South Asian Review

ISSN: 0275-9527 (Print) 2573-9476 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsoa20

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and its

Incarnations

Moumin Quazi

To cite this article: Moumin Quazi (2014) Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and its
Incarnations, South Asian Review, 35:1, 157-168, DOI: 10.1080/02759527.2014.11932960

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2014.11932960

Published online: 08 Dec 2017.

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 157

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and

its Incarnations

Moumin Quazi

Tarleton State University

Introduction

I n my article "'Filmy Glazes' on Salman Rushdie's Midnight's

Children," I argued that Salman Rushdie structured his novel, not
only with a nod to the 19th -century realist novel's 3-book structure (as
found in such works as Charles Dickens's Hard Times), but also with
an intertextual reflection of his debt to the influence of cinema on his
writing. I interpreted Midnight's Children (MC) as a parody of filmic
language, structure, and themes, emblematic of a version of hybrid
postcolonial identities. Now that a film version of the novel has
actually been produced, I can now test the validity of my original
suppositions against the adapted screenplay, and I will compare the
original novel to the other two iterations of Midnight's Children that
appeared between the novel's publication in 1980 and its Deepa Mehta
directed filmic incarnation, in 2012: a Vintage screenplay (1999) and
its 2003 stage play (adapted for the theater by Rushdie, Simon Reade,
and Tim Supple). Using reception and genre theory, and applying film
and postcolonial theory to the four versions, I conclude with a note
about the pedagogical implications of the morphing of a pre-fatwa
novel that parodies cinema and its multivalent self-references into a
post-fatwa movie that ironically has embraced the sentimentality of a
19th-century novel while seemingly eschewing its filmic roots.
By comparing these versions, I am going against the grain of
traditional genre criticism, which "by stressing coincident structures
and concerns, ... has labored mightily to conceal or conquer difference
and disagreement" (Altman 50). Instead, I am interested in

[ © BY THE SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW]

!58 Moumin Quazi

foregrounding Midnight's Children's differences, showing the

incarnations as "dynamic structures that cannot be reduced to static,
unchanging configurations" (Juan Taranc6n 14). They, like genres, are
remarkably flexible, and are "constantly fluctuating arrangements"
rather than "closed, a-temporal structures" (Taranc6n 18). T. S. Eliot, in
his 1919 essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," argued that "no
artist of any art has his (sic) complete meaning alone" (qtd. in
"Introduction" by Grant and Kurtz I). While 21st-century criticism is
aware that "complete meaning" is an impossibility, by examining the
ending of all of MC 's forms, Eliot's modernist claim that "The existing
order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after
the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so
slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work
toward the whole are readjusted" (qtd. in Grant and Kurtz I) is
somewhat useful. We can still appreciate Eliot's observation of the
deferral of "the relations, proportions, and values" of Rushdie's
poststructural work.
Rushdie shows us that while his initial novel may have later
become a kind of Ur-text for his story of India's independence and its
aftermath, it has never been the "correct" version. If anything, now that
Midnight's Children has had at least four incarnations (five, if one
counts the film screenplay and movie as two different versions),
Rushdie's iterations, taken as a whole, have become an oeuvre unto
themselves, born out of its own conflict. Midnight's Children, by its
repetitions and transformations through multiple genres and even
multiple containers of meaning, repeatedly reminds us about the power
and the freedom of fluidity, flexibility, and breaking of imagined and/or
imposed boundaries. Rushdie, over a lifetime, has illustrated the
irrelevance of walls and the relative ease by which they are
transcended. These multiple versions have become bridges from one
reader to another, one writer to other writers, one arena to another, one
stage or screen to another, one platform to another, and one subjectivity
to many subjectivities.
The Original Novel, 1980
Critics, such as Soren Frank, note that an "encyclopaedic" mixture
of genres constitutes Midnight's Children's general hybridity: "family
saga, Bildungsroman, autobiography, national history, myth, legend,
the picaresque, epic, slum-naturalism, magical realism, essay,
prophecy, satire, comedy, tragedy, and surrealism" (196). Even that
excellent list fails to do justice, for Frank leaves out the Bombay
Talkie. While Nancy E. Batty had argued, in 1987, that in his writing of
Midnight's Children, Rushdie had used the "structure of an episodic
film, or serial" (57), I took her argument much further in 2006, arguing
 Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and its Incarnations 159

