“Nobody from Bombay should be without a basic film vocabulary”

“Midnight's Children was really born [ … ] when I realized how much I wanted to restore the past to myself, not in the faded grays of old family-album snapshots, but whole, In CinemaScope and glorious Technicolor.” ¹ Rushdie's remarks in his 1982 essay “Imaginary Homelands” on the genesis of Midnight's Children (1981) immediately flag the importance of cinema as part of its narrative world. Rushdie highlights how the language of cinema is intricately interwoven with the novel's artistic project. As critic Vijay Mishra has noted, “in Rushdie's postmodern poetics, Bollywood is both an evanescent presence and a structural reference point.” ² Building on Mishra's argument, this essay will explore Indian popular cinema as an important tool for Rushdie's articulation of India's postcolonial modernity. ³ I will argue that the medium of film, more specifically Indian popular cinema, finds its way into the narrative argument of Midnight's Children structurally, metaphorically, and through characters connected with the Indian film industry. This essay will explore how Rushdie draws on the visual culture of commercial Hindi cinema and will argue that Indian popular cinema functions in the novel as a shaping agent in an articulation of India's post-independence national conceptualization of itself.