Writer Salman Rushdie yesterday discussed the U.S. premiere of the stage adaptation of his Booker Prize-winning novel, “Midnight’s Children,” which will be performed at the University in March by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
“It’s been a long road,” Rushdie said during a press conference at the Michigan League. “There have been projects to dramatize adaptations for 21, what is almost 22 years, so we finally seem to have had what are very happy results.”
The story begins with the birth of the protagonist, Saleem Sinai, as India gains its independence from the British Empire. As he grows, he finds he shares a psychic communication with other children brought into being at that moment. The book is a half-supernatural, half-realistic allegory of India’s recent history and the turmoil it finds itself in when forced to deal with its freedom.
A central concern of the narrative is that “these days, you can’t explain individual lives without explaining their larger historical context. … The view of a character since Heraclitus – man’s character as his fate – is now not entirely true because the public sphere can change his fate irrespective of how we live our lives,” Rushdie said, adding that much of the content was inspired by the circumstances of his own life.
“Before it acquired its big historical dimension, it really started from a desire to write about childhood, to write about growing up in Bombay at that time, a city at a very much richer and happier phase in its history than perhaps today,” said Rushdie, who was born just before India gained its independence from Great Britian. “(I thought) if I could make the coincidence exact, and not eight weeks apart, but exact, and imagine that the newborn child and the newborn country were somehow siblings, were some how twins, that it would be a way of writing a family story in which one member of the family was the whole country.”
Rushdie said that in spite of his long-time desire to produce the book in some cinematic venue, it has been continually delayed and canceled due to primarily political reasons. “There are certain things that have allowed me to reimagine the book in ways that I’ve found very interesting,” he said. “The demands of staging required an actual rethinking of the narrative structure of the book.”
Rushdie said that his desire to stage the book came from the same place as his desire to write it – his childhood. “I grew up in a movie generation,” he said. “All we had was movies and books.”