that Rushdie parodied film language, style, culture, and even structure,
and that phenomenon is reflected in his narrative as a "hybrid,
metamorphic, heteroglossic identity and voice" of what was once
colonial India, then became Pakistan (East and West), India, and
Bangladesh (73). In doing so, "Rushdie has achieved filmic effects,
emphasized narratorial instability, and highlighted a discontinuity of
space and time, so that his fiction may mirror the indeterminacy of
meta-narratives and the destabilized identity of the [now even more
problematized] postcolonial subject"; in other words, he created a
"postcolonial grotesque form of the novel" (73).
One of the key narrative moments in the novel occurs when, as a
doctor, Aadam Aziz examines his wife-to-be through a six-inch hole in
a perforated sheet (the title of the novel's first chapter). Just as the
holes in the sheet permit but partial views for the doctor to configure in
his mind a complete picture of the woman he is examining piecemeal,
so does the novel require of its readers to piece together, with Padma
(the narratological audience within the novel), the myriad twists and
details of the plot in their imagination. For Rushdie, the sheet is a trope
for the narrative tapestry of his fiction. He says, "We see the world in
fragments and we try to make a picture [emphasis mine] of it by adding
those fragments together" (Bookworm I). For Rushdie, his first attempt
at a story that he will seek to reconfigure at least three more times, the
"making of a picture" is crucial, even to the point where his voice stars
in a film picture directed by his friend, Deepa Mehta.
Previously, I noted that parodying a film's structure of the three
acts of Y4 then Y2 then '14 lengths of the book corresponded almost
precisely to the rations found in a standard screenplay, as defined by
the professor Syd Field who wrote the proverbial book on screenplay
writing, Screenplay: The Foundations of Writing. By incorporating
multiple genres in his novel, Rushdie creates what Bakhtin calls a
"double-styled hybrid construction, containing two utterances, two
speech manners, two styles, two 'languages"' (The Dialogic
Imagination). As "books and movies are different languages" (The
Screenplay of Midnight's Children 2), Rushdie code-switches within
his novel, incorporating plot points (significant incidents or events
within a plot that spin the action around in another direction) at the end
of each Act. Book One ends on page 138 of 552 (corresponding to the
end of a screenplay's Act 1), with the revelation that Saleem and Shiva
have been switched at birth by Mary Pereira (who later reappears as
Mrs. Braganza, owner of the pickle factory where Saleem "chutnifies"
history). Book Two's 269 pages end on page 410 (corresponding to the
end of a screenplay's Act II), with an amnesia-causing spittoon
accident caused by a bomb blast, and the remaining pages end with the
revelation that the pickle factory owner is Mary, that Saleem is now the
160 Moumin Quazi

ward of a young boy, to whom he leaves an empty pickle jar as an

emblem of a future story yet to be told. The novel ends with the
following pessimistic claim: "Love does not conquer all, except in the
Bombay talkies" (530). He opines that his "pickles of history" may be
"too strong for some palates, their smell may be overpowering, tears
may rise to eyes," but hopes that " nevertheless it will be possible to
say of them that they possess the authentic taste of truth ... that they
are, despite everything, acts of love" (550). In the novel, it is his stories
that he calls "acts of love." He ends with the following text, which I
will include as a baseline for comparing the other three versions of this
story:
Yes, they will trample me underfoot. the numbers marching one two
three, four hundred million five hundred six. reducing me to specks
of voiceless dust, just as. in all good time. they will trample my son
who is not my son. and his son who will not be his, and his who will
not be his, until the thousand and first generation. until a thousand
and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand
and one children have died, because it is the privilege and the curse
of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times,
to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of
the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace. (552)
By most accounts, this ending with its similarities to his first published
novel, Grimus, ends with an "annihilating whirlpool" is pretty
pessimistic. In the film version, this, among other things, will undergo
a change.
The Screenplay of Midnight's Children (The First Published
Screenplay of the Unmade Mini-series), 1999
In his introduction to the screenplay, Rushdie acknowledges that
"books and movies are different languages, and [that] attempts at
translation often fail" (2). The original project to make Midnight's
Children into a five-part mini-series for the British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC) was unsuccessful, "for political reasons" (I), except
that it did produce an interesting artifact, a 300-page published
"screenplay," written by Rushdie.
In the the process of adaptation, Rushdie makes a few changes to
the story, including reducing and condensing action, like Saleem's
visits to Pakistan, for one. He also keeps General Zulfikar alive to the
end, though in the novel he dies earlier. The biggest change is that, in
the novel, Shiva never learns that he was swapped at birth, and Saleem
Sinai remains paranoid to the end that Shiva might still come back to
finish him off. In the screenplay, Rushdie, without equivocation, kills
off Shiva in a motorcycle wreck (291-296). Beyond altering storylines,
the major change to the narrative strategy involved using the device of
 Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and its Incarnations 161

