Midnight’s Children at 25
Ashish Mehta

Writing a new introduction for the 25th anniversary edition of "Midnight’s Children", Salman Rushdie singles out the late Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi for threatening legal action against his magnum opus, even as it made an "amazing admission" of excesses of her emergency rule.

In the introduction, titled "The birth pangs of Midnight’s Children", the Mumbai-born author reminisces about making a journey from Britain to India in 1975 on a shoestring budget, financed out of the royalty of his first novel, "Grimus". It was the time when "Indira Gandhi was convicted of election fraud, and one week after my 28th birthday she declared a state of emergency and assumed tyrannical powers... I understood almost at once that Mrs G. had somehow become central to my still-tentative literary plans," Rushdie writes in the new introduction to the 25th anniversary Vintage Classics edition coming out this month.

Talking about the reception the path-breaking novel had, he notes: "In the West, people tended to read ‘Midnight’s Children’ as a fantasy while in India people thought of it as pretty realistic, almost a history book... But it was wonderfully well liked almost everywhere, and changed its author’s life.

"One reader who didn’t care for it, however, was Indira Gandhi, and in 1984, three years after its publication - she was prime minister again by this time - she brought an action against it, claiming to have been defamed by one single sentence." The controversial sentence was: "It has often been said that Mrs. Gandhi’s younger son Sanjay accused his mother of being responsible, through her neglect, for his father’s death; and that this gave him an unbreakable hold over her, so that she became incapable of denying him anything." Rushdie writes: "Tame stuff, you might think, not really the kind of thing a thick-skinned politician would usually sue a novelist for mentioning, and an odd choice of casus belli in a book that excoriated Indira for the many crimes of the Emergency.

"Before the book’s publication, (publishing house Jonathan) Cape’s lawyers had been worried about my criticisms of Mrs. Gandhi and had asked me to write them a letter in support of the claims I was making. In this letter I justified the text to their satisfaction, except with regard to one sentence which, as I said, was hard to substantiate, as it was about three people, two of whom were dead, while the third would be the one suing us. — IANS

HOME