Film Screening—Deepa Mehta's Midnight's Children

 Film Screening—Deepa Mehta's Midnight's Children

This task is based on the film screening of Midnight's Children by Deepa Mehta. This blog assigned by Dilip Barad sir. 

1. Pre-viewing Activities:

A. Trigger Questions :

1. Who narrates history — the victors or the marginalized? How does this relate to personal identity? 

• Common view: History is often narrated by the victors, which means dominant powers shape the “official” record to justify their actions and worldview.

• Postcolonial critique: Scholars like Gayatri Spivak (Can the Subaltern Speak?) argue that the marginalized—the colonized, the oppressed—are frequently silenced or misrepresented in dominant histories.

• Personal identity link: When a community’s history is erased or distorted, its people may internalize the dominant narrative, leading to identity crises, shame, or loss of heritage. Conversely, reclaiming suppressed histories can restore pride and a sense of self.

• Example: In India, colonial histories often minimized indigenous resistance; recovering those narratives reshapes modern Indian identity.

2. What makes a nation? Is it geography, governance, culture, or memory?

• Geography: Physical borders can define a nation but are often artificial (e.g., Partition of India).

• Governance: Shared political structures and laws can unite people but may not reflect cultural realities.

• Culture: Language, religion, traditions, and shared customs create emotional bonds.

• Memory: Collective memory—both historical events and myths—creates a sense of belonging. Benedict Anderson calls this an “imagined community”: people feel connected not because they know each other personally but because they share a mental image of unity.

• Postcolonial insight: Many nations are products of colonial map-making, so “nationhood” is often an uneasy blend of imposed borders and self-fashioned cultural identity.

3. Can language be colonized or decolonized? Think about English in India.

• Colonization of language: During British rule, English became the language of administration, law, and higher education, marginalizing native languages. It carried the prestige of power and shaped thought patterns (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o calls this “linguistic imperialism”).

• Decolonization of language: Writers like Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and Kamala Das have appropriated English, infusing it with Indian idioms, rhythms, and cultural references—turning the “master’s language” into a tool of self-expression.

• Ongoing debate: Some see English in India as a lingering colonial legacy; others view it as a hybrid, globalized Indian language that bridges cultures and expands literary possibilities.

• Term: Rushdie’s “chutnification of English” describes this playful mixing of languages to reflect India’s multilingual reality.

2. While-Watching Activities :

Time Marker / Scene	Observation Focus	Postcolonial Angle to Notice
Opening Scene	Note how nation and identity are intertwined in Saleem’s narration.	Observe whether the narrator treats personal life as inseparable from the nation’s political history—reflects Benedict Anderson’s imagined community idea.
Saleem & Shiva’s birth switch	How does the identity of each child become hybridized—biologically, socially, politically?	This scene reflects Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity, where identity is a mix of origins, circumstances, and power structures.
Saleem’s narration	Is the narrator trustworthy? How does metafiction (storytelling about storytelling) affect your perception?	Think of unreliable narration and how postcolonial literature often questions “official” truth, making the audience aware of constructed history.
Emergency Period depiction	What does the film suggest about democracy and freedom in post-independence India?	Consider whether political oppression mirrors colonial control, challenging the idea that independence automatically ensures liberty.
Use of English/Hindi/Urdu	Spot moments where English is blended or subverted with Hindi/Urdu.	This is Salman Rushdie’s “chutnification of English” in action—language as a hybrid postcolonial identity marker.

3. Post-Watching Activities :

“What does it mean to belong to a postcolonial nation that speaks in a colonizer’s tongue and

carries the burden of fractured identities?”

To belong to a postcolonial nation is to live in a space where the past is never entirely past. The nation breathes in two languages at once—the inherited rhythms of its own speech and the lingering cadences of the colonizer’s tongue. In Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie turns this linguistic and cultural tension into the heartbeat of Saleem Sinai’s life. India, as Rushdie depicts it, is not a single, seamless story but a thousand overlapping fragments, stitched together with borrowed words and contested memories.

The use of English in India is perhaps the clearest reminder of this colonial inheritance. During British rule, English was the language of law, administration, and intellectual prestige, creating a hierarchy in which native languages were deemed provincial. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o calls this linguistic imperialism, a subtle but enduring form of domination. Yet Rushdie, like many Indian writers, refuses to surrender English to its colonial past. He reshapes it through what he calls the “chutnification of English” (Imaginary Homelands), seasoning it with Hindi, Urdu, and regional idioms. This transformed English is not the Queen’s; it is Saleem Sinai’s, crowded with the smells of pickle jars, the sounds of Bombay’s streets, and the pulse of India’s political upheavals. Language here is both colonized and decolonized—colonized in its origin, but decolonized in its irreverent, hybrid use.

Belonging, however, is not only a matter of language. It is also about identity—and in Midnight’s Children, identity is always unstable. The birth-swap of Saleem and Shiva is more than a plot twist; it is a metaphor for hybridity in Homi Bhabha’s sense: the creation of something new from the collision of cultures, classes, and histories. Biologically, socially, and politically, each boy lives the other’s life. Saleem, born poor but raised rich, becomes a symbol of India’s elite English-speaking class, while Shiva, born rich but raised poor, embodies the resentment of those excluded from privilege. Their intertwined fates mirror the divisions of postcolonial India: linguistic, economic, and ideological.

The nation itself is portrayed as an imagined community (Benedict Anderson), held together less by geography or governance than by shared narratives—narratives that are themselves fractured. Saleem’s unreliable narration forces us to question the very act of telling national history. His life runs parallel to that of India, but he constantly digresses, contradicts himself, and blurs fact with fantasy. This metafictional style suggests that any history—especially a postcolonial one—is as much invention as truth. As Ana Cristina Mendes and Joel Kuortti note in their analysis of the film adaptation, the removal of Padma as Saleem’s interlocutor changes the dynamic: without her interruptions, the narration becomes more authoritative, less dialogic, and perhaps less reflective of India’s polyphonic identity.

The Emergency of 1975–77 becomes the novel’s most pointed commentary on post-independence freedom. Declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, it suspended democratic rights and silenced dissent. In Rushdie’s allegory, this political repression mirrors colonial control, reminding readers that the nation’s liberation did not end the experience of subjugation. The film’s depiction of forced sterilizations and censorship reinforces the idea that belonging to a nation is not always synonymous with liberty—it can also mean carrying the scars of authoritarianism.

For me, to belong to such a postcolonial nation is to inhabit a space where identity is never singular. It is to speak in a language shaped by a history of domination but made one’s own through creative adaptation. It is to live among competing memories of the past, each claiming to be the true story. It is to recognize that the nation’s unity is fragile, built from fragments—just as Saleem describes himself as “handcuffed to history,” a body holding together the cracked mosaic of India.

In the end, belonging is less about purity of origin and more about the ability to navigate hybridity with honesty. Like Saleem, we inherit both the burden and the blessing of fractured identities. And perhaps, in embracing the fractures rather than hiding them, we come closest to belonging.

References : 

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture (1994).

Mehta, D. (Director). (2012). Midnight’s children [Film]. David Hamilton Productions.

Mendes, Ana Cristina & Kuortti, Joel. “Padma or no Padma” (2016)

Rushdie, S. (1981). Midnight’s children. Jonathan Cape.