film within the film by "allowing the peep-show man Lifafa Das to
introduce each episode as if it were a part of his peep-show" (8). He
waves his audience to "come see come see come see!" the films that he
is showing, which end up being the diegetic action of the 290-minute
BBC mini-series (15, Ill, 163,211, 263).
This version took its toll on Rushdie, when the project failed. He
writes, "As for me, the rejection of Midnight's Children changed
something profound in my relationship with the East. Something
broke" (12). This aborted attempt caused Rushdie to plunge "into a
deep depression" (I 0), but he held out hope that "a film brought into
half-being by the publication of its screenplay may yet manage,
someday, to get itself born" (12). At the end of the film that was
ultimately made thirteen years later, Saleem says, in a voice-over by
Rushdie himself, "A child and a country were born . . . We have
survived and made our way." It is hard not to imagine Rushdie saying,
"the film managed to get itself born."
Comparing the ending of the mini-series version to the novel's,
one discovers that the tone and wording are nearly identical. About his
tale, Saleem refers to the notebooks he has been writing in. He picks up
an empty pickle jar and says:
All the eggs which gave birth to the population of India could be
fitted into a standard-size pickle jar. All the spermatozoa could be
lifted on a single spoon. Every pickle jar contains, therefore. an
amazing possibility: the chutnification of history. I. however. have
pickled stories: memories and histories. vegetables and fruit. These
(he pats the notebooks) are the pickles of history. And they are,
despite everything, acts of love. (307)

The ending leaves us with the sound of a "distorted CONCH-SHELL

scream[ing]" and Saleem saying, in a voice-over:
Yes. they will trample me underfoot. the numbers marching one two
three. four hundred million five hundred six ... just as they will
trample my son who is not my son, and his who will not be his, until
the thousand and first generation. And we can no longer see him at
all. There is just the infinite CROWD. Because it is the privilege and
the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of
their times. to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating
whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.
(308)

It is important to observe that Rushdie keeps his original novel's words

here. While the last word of the novel is "peace," the outcome of
midnight's children is dire.
162 Moumin Quazi

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (The Stage Play), 2003

The 2003 stage play adaptation was co-written by Rushdie, Simon
Reade, and Tim Supple and performed by the Royal Shakespeare
Company. It was staged in two parts, the first a 61-minute Act, and the
second, a 57-minute Act. Twenty actors performed the parts of about
80 characters. The ambitious 3-hour show opened to lukewarm
reviews. For example, the Columbia Spectator's Ruben Harutunian
called the play "doomed to mediocrity." He inevitably compared this
attempt to the original Booker of the Bookers: "Unfortunately, the
ambition behind this play is far greater than the achievement. 550 pages
of an epic novel have been condensed to three-plus hours of still-
sprawling traffic on the stage." Its criticism notwithstanding, one of the
strengths of the project is that it provides a shorthand, penned by the
original author himself, that Rushdie students may find useful as a
supplement (not as a replacement) to the literary novel, like Saleem's
comment on Padma's storytelling: "Wow, Padma, I swear. You know
how to tell things really fast" (The Screenplay of Midnight's Children
87).
In this iteration, film is a dominant factor: indeed, so much so, that
the first line of the stage play's directions is: "A film screen dominates
the stage and shows us the infinite crowd that is India today" (1). No
fewer than 64 times, is made a reference to the film. For example, in
the text, Hanif says, "The Bombay film is a temple of illusions" (73);
action is directed "as if in a film seen from Saleem's point of view"
(76); newsreel clips (100, 106, and 109, for example); home movies
(25); coming attraction trailers (92); and more.
Filmic element is important for the ending as well, as might now
be expected. Saleem says, as he looks through "exercise books" m
which his story has been written:
All the eggs which gave birth to the population of India could be
fitted into a standard-size pickle jar. All the spermatozoa could be
lifted on a single spoon. Every pickle jar contains, therefore. an
amazing possibility: the chutnification of history. I, however, have
pickled stories: memories and histories, vegetables and fruit. These
(the books) are the pickles of history. And they are, despite
everything, acts of love.
In the film that would finally be made, Rushdie's "acts of love" phrase
will end the movie. Here it only provides a pause to the speaking parts
while a film is shown:
Film: on screen, we fast-forward through Indian history from 1978 to
the present day and end at a vast crowd celebrating Independence
 Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and its Incarnations 163

