Intro
Once upon a time India was owned by Britain. Then, on August 15, 1947, it didn't anymore. Saleem Sinai was born at the stroke of midnight on the day when India became independent, and for that reason became a) telepathic b) possessing a giant nose and c) the hero and narrator of Midnight's Children. The book traces Saleem's life and the political, social, linguistic, and cultural strife faced the newly independent India.
Sound postcolonial enough for you? It's certainly got enough material, filling over 500 pages. What with the narrator/protagonist who literally embodies twentieth-century India as it achieves independence from the Brits and undergoes the violent trauma of Partition (the splitting of one nation into India and Pakistan), you've got a book completely immersed in one of the biggest postcolonial struggles in modern history.
So don't think we're exaggerating when we say it's got every major theme related to postcoloniality. Seriously, we're not joking here. Linguistic diversity? Multiple and fractured identity? Hybridity? Religious extremism? Racial and ethnic division? Yep, yep, yep. All there—and then some.
Plus, it doesn't hurt to have some seriously genius writing that twists the English language in new ways, plus storytelling that's actually good while being super-literary (he uses magical realism like a guy spinning plates on sticks). We're telling you—there's a reason why this novel won the "'Booker of Bookers"' (given to the best novel in all the years of the Booker Prize) twice.
Quote
Telepathy, then: the inner monologues of all the so-called teeming millions, of masses and classes alike, jostled for space within my head. In the beginning, when I was content to be an audience—before I began to act—there was a language problem. The voices babbled in everything from Malayalam to Naga dialects, from the purity of Lucknow Urdu to the Southern slurrings of Tamil. I understood only a fraction of the things being said within the walls of my skull. Only later, when I began to probe, did I learn that below the surface transmissions—the front-of-mind stuff which is what I'd originally been picking up—language faded away, and was replaced by universally intelligible thought-forms which far transcended words…but that was after I heard, beneath the polyglot frenzy in my head, those other precious signals, utterly different from everything else, most of them faint and distant, like far-off drums whose insistent pulsing eventually broke through the fish-market cacophony of my voices…those secret, nocturnal calls, like calling out to like…the unconscious beacons of the children of midnight, signaling nothing more than their existence, transmitting simply: "'I."' From far to the North, "'I."' And the South East West: "'I."' "'I."' "'And I."'
Analysis
Smack in the middle of the book, we find out that our main guy is, among other things, telepathic. You know, no bigs. But wait: his telepathy isn't just a cool superpower (although it is that): it does way more than qualify him for X-Men . Saleem's telepathy is a way for us to imagine the difficulty of containing multitudes (of languages, of voices, of people) in one body. And not just Saleem's body—like, the body politic of the nation of India.
In other words, Saleem's sense of the "'polyglot frenzy"' points us to modern India: its teeming diversity in terms of languages and people, and the immense challenge it has to stay unified in face of all these differences.
And then there's that whole bit about "'the children of midnight."' These children are all the kids that, like Saleem, were born on the eve of India's independence from Great Britain. Between midnight and 1am of that eve, to be precise.
That Saleem eventually finds a way to hear their voices—"'like calling out to like"'—underneath the crazy clamor of all the other voices is a sign of hope in a novel that keeps telling us how Saleem/India is literally splitting apart and dying. It's the hope that, despite all this "'cacophony"' of difference, there is the possibility for one, peaceful, whole nation.
These "'midnight's children"' share a unique similarity with Saleem. They all have the same potential that comes from the ability to say "'I"': to claim their own identity. And that's huge, especially if you read these kids as "'the future"' of an independent India. It's that hope of every kid and every country: the desire for self-determination. And that's something we're betting you can relate to, even if you're not a card-carrying postcolonialist.