Teaching Midnight’s Children as an Indian Movie

The paper seeks to interpret Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as an Indian movie, and to offer helpful approaches for teaching the magical realist novel, the Indian movie, and its aesthetic, historical, fantasy, and literary contexts. The comparison between Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and cinematic discourse, as well as the new display of the linkage of a memory-theater, the fascination with the subconscious mind or historical events, and the significance of dreams, supernatural power, or magical realism, all help justify Midnight’s Children to be an Indian movie. For instance, cinematic discourse pervades the style and imagery of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and film vocabulary is used in various places throughout the text as a mode of notation for textual strategies. What’s more, when the narrator Saleem spies on his mother Amina Sinai and her lover Qasim Hhan playing out their love scene, he feels like he’s watching an Indian movie. Thus, this paper aims to provide an in-depth examination of the possibility of adapting Midnight’s Children for the screen, to analyze the film vocabulary and discourse in the magical realist novel, and to shed light on the insight into the cultural significance of the novel and how it is likely to be represented in the film medium.