India is so big, so crowded, so jammed full of the fascinatingly particular, so awingly representative of human variety, that a novel pretending to India as subject can't avoid the question of how novels in general may claim truthfully to cope with the daunting vastnesses, the multiplicities of things and persons. What makes Midnight's Children so extraordinarily important, and moreover (for literary importance isn't always matched by a fetching readability), what makes it so vertiginously exciting a reading experience, is the way it takes in not just the whole apple cart of India and the problem of being a novel about India but also, and this with the unflagging zest of a Tristram Shandy, the business of being a novel at all. "Is this an Indian disease, this urge to encapsulate the whole of reality?" speculates writing narrator Saleem Sinai. No, he implies, by way of reply, it's a novelist's disease; but one to be opened up for inspection, foregrounded as they say, nowhere more aptly and revelatorily than in an ambitious fiction of India….
If Indians are, as [Rushdie] says, "obsessed with correspondences"—"Similarities between this and that, between apparently unconnected things, make us clap our hands delightedly when we find them out. It is a sort of national longing for form"—then Saleem's narrative exhibits the national craving in super-abundance. It writes history, we might say by way of compliment, on the Walter Benjamin model, spinning webs of meaning around pepperpots and bicycles, spittoons and Mrs Ghandi's parted hair….
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