One of the more curious aspects of the annual Booker Prize is the fact that in the eleven years since its inception it has been awarded four times to novels set in India with the connecting leitmotif of the decline and fall of the British Empire…. [The fourth novel in this group,] Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, takes in most of this history yet is altogether different. It is the view from within, of colonial and independent India from the midnight hour of 15 August 1947, the birth of Independence, and of a new generation of Indians….

For those born after Independence, the inheritors of the Indo-British sensibility, as for Saleem Sinai, the hero-narrator of Midnight's Children, the search is for the validity of this legacy in modern India, where, as in all developing countries which have emerged from their colonial past, economics, religion and culture are all consumed by the...