Belonging After Empire: Identity, History, and Language in Midnight’s Children
Film: Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children (2012)
Based on: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981)
Format: Reflective critical blog responding to the Film Screening Worksheet
Introduction: A Nation Born with a Story
Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children begins with an extraordinary coincidence: Saleem Sinai is born at the precise moment when India becomes independent from British rule. The film therefore makes private identity and public history inseparable. Saleem does not simply live in India; he is made into a symbolic figure through whom the new nation’s hopes, violence, divisions, and disappointments are narrated. The British Council describes the film as a 2012, 148-minute feature directed by Mehta and written by Mehta and Rushdie; its synopsis presents the exchanged births of Saleem and Shiva as the event that links their lives to India’s “triumphs and disasters” [1].
The film’s central question is not whether Saleem is biologically, religiously, or socially “really” Indian. Instead, it asks how identity is produced through memory, family, language, power, and historical accident. Saleem is born to one family but raised by another. He is biologically connected to a poorer household but socially formed within the affluent Sinai family. Shiva, his rival and counterpart, experiences the reverse movement. Their exchanged identities expose the weakness of rigid categories such as Hindu and Muslim, rich and poor, victim and victor, colonized and free.
The film is also an adaptation of a novel famous for its density, digression, jokes, historical references, magical realism, and experimental English. Mendes and Kuortti argue that the 2012 film should not be judged only by whether it reproduces the novel faithfully. It should be understood as a creative project that constructs new ways for audiences to encounter the story through cinema, voice, performance, editing, and visual symbolism (Mendes and Kuortti) [3]. That perspective is important here: Mehta’s film does not merely transfer Rushdie’s words to the screen. It translates a literary nation into a cinematic one.
1. Pre-viewing Activities: Questions Before Watching
Who narrates history—the victors or the marginalized?
History is often recorded by governments, armies, elites, and institutions that possess the power to preserve documents and define official truth. However, the people who experience violence, displacement, poverty, religious conflict, or political repression also carry histories that official narratives may suppress. Midnight’s Children gives the act of narration to Saleem, a fictional individual whose life intersects with national events. His voice challenges the idea that history must be told only from the viewpoint of presidents, generals, or colonial administrators.
Saleem’s narration is nevertheless not a simple replacement for official history. He is an unreliable narrator. He misremembers, exaggerates, interrupts himself, confuses chronology, and turns national events into personal metaphors. In “Imaginary Homelands,” Rushdie explains that Saleem is deliberately “suspect” because his mistakes arise from fallible memory, personality, and circumstance. His vision is fragmented rather than complete (Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands”) [4]. This unreliability does not make his story worthless. It demonstrates that all historical knowledge is shaped by position and memory.
Saleem’s identity is therefore related to narration in two ways. First, he discovers who he is by telling the stories of the people and events that produced him. Second, he shows that identity is never an isolated possession. He declares, “I have been a swallower of lives,” suggesting that the self contains the histories of parents, servants, lovers, enemies, cities, religions, and nations (Rushdie 4). To know Saleem is to know the many lives that have entered his own.
What makes a nation?
A nation is more than a geographical territory or a government. Geography provides a physical space, and governance provides institutions, laws, and citizenship. Yet a nation also depends on shared stories, cultural memories, languages, rituals, political ideals, and arguments about belonging. In the film, India is not presented as a perfectly unified object waiting to be discovered. It is a contested and unfinished creation.
Saleem’s body becomes a map of this uncertainty. His birth coincides with independence, but his biological and social identities do not coincide. His family is shaped by Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and secular influences. His personal history includes Bombay, Kashmir, Pakistan, war, migration, and the Emergency. India appears coherent because people imagine a common national future, but it appears fragmented because that future is experienced differently according to class, religion, language, gender, and region.
The National Archives’ educational material on Partition emphasizes boundary-making, communal tension, violence, and forced displacement after the division of British India in 1947 [5]. These facts help explain why the film’s birth scene is both celebratory and ominous. Independence creates a new political nation, but Partition simultaneously produces separation, fear, and loss. The nation is born with a wound.
Can language be colonized or decolonized?