Day in modern-day India, now ... The future? How to tell Padma ...
there's no future. Not for me. Tick, tock. It's Independence Day
again and the many-headed multitude will be in the streets pushing
shoving crushing, and the cracks, my cracks, will widen ... I can
hear and feel the rip tear crunch.
Padma returns with a birthday cake.
Padma: Happy birthday, mister! Happy birthday!
Conch-shell blasts. The sea ofhumanity dwarfs Saleem.
Saleem: Yes, they will Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the
numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred
six ...
Film: ... and as at the beginning of the play, the film bleeds into
other aspects of modern India, but this time they are darker, more
distressing, more violent sides ofthe nation . ..
. . . just as they will trample my son who is not my son, and his who
will not be his, until the thousand and first generation.
Because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight's children to be
both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be
sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, -and to be
unable to live or die in peace. ( 118-19)
It is significant that this version maintains the idea that "there's no
future" for Saleem. The stage play is just as pessimistic in this regard as
the two preceding versions. What has been brought back, and even
foregrounded, is the literal presence of film, which is now used as a
narrative device in the projection of the performance.
Midnight's Children (The Film), 2012
In 2008, Rushdie began writing his fourth version of Midnight's
Children. In 2011, the shooting of the film, directed by Deepa Mehta (a
Canadian-Indian), began. The movie starring a "who's who" of South
Asian film stars appeared in the picture, finally released in 2012. The
cast included Satya Bhabha as the adult Saleem Sinai, Darsheel Safary
as the young Saleem, Shabana Azmi as Naseem, Rajat Kapoor as
Aadam Aziz, Seema Biswas as Mary Pereira, Shriya Saran as the adult
Parvati, Siddharth as the adult Shiva, Rahul Bose as General Zulfikar,
Charles Dance as William Methwold, and Kulbushan Kharbanda as
Picture Singh, to name a few. As noted above, Rushdie voiced the
narrator's part.
Though Midnight's Children isn't a product of the Bombay cinema
(widely known as "Hollywood"), it has been produced by a Canadian
filmmaker of Indian origin, and a Bombay-born-Pakistani-Anglo-now-
American-resident writer. Reviewers seemed to expect a more razzle-
dazzle movie than the one produced. Reviews of the film were, as with
the stage play, lukewarm. Rachel Saltz of The New York Times was one
of several reviewers who noted the somewhat muted nature of the film.
164 Moumin Quazi

