Editing Midnight's Children (section)

== Style ==
''Midnight's Children'' has been called "a watershed in the post-independence development of the Indian English novel", to the extent that the decade after its 1981 publication has been called "post-Rushdie". During that decade, many novels inspired by ''Midnight's Children'' were written by both established and young Indian writers.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Rege|first=Josna E.|date=Fall 1997|title=Victim into Protagonist? 'Midnight's Children' and the post-Rushie National Narratives of the Eighties|jstor=29533221|journal=Studies in the Novel|volume=29|issue=3|pages=342–375}}</ref>

Rushdie's innovative use of magic realism allowed him to employ the nation-as-family allegory and at the same time confound it with an impossible telepathy among a multitude of children from a multitude of languages, cultures, regions and religions. No one genre dominates the entire novel, however. It encompasses the comic and the tragic, the real, the surreal, and the mythic. The postcolonial experience could not be expressed by a Western or Eastern, public or private, polarity or unity, any more than any single political party could represent all the people of the nation.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel: Genre and Ideology in R. K Narayan, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya and Salman Rushdie|url=https://archive.org/details/culturalimperial00afza|url-access=registration|last=Afzal-Khan|first=Fawzia|publisher=Pennsylvania State University Press|year=1993}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book|title=Salman Rushdie|last=Rubinson|first=Gregory J.|work=Fiction of Rushdie, Barnes, Winterson and Carter: Breaking Cultural and Literary Boundaries in the Work of Four Postmodernists.|publisher=McFarland and Company|year=2005|pages=29–76}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book|title=Postcolonial Lack and Aesthetic Promise in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and The Moor's Last Sigh|last=Schultheis|first=Alexandria W.|work=Regenerative Fictions: Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis, and the Nation as Family.|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan|year=2004|location=New York|pages=105–151}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book|title=Salman Rushdie|last1=Eaglestone|first1=Robert|last2=McQuillan|first2=Martin|publisher=Bloomsbury Publishing|year=2013|series=Contemporary Critical Perspectives|location=London}}</ref>

{{Anchor|Chutnification}}Rushdie also coined the word ''chutnification'' in the book to describe the adoption of Indian elements into the English language or culture.<ref name="Krishnamurthy">{{cite web |last1=Krishnamurthy |first1=Sarala |title=The chutnification of English: An examination of the lexis of Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children". |url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/50232193 |accessdate=3 September 2018 |date=3 September 2018}}</ref><ref name="Crane">{{cite book |last1=Crane |first1=Ralph J. |chapter=The Chutnification of History |title=Inventing India |date=1992 |pages=170–189 |doi=10.1057/9780230380080_8 |language=en|isbn=978-1-349-39062-5 }}</ref> A [[chutney]] is a sauce for a dry base, originating from the Indian subcontinent.