A language can be colonized when an imperial power gives its language greater authority in education, administration, law, employment, and literary prestige. English in India carries this history. It was associated with British rule and continues to offer social advantages, but Indian writers and speakers have also transformed it. English is not used in India exactly as it is used in Britain. It is mixed with Indian languages, accents, rhythms, idioms, cultural references, and local forms of knowledge.
Rushdie calls this process a remaking of English. In “Imaginary Homelands,” he argues that Indian writers cannot simply use English in the way the British did; the language must be remade for new purposes. He connects this struggle with freedom, because taking possession of English means refusing to let colonial history determine how Indians can represent themselves (Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands”) [4]. The language may have arrived through empire, but it can be appropriated, altered, and made answerable to Indian experience.
2. While-Watching Activities: Guided Observations
Because different versions of the film may have slightly different runtimes, the observations below identify scenes and narrative moments rather than fixed minute markers.
| Film moment | Observation and interpretation |
|---|---|
| Opening narration | Saleem’s voice immediately joins his birth to the birth of India. The personal “I” becomes a national “we,” but the connection is also unstable because Saleem’s memory is self-conscious and fallible. |
| Saleem and Shiva’s birth switch | Mary Pereira’s exchange of the babies turns identity into a question of nurture, class, religion, biology, and historical contingency. The boys inherit lives that were intended for one another. |
| Saleem’s narration | The older Saleem’s voice creates a dialogue between past and present. His comments remind viewers that the story is being shaped after the events have happened, not witnessed from an impossible position of total objectivity. |
| Emergency sequence | The film presents the Emergency as a crisis in which the state’s power enters private life. The suppression of freedom echoes the danger of allowing one official story to replace all competing memories. |
| English, Hindi, Urdu, and other languages | Linguistic variation prevents “Indian” identity from being reduced to one standardized voice. The adaptation’s use of Indian languages makes cultural difference audible rather than leaving it only as a theme. |
Is Saleem a trustworthy narrator?
Saleem is trustworthy precisely when the film makes us aware of his limitations. A traditional historical narrator might pretend to know exactly what happened, but Saleem exposes the process of remembering. He frequently turns backward, corrects himself, adds stories within stories, and connects physical events to magical or symbolic explanations. This metafictional technique makes the audience ask how stories become history.
The older Saleem’s voice also creates a relationship between cinema and memory. Rushdie’s voice was used as the voice of the older Saleem. Mehta explained that narration was initially not planned, but she later wanted to return more of the novel’s language to the film; Rushdie resisted at first, yet eventually performed the voice himself (Canfield) [2]. The voiceover is therefore not decorative. It functions as a bridge between the novel’s verbal richness and the film’s visual world.
What does the Emergency suggest about democracy?
The film’s Emergency sequence suggests that democracy is not guaranteed merely because a nation has elections, a constitution, or the symbolic status of independence. Democratic life depends on civil liberties, dissent, press freedom, institutional accountability, and the ability of citizens to challenge official power. The historical Emergency lasted from June 1975 to March 1977; Carnegie’s account notes that fundamental rights were suspended, courts were weakened, and security services received broad powers of arrest [6].
In Midnight’s Children, the state’s violence is especially disturbing because the nation that promised freedom becomes capable of disciplining bodies and memories. The film thus contrasts the joy of independence with the later danger of authoritarian nationalism. A nation can become oppressive when unity is defined as obedience and when disagreement is treated as betrayal.
3. Group One: Hybridity and Identity
Saleem and Shiva as hybrid identities
Saleem and Shiva represent hybridity not because they are simply mixtures of two cultures, but because their identities are formed in an unstable space between biological origin and social upbringing. Saleem is born to a poorer family but raised as the son of the affluent Muslim Sinays. Shiva is born to the Sinays but grows up elsewhere. Their lives therefore disrupt the assumption that religion, class, family, and identity naturally align.
The exchange at birth is symbolic of postcolonial dislocation. Independence promises a new beginning, yet the babies enter a world already shaped by colonial borders, Partition, unequal wealth, religious categorization, and inherited social structures. Their switch suggests that the nation itself has been rearranged by political decisions that affect people differently. A new flag cannot erase the older histories carried by families and communities.
Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of the “Third Space” helps explain this condition. The Third Space is an interstitial site where cultures meet, negotiate, and produce meanings that cannot be reduced to either side of a binary. Bhabha’s work rethinks cultural identity, social agency, and national affiliation rather than treating identity as a pure inheritance (Bhabha) [8]. Saleem’s identity exists in such an in-between space. He is not merely Hindu or Muslim, rich or poor, insider or outsider. His belonging is produced through negotiation.
Is hybrid identity confusion or possibility?
The film presents hybrid identity as both painful and productive. It is painful because Saleem’s identity is stolen from him before he can choose it. He experiences betrayal, displacement, bodily fragmentation, and uncertainty. Shiva’s life also shows that mobility between identities does not automatically create freedom; his anger and militarized masculinity reveal the damage caused by class inequality and political exclusion.
At the same time, hybridity creates the possibility of connection. Saleem’s mixed inheritance allows him to imagine a nation larger than a single religious or cultural category. His telepathic relationship with the other midnight’s children symbolizes the possibility of communication across distance. The film does not claim that difference disappears. Instead, it suggests that a nation may be held together by the difficult work of negotiating difference.
4. Group Two: Narrating the Nation
Saleem’s personal history as national history
Midnight’s Children rewrites national history through an intimate narrative. Instead of presenting India as a sequence of impersonal dates, it gives political events bodies, families, arguments, wounds, and memories. Saleem’s life is not an objective summary of India, but it becomes a form of counter-history. His errors and exaggerations are meaningful because they reveal how individuals experience history from within.
Rushdie’s essay “Imaginary Homelands” makes this method explicit. He describes his India as one version among many possible Indias and compares the narrator’s perspective to a broken mirror whose fragments may be more truthful than a supposedly perfect reflection. For Rushdie, rewriting history is political because official accounts can distort or erase violence (Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands”) [4]. The film retains this principle by allowing Saleem’s voice to compete with the authority of the state.
Partha Chatterjee’s account of nationalism is useful because it challenges the idea that European history provides the universal model for every nation. Anticolonial nationalism in India did not merely copy a Western template; it developed through local struggles over culture, religion, political sovereignty, and social life. Chatterjee’s The Nation and Its Fragments examines how nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa produces forms of belonging that cannot be understood only through European categories (Chatterjee) [9].
The film similarly rejects a simple binary between colonizer and colonized. India is shaped by colonial institutions, but it is also reshaped by Indian memory, multilingualism, family life, popular culture, religion, and political conflict. The result is not a pure precolonial identity restored after independence. It is a fractured, changing, and hybrid nation.
Timeline: India and Saleem’s journey
| Historical moment | Saleem’s personal or symbolic journey | Meaning in the film |
|---|---|---|
| 15 August 1947: independence and Partition | Saleem and Shiva are born at midnight and exchanged by Mary Pereira. | National freedom and personal displacement occur together. |
| Late 1940s and 1950s: the new nation takes institutional shape | Saleem grows up within the Sinai family and learns that his life is connected to other midnight’s children. | Citizenship is imagined as a collective project, but social inequality remains. |
| 1960s: conflict and political instability in the subcontinent | Saleem’s identity is repeatedly displaced through family crisis, migration, and conflict. | National borders do not produce stable selves; they create new forms of belonging and exclusion. |
| 1971: war and the creation of Bangladesh | Saleem’s relationship to Pakistan and the subcontinent becomes part of the wider violence of partitioned histories. | The national map remains unfinished and contested. |
| June 1975–March 1977: the Emergency | The state’s power reaches into the lives of the midnight’s children and threatens their collective future. | Independence without civil liberties can become another form of domination. |
Is India coherent or fragmented?
The film presents India as both coherent and fragmented. It is coherent in the sense that people continue to imagine a shared political and cultural future. The midnight’s children are linked by a common historical moment, and Saleem’s storytelling tries to gather their lives into one narrative. Yet India is fragmented because its citizens do not occupy the same social reality. Religion, language, caste, class, gender, region, and political power determine how the nation is experienced.
This apparent contradiction is not a weakness in the film’s representation. It is the point. India is coherent as an ongoing argument about how difference can coexist. It is fragmented as a lived reality. Saleem’s narrative form—full of interruptions, repetitions, digressions, and competing voices—mirrors this national condition. The film suggests that unity should not mean uniformity. A democracy must make room for disagreement and plurality, or its national story becomes authoritarian propaganda.