She comments: "Despite the Hindi-movie outlines [emphasis mine] of

the plot, even more evident in its stripped-bare state, Mr. Rushdie and
Ms. Mehta have avoided the temptation of turning "Midnight's
Children" into an ersatz Bollywood production." She adds, "But the
film needs an injection of Bollywood's unembarrassed, anything-goes,
bigger-than-life spirit, which embraces willy-nilly-as does Mr.
Rushdie's novel-the vulgar, the fanciful and the frankly
unbelievable." Peter Bradshaw, for The Guardian, had a mixed review,
calling the film "soupy and soapy," while still having "enough here to
entertain-and to send audiences back to the book." If that were to
happen, Rushdie's project will have come full circle.
The film, whose working title alias was "Winds of Change," was
given an almost mythical origin story from the start. In an interview
with Matthew Bernstein and Deepika Bahri at Emory University,
Rushdie asserted that their collaboration was "at every step of the way
[. . .] on the same page," while Mehta said their lists of narrative
incidents that needed to be included in the film were "identical" and "a
sign from the gods." Mehta gave a similar account in a different
interview: "Before [Rushdie] wrote the script, we asked each other
what the other thought were the essential components of the book that
should be in the script. Miraculously, we agreed on everything" (PTI).
Rushdie has a tendency to exaggerate the fantastical coincidences in his
own life, as the story of the film's seamless collaboration illustrates. In
another setting, he claimed that his novel Fury was published on 9/11,
2001 (Goonetilleke 169), when, in fact, its release date was September
4, 2001 (Eaglestone 5). Here we see at work what Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak has called "the general mode of the postcolonial: 'rerouting the
historical'" (244 ).
The film does match the novel's structure: precisely, half the time,
in its plot points. The film is 148 minutes long. To coincide with Syd
Field's paradigm regarding plot points, the turning points in the film
should happen at the 37-minute mark and the !-hour 51-minute mark.
The novel's first plot point is the revelation that Saleem and Shiva have
been switched at birth by Mary Pereira. The film's first plot point at
exactly the 37:34-mark is that of Mary Pereira switching Saleem and
Shiva behind the scenes at the hospital. The novel's second plot point is
the amnesia-causing spittoon accident caused by a bomb blast. In the
film, however, the second plot point does not coincide with the novel's:
instead, in the film, Parvati seduces Shiva revealing the birth-switch to
him, followed by a voice-over by Saleem: "I had many families and no
family. There were the parents I never knew who gave me life, and the
parents who raised me whom I lost. And midnight's children who were
taken from me for a time. I wandered among them all, and at last I was
ready." As noted above, literary texts and movies are two different
 Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and its Incarnations 165

languages, yet these two forms coincide in at least one plot point. One
of the key differences is in the final moments of the film, though.
The film ends with a birthday party, on a rooftop, with fireworks
going off in the night sky (it is Independence Day, after all). Baby
Aadam says, "Abba ... Abbaracadabra." Saleem says back to him, "A
new generation, but more careful - Duffer." [Then, a voice-over,
featuring the narration by Rushdie as Saleem, ends the film.] "A child
and a country were born at midnight, once upon a time. Great things
were expected of us both. The truth has been less glorious than the
dream, but we have survived and made our way, and our lives have
been, in spite of everything, acts of love." [Pan up to fireworks
exploding before the final credits are shown as a flute, not a conch,
plays wistfully.]
What is ironic about this version is that Rushdie connected the
power of love and film, in his original version: "Love does not conquer
all, except in Bombay talkies" (530). As it turns out, though not a
"Bombay talkie" per se, Mehta's film does not end with the
"annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes (...] unable to live or die in
peace," but rather with "love."
Genre: Theory and Practice
When Rushdie says that he has written Midnight's Children four
times, "and it's three times too many" (Interview with Bernstein and
Bahri), he is foregrounding the fact that each version is part of a
different genre: a novel, a mini-series for television, a stage play, and a
film screenplay. The similarities between each version, however, also
reveal a cross-talk between each form, a hybridity that highlights a
multivalent identity. This post-structural breaking down of boundaries
is emblematic of Rushdie's work and consistent with Rick Altman's
groundbreaking work on film and genre, aptly titled, Film/Genre, (BFI,
1999). Altman questions the traditional conceptions of genre which
hold that a genre, like Aristotle's view that poetry, exists 'in itself' and
that a kind can have an 'essential quality' (2), and Horace's added view
that "each genre must be understood as a separate entity, with its own
literary rules and prescribed procedures" (3).
Genre studies, until the 201h century (and stubbornly beyond it),
took on the characteristic that was spurred by the French literary
historian Ferdinand Brunetiere's evolutionary model, which, when
applied to genre theory, treats genre as if it were a biological species.
The effect is that "genre study serves to convince theorists that genres
actually exist, that they have distinct borders, that they can be firmly
identified, that they operate systematically, that their internal
functioning can be observed and scientifically described, and that they
evolve according to a fixed and identifiable trajectory" (6). In spite of
166 Moumin Quazi

