The question of crowdedness needed a formal answer as well as a linguistic one. Multitude is the most obvious fact about the subcontinent. Everywhere you go, there’s a throng of humanity. How could a novel embrace the idea of such multitude? My answer was to tell a crowd of stories, deliberately to overcrowd the narrative, so that “my” story, the main thrust of the novel, would need to push its way, so to speak, through a crowd of other stories.
Was not familiar with this novel before reading.
Really cool to get the author’s insight on characters and why he chose certain aspects for the novel.
I really need to read Midnight’s Children. This is a beautiful reflection from Rushdie on what it takes to write something huge. It’s also a hard-hitting indictment on the current state of affairs in India.
The question of language was central to the making of Midnight’s Children. In a later novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, I used the acronym “Hug-me” to describe the language spoken in Bombay streets, a melange of Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi and English. In addition to those five “official” languages, there’s also the city’s unique slang, Bambaiyya, which nobody from anywhere else in India understands. Clearly, any novel aiming for readability could not be written in Hug-me or Bambaiyya.
Was not familiar with this novel before reading.
Really cool to get the author’s insight on characters and why he chose certain aspects for the novel.
I really need to read Midnight’s Children. This is a beautiful reflection from Rushdie on what it takes to write something huge. It’s also a hard-hitting indictment on the current state of affairs in India.