5. Group Three: Chutnification of English
What is chutnification?
“Chutnification” describes the process by which Rushdie mixes English with Indian words, idioms, cultural references, oral storytelling patterns, nonstandard grammar, comic exaggeration, and multilingual rhythms. The term is culinary as well as linguistic: like chutney, the language is made from different ingredients. It does not imitate the imagined purity of standard English. It produces a new form suitable for a postcolonial experience.
The word is especially useful because it reverses the power relationship between English and Indian languages. Under colonialism, English could be treated as the language of official knowledge and authority. Rushdie’s writing takes English and makes it answer to Bombay, Kashmir, family gossip, cinema, religion, food, politics, and memory. Mehta and Rushdie faced the problem of adapting this verbal abundance to the screen. Their solution included voiceover, multilingual dialogue, visual motifs, music, and performance. Rushdie described the screenplay as a process that demanded attention to audience clarity, while Mehta wanted narration to restore some of the novel’s language (Canfield) [2].
Creative language exercise
A brief passage from the novel’s opening, reproduced in an Open University teaching resource, begins: “I was born in the city of Bombay ... once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date” (Rushdie 3) [7]. The passage then moves toward the exact date of Saleem’s birth, 15 August 1947, and links his body to the nation’s independence.
A standardized-English version might read: “I was born in Bombay on 15 August 1947, the day India became independent.”
The standardized version is grammatically clear, but it loses several important effects. First, the self-correction—“No, that won’t do”—creates the sound of a storyteller speaking directly to an audience. Second, “once upon a time” invokes fairy tale and oral narrative, while the correction brings the story back to a precise historical date. Third, “Bombay” carries a cultural and historical identity that is not identical to the modern official name “Mumbai.” Finally, the original passage makes the birth seem both ordinary and mythic: Saleem is a child, a storyteller, and a national symbol at the same time.
The translation also loses the sense that language is thinking aloud. Rushdie’s English does not simply deliver information; it performs hesitation, memory, correction, and cultural layering. This is why chutnified English is not incorrect English. It is an artistic method for making the language carry more than one history.
Is English still colonial, or is it now Indian?
The most convincing answer is that English can be both historically colonial and creatively Indian. Its colonial history cannot be erased. English continues to have unequal access, and mastery of it may still provide educational and professional privilege. Yet language is not permanently owned by the empire that spread it. Indian writers, filmmakers, teachers, and speakers have transformed English through local vocabulary, accents, syntax, genres, and cultural references.
The film’s multilingual soundscape makes this argument audible. English does not stand outside Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, or other languages as a neutral universal medium. It exists in contact with them. This contact may be unequal, but it can also produce new expression. Decolonization therefore does not necessarily require rejecting English. It may involve changing who controls the language, what experiences it can represent, and whose speech is treated as legitimate.
6. Required Reflective Blog: Belonging in a Fractured Linguistic Nation
What does it mean to belong to a postcolonial nation that speaks in a colonizer’s tongue and carries fractured identities?
To belong to a postcolonial nation is to inherit both freedom and unfinished history. Midnight’s Children makes this contradiction visible by placing Saleem’s birth at the exact moment of India’s independence. His life begins as a national celebration, but it is immediately marked by Partition, religious division, unequal class positions, and the exchange of identities. He is born into one family and raised in another; his body carries a history that his social life does not reveal. Through Saleem and Shiva, the film shows that identity is not a simple fact waiting to be discovered. It is produced through family, memory, language, politics, and power.
Saleem’s story also changes the meaning of national history. The official version of independence might emphasize leaders, ceremonies, flags, and constitutional achievement. Saleem’s version includes those events, but it also includes servants, mothers, lovers, children, displaced people, and the wounded bodies of citizens. His narration is unreliable because memory is unreliable. Yet this weakness becomes a form of honesty. He does not pretend that one person can possess the whole truth. Rushdie describes Saleem as a narrator whose vision is made of fragments, and he connects those fragments to the political need to challenge official versions of the past (Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands”) [4]. Belonging therefore means participating in a national story while also questioning who has been excluded from it.
