Salman Rushdie Quotes
One of the things I've thought about 'Midnight's Children' is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.
Rushdie, Salman. Interview by Charlie Rose. Charlie Rose, PBS, 14 Nov. 2012.
The Partition was accompanied by over 2 million murdered Indians as India was divided into a smaller India with almost all the Hindus and Sikhs and a slight majority of the Muslims and Pakistan with all Muslims who made that choice. Pakistan has been trying to de stabilize the area ever since to gain control of more land and became a theocracy and military dictatorship—sometimes de facto and sometimes de juro.
As early as 1933, 14 years before Indian independence, there was a movement for a separate Muslim nation within India. Ironically, Hindu India was never a nation in any sense of the word, but was a series of independent principalities much like Italy before its unification. However, with the Muslim conquest of the various Indian states, there was a central authority, ruler, and nation for the first time. Later the Muslims had to argue that India was not a country when it was they who had made it such. When the Muslim Emperors were in power, they argued that India was one country under their authority. But when they lost power, the Muslims argued the other side of the issue.
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie FRSL is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His work, combining magical realism with historical fiction, is primarily concerned with the many connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, with much of his fiction being set on the Indian subcontinent.
