Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children:

The Link between Magical Realism and Post Colonialism

Abstract

Indian English novel is very distinct in itself and has never been simply an extension of world English fiction. Among the important writers of Indian English fiction, Salman Rushdie has developed the scope of Indian novel in English both thematically and technically. Just as the Indian novels in English are varied in theme and tone, the technical methods employed in them are also diverse. Many writers including Salman Rushdie emerged in the 1980s to enrich the English language by attaching it to new forms of expression and technical innovations. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is often associated with several categories of literary fiction including magical realism, postcolonial fiction and postmodern text. Midnight’s Children presents an encyclopaedic exploration of an entire society through the story of a single person. The most important aspect of the novel’s narrative is its use of magical realism. It is one of the most widely studied and written about novels of the twentieth century. The exploration that it undertakes of the connections between and relation of the individual self to the historical nation has been of great interest to postcolonial critics especially with its use of magical realism. This paper gives an outline of magical realism and how it is treated by Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children within the postcolonial framework.