ABSTRACT
In 1980, a new novel by an unknown Indian writer living in London burst upon the literary scene. It was received with enormous enthusiasm by critics both in India and abroad, and some went so far as to suggest that here at last was a viable candidate for the Great Indian Novel—if such a thing indeed existed. The novel was Salman Rushdie’s Midnights Children, and with its publication “the literary map of India,” as Clark Blaise put it, was irrevocably redrawn.
