the novel’s intertextual layering, its invocation of magic-realist aesthetics, and its cosmopolitan urban scenes as deliberate instruments of narrative opposition to both imperial and majoritarian logics.