Benedetto Croce's 1902 "No" to the scientific schemes of Brunetiere,

Rene Welleck and Austin Warren's 1940 inner and outer form theory
of genre, Northrop Frye's 1957 Anatomy of Criticism's connecting
genre to Jungian archetypal categorization, Tzvetan Todorov's
structuralist approach, followed by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.'s schema theory in
1967, together "tie questions of textual structure to reader expectations
regarding textual structure" (11). Before Altman's organic view of
genre theory, Alastair Fowler's Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to
the Theory of Genres and Modes ( 1982), returned to the "classical
emphasis on textual structure within traditional genres and canons of
texts" (II). What Altman recognizes is that there are various
constituencies that affect the formation and understanding of genre: the
producers, the critics, and the audience, just to name three major ones.
He holds a post-structural understanding that "genres serve diverse
groups diversely" (207). This kind of genre-fication can be seen in the
work of critics like Vijay Mishra, who, while claiming on the one hand
that "there is no simple theory of Bombay (Bollywood) Cinema, on the
other hand, he will do a book-length study in which he treats selected
texts [films] from the Bombay cinema and analyzes them as "one
interconnected, heterogeneous genre to which [he has given] the term
grande syntagmatique (after Metz)" (xviii). By applying a
syntactic/syntagmatic/pragmatic approach of genre theory, that sees
genres as simultaneously defined by multiple codes, corresponding to
the multiple groups who, by helping define the genre, may be said to
'speak' the genre," Altman is doing a postcolonial (what I call
"Rushdian") redefining of"genre." So, ultimately, genre comes to be a
clear and stable entity, instead of being a multivalent term that is
"variously valorized by diverse user groups" (Altman 214 ).
In his memoir Joseph Anton, Rushdie observes: "He [Rushdie] had
always been post-something according to that mandarin literary
discourse in which all contemporary writing was mere aftermath-
postcolonial, postmodern, postsecular, postintellectual, postliterate.
Now he would add his own category, post:fatwa, to that dusty post-
office, and would end up not just po-co and po-rno but po-fa as well"
(442). Though all the published post-novel versions naturally have as
their Ur-text the original novel, they are all distinctly different pieces,
with different plots and outcomes, however subtle they may be.
Rushdie illustrates that genre is fluid, even unstable, and that labels are
easy but problematic. While Rushdie began the process of writing
Midnight's Children in 1975, its first version, a novel (1980) was
remarkably filmic; its second version, a mini-series ( 1999), is decidedly
televisual; its third version, a stage play (2003) is a multi-media
spectacle; and its fourth version, a film (2012) is, strangely, non-filmic.
"Genre" is hard to nail down, as Rushdie's rhetorical moves reveal.
 Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and its Incarnations 167

Now, it would appear that finally, Rushdie can add po-MC to his Post-
it® notes.
Put another way, the vision of Midnight's Children has persisted
through shifting forms, proving its enduring flexibility and vitality,
staying as an imperishable energy, abiding changeable incarnations.

Works Cited
Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. 2000. London. BFI: I999.
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays,
translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, edited by Michael
Holquist. 1981. U of Texas P, 1992.
Batty, Nancy E. "The Art of Suspense: Rushdie's 1001 (Mid-)Nights." Ariel,
vol. 18, no. 3, 1987, pp. 49-65.
Bradshaw, Peter. '"Midnight's Children-Review." The Guardian, 20 Dec.
2012. Web. II August 2014.
Eaglestone, Robert. ''Introduction." Salman Rushdie: Contemporary Critical
Perspectives. Bloomsbury, 2013.
Eaglestone, Robert, and Martin McQuillan, edited by Salman Rushdie:
Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Bloomsbury, 2013.
Field, Syd. Screenplay: The Foundations of Writing. 1979. Dell, 1982.
Frank, Soren. '"The Aesthetic of Elephantiasis: Rushdie's Midnight's Children
As An Encyclopaedic Novel." Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 46,
no. 2, 2010, pp. 187-98.
Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A. Salman Rushdie. 2010. Palgrave Macmillan. 1998.
Grant, Barry Keith and Malisa Kurtz. '"Introduction." Notions of Genre:
Writings on Popular Film before Genre Theory, edited by Barry Keith
Grant and Malisa Kurtz. U of Texas P, 2016.
Harutunian, Ruben. "Royal Shakespeare Adaptation Misses Mark." Columbia
Spectato, 30 November 2008. Web. 30 August 2011.
Mehta, Deepa and Salman Rushdie. "Interview with Matthew Bernstein and
Deepika Bahri." Emory University, 28 February 2010. Web. 30 August
2011.
"Midnight's Children, A Dream Come True: Deepa Mehta.'' Press Trust of
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