The film’s treatment of English adds another layer to this problem. English is a language associated with colonial power, education, administration, and social privilege. Speaking it can feel like carrying the history of empire in one’s mouth. Nevertheless, Midnight’s Children refuses to surrender English to the British. Rushdie reshapes it through Indian idioms, multilingual rhythms, comic exaggeration, oral storytelling, and cultural references. His “chutnified” English is not an imperfect imitation of standard English; it is a new literary instrument. In that sense, belonging involves taking a language that arrived through domination and making it speak to local memories and realities.
The film adaptation develops this linguistic struggle through sound. The older Saleem’s voice, performed by Rushdie himself, connects the cinematic present to the novel’s verbal texture. Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and English occupy the same narrative world rather than appearing as separate sealed identities. This does not create perfect harmony. Languages still carry class and religious associations, and not every character has equal access to public speech. However, multilingualism makes the nation audible as a contact zone rather than a single standardized voice.
Bhabha’s idea of the Third Space helps explain why this condition can be creative as well as painful. Saleem and Shiva exist between biological and social identities, between personal memory and public history, and between languages. Chatterjee’s critique of Western models of nationhood similarly reminds us that India cannot be evaluated only according to a European story of linear national progress. The nation is made through its own arguments about culture, religion, sovereignty, and modernity (Bhabha; Chatterjee) [8] [9].
Therefore, belonging to a postcolonial nation means accepting that identity may be plural, incomplete, and historically burdened. It does not mean choosing one pure origin or pretending that colonialism has disappeared. It means learning to inhabit contradiction: to remember violence without reducing the nation to violence, to use English without forgetting its history, and to claim the nation while demanding that its official story become more inclusive. Midnight’s Children suggests that a fractured identity is not necessarily a failed identity. Like Saleem’s story, it can become a space from which new forms of solidarity and freedom are imagined.
Conclusion
The worksheet’s three major themes—hybridity, national narration, and chutnified English—are inseparable in Midnight’s Children. Saleem’s mixed identity makes him a figure of the nation’s mixed histories. His unreliable narration challenges the authority of official memory. Rushdie’s transformed English demonstrates how a colonized language can be appropriated and remade. Mehta’s adaptation translates these concerns into voice, image, sound, performance, and historical montage.
The film does not offer a simple definition of India. Instead, it shows nationhood as a continuous process of remembering, arguing, translating, and negotiating. To belong is not to possess a pure identity. It is to participate in a collective story while remaining alert to the fragments and silences within it.
Works Cited
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
Canfield, Kevin. “Salman Rushdie and Deepa Mehta on Midnight’s Children.” Filmmaker Magazine, 17 Apr. 2013, https://filmmakermagazine.com/68782-salman-rushdie-and-deepa-mehta-on-midnights-children/.
Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton UP, 1993.
Mendes, Ana Cristina, and Joel Kuortti. “Padma or No Padma: Audience in the Adaptations of Midnight’s Children.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 52, no. 3, 2017, pp. 501–518. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989416671171.
Mehta, Deepa, director. Midnight’s Children. Performances by Satya Bhabha, Shriya Saran, Anupam Kher, Shabana Azmi, Seema Biswas, and others, David Hamilton Productions, 2012.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. Granta, 1991.
---. “Imaginary Homelands.” London Review of Books, vol. 4, no. 18, 7 Oct. 1982, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n18/salman-rushdie/imaginary-homelands.
---. Midnight’s Children. Jonathan Cape, 1981.
The National Archives. “Partition of British India.” The National Archives, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/partition-of-british-india/. Accessed 17 Aug. 2026.
Online Research References
[1]: British Council UK Films Database, “Midnight’s Children”
[2]: Kevin Canfield, “Salman Rushdie and Deepa Mehta on Midnight’s Children,” Filmmaker Magazine
[3]: Ana Cristina Mendes and Joel Kuortti, “Padma or No Padma,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
[4]: Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” London Review of Books
[5]: The National Archives, “Partition of British India”
[6]: Rudra Chaudhuri, “Re-reading the Indian Emergency,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
[7]: The Open University, “Midnight’s Children,” OpenLearn excerpt
[8]: Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Taylor & Francis publisher page
[9]: Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, JSTOR record
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