From Text to Film: Analyzing Filmic Representation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
Keywords:
Politics, Transmutation, Screenplay, Postmodern, Postcolonial, Magical RealismAbstract
This paper proposes to delve deeper into the politics of adaptation and transmutation of the Booker Prize-winning novel Midnight’s Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie into a movie titled Midnight’s Children released on 09 September 2012. Both the novel and the movie mirror each other in many aspects but to bring the five hundred pages long novel into a feature film the length of the book was reduced to almost one hundred and sixty pages. The shooting of the film was done in Colombo as the director Deepa Mehta was afraid that it would be an onerous task for them to complete the shoot of the movie in Pakistan or India. Rushdie took almost a year to bring the book down to the length of the screenplay. Midnight’s Children portrays post-independence India. Similarly, the movie tries to retain the elements of the novel in the form of a screenplay. The novel as well as the movie is based on postmodern, postcolonial themes and magical realism. The movie also has tried to capture most of the aspects as they were in the novel but it is also beyond doubt that the screenplay differs from the book.
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