Parodying Nehru in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh

Abstract

Like The Discovery of India, Midnight’s Children is an attempt both to delimit the boundaries of, and to provide the content for, a modern Indian nation. It spans roughly eighty years in the history of India—from the emergence of nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century to the period of the Emergency and the suspension of democracy under Indira Gandhi—and relates the experiences of one family, whose story is told by Saleem Sinai, one of its last surviving members. Midnight’s Children met with enormous success, bestowing celebrity status on an erstwhile unknown writer and subsequently earning him the Booker of Bookers in 1993, awarded to the book deemed the best to have won the Booker Prize since its inception.