It is August 1997, fifty years of our independence, and I have brought home a big book from the library: Midnight’s Children. It is not age-appropriate, but neither our librarian at school (God bless Ms Wasal!) nor my folks at home have ever interfered with my reading choices.
I may not know the phrase enfant terrible yet, but I am slowly becoming aware of Indian Writing in English (The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy had won the Booker earlier that year.) In this world, Salman Rushdie, his fatwa and the banned Satanic Verses (1988) are often discussed hotly. (Years later I would read that he did not feel that "his book was especially critical of Islam, but...
a religion whose leaders behaved in this way could probably use a little criticism".)
Midnight’s Children, however, is utterly unlike anything else. I have ever read. Bawdy and irreverent and clever, it is compelling in a peculiar way. I don't understand eighty percent of what is going on -- quite a bit of it sexual, a lot of references political -- but I dutifully note down my favourite flourishes of Rushdie’s prose, in a notebook I carry around nerdily. The central conceit captivates my imagination: the narrator-protagonist Saleem Sinai, born at the midnight hour of India's tryst with destiny, is forever linked to the country. As Rushdie himself wrote in later years, "If he and India were to be paired, I would need to tell the story of both twins."
*
15 August, 2022: Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav.
I find myself thinking of Midnight’s Children all day.
Three days ago, just as he was about to deliver a public lecture at the historic Chautauqua Institution, the 75-year-old Rushdie was attacked by Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old Lebanese-American. It is believed the young man had been radicalised during his trip to Lebanon, but not much was known. Rushdie was gravely injured and in hospital with multiple stab wounds. Ironically, the subject of Rushdie's talk that day was the US as a safe haven for exiled writers.
*
A few days pass, I read the news, it rains a little, I try and work. Still maudlin, I decide to go to a nearby theatre to watch a film, self-consciously, in protest.
The film is Laal Singh Chaddha, and the pitiful protest I want to register is against the absurd "boycotting" movement that has gathered massive momentum on social media these days, through toxic Twitter accounts and boiler rooms amplifying their constant sense of victimhood, a trend that this time round effectively destroyed the film’s prospects. What had begun as #JusticeForSSR had now morphed into #BoycottBollywood. The anger was not merely against the three Muslim superstars who had entertained us for the last few decades, actors who have spent almost their entire careers playing memorable Hindu men, but was now ranged against the industry at large. (Doesn't matter its contribution to the nation's GDP or its soft power.)
When the #BoycottLSC trend had first begun, I had remarked lightly that this was the revenge of those Indians who had felt attacked by Aamir Khan's Three Idiots, the uncles and aunties who did not want their children to be misled into following their dreams. The time for levity though is gone.
*
Night-show; a large hall; we are the only occupants. In all my years of cinema-viewing, this has never once happened.
Surrounded by rows and rows of empty seats on all sides, I cannot bring myself to joke that in our youth, when cinema halls were the only place for lovers to hold hands and find intimacy, such boycotts would have been useful. It felt too close to the bone; there were too many lives and livelihoods at stake, my own included. It is true that nepotism has always riven Bollywood, but this attempt to cancel certain stars or screenwriters in this concerted way feels positively McCarthy-era, borderline Soviet. I eat a waffle and watch the movie.
Turns out, Laal Singh Chaddha is, uniquely, a pop culture, Bollywoodesque, charming sequel to Midnight's Children. The eponymous Laal, neuro atypical perhaps, much like Saleem Sinai, hurtles through contemporary history in India, beginning with the end of the Emergency, exactly where Sinai's journey had closed.
It is quite clear though that a large chunk of midnight's grandchildren have no interest in that India or in allowing art to speak for itself; they are so amped up on their manufactured rage that they are busy undoing the very freedoms that had been their -- our -- most vital midnight inheritance.
Devapriya Roy is an author and teacher; her latest book is Friends from College. She can be reached at roydevapriya@gmail.com.