SOURCE: Shankar, Subramanian. “Midnight's Orphans, or a Postcolonialism Worth Its Name.” Cultural Critique 56 (winter 2004): 64-95.

In the following essay, Shankar explores contemporary Indian literature, noting Rushdie's role as a postcolonial Indian author and utilizing Rushdie's commentary and critiques on postcolonial literature.

In 1997, Salman Rushdie celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of India's independence from British rule by coediting The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, 1947-1997 with Elizabeth West. In the introduction to the anthology, Rushdie claimed that the most interesting literature of post-Independence India was in English.¹ “The prose writing—both fiction and nonfiction—created in this period [the fifty years after independence] by Indian writers working in English,” he wrote,

is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the eighteen “recognized” languages of India, the so-called “vernacular languages,” during the same time; and, indeed, this new, and...