Midnights Children: What is Magical Realism

Children. In this book, Rushdie uses Magical Realism in an ample way as Rushdie presents his characters with a cultural twist to them, relating them to Indian gods and mythic heroes, while at the same time subjecting them to politics and collective catastrophe, subsequently using Magical realism to portray many aspects of Midnights children.  Already the first line in the book reveal an indication of magical realism. Saleem’s declares in his flashback ‘I was born in the city of Bombay … once upon a time’.  This tells us how Rushdie is already using the same arrangement as fairy tales do, with ‘Once upon a time’ Saleem Sinai and India are each other’s figurative counterparts, they represent each other together as they are both born on the day of India’s independence, August 15th 1947, and alongside another thousand children also born at the stroke of midnight that day.  The telepathic powers Saleem inherits is the most extraordinary out of all the powers given to the ‘Midnight’s Children’, as he loses and regains ability to connect to the other thousand telepathically.  The power he gains through the high sensitivity of his abnormally large nose.  He now can sense emotions and intentions as well through scent.  In normal circumstances, a nose senses different objects with particular smell, good or back, e.g. Perfume or garbage. However, within this book, Saleem’s nose senses emotion, love, hate, fear, etc. This contributes to the tone of Magical realism, as obviously in reality this isn’t achievable. Rushdie often mentions ‘cracks’ in the book. The  ‘crack’ in the body of the book, is in relation to Saleem breaking down emotionally through ‘Midnights Children’. A point in the book where Saleem confesses his powers to his parents, and his father strikes him on the ears, in this incident; his ‘stupid cracks’ are literally physical cracks now. In this instance, Rushdie has substituted the emotional for the physical. Empirical referents evoke non-empirical referents and vice versa. The relation of Saleem’s birth, growth, development, devastation are related to India in comparison to his character.