The reel story of Midnight’s Children seeing the light of day

Not all stories in controversial author Salman Rushdie’s life have had a happy ending. But one story closely connected to Sri Lanka did have a happy ending, after a long drawn out struggle to have his Booker Prize-winning novel , “Midnight’s Children” made into a movie became a reality late last year.

The movie which was shot in Sri Lanka, directed by well known Canadian/Indian Director Deepa Mehta, almost did not happen, reveals Rushdie in his recently released memoir. The Indian born British author who lived in hiding for almost ten years after a ‘fatwa” (a death sentence) was issued against him in 1989 by Iran’s religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini for writing a novel called the “Satanic Verses”, in his memoir details why it took nearly 14 years for Midnight’s Children to be made into a movie and how changes in the Sri Lankan political set up led to the successful conclusion of the movie project in 2012.

Salman Rushdie calls his memoir ‘Joseph Anton’, the name he coined using the first names of two of his favourite writers, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov as his alias as he lived under police protection. He devotes many pages to detail his personal struggle of living under the shadow of a death sentence as well as about his early days in the city of his birth Mumbai. In addition it reveals the little known details on the behind-thescenes drama enacted in Sri Lanka over the decision to allow Midnight’s Children to be filmed here.

It was in 1997 that the BBC had set its sights on adapting Midnight’s Children as a five part TV series. The book which tells the story of two children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947--the moment that India gained independence from British rule, but are switched at birth had won Rushdie the Booker Prize in 1981. However it ruffled quite a few feathers in India for its portrayal of the years of emergency rule during the tenure of the former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the early 1970s but won great international acclaim.

By the time the BBC decided to make Midnight’s Children into a TV series, Salman Rushdie had released his most controversial book Satanic Verses and he was embroiled in more trouble than he had bargained for. Satanic Verses was banned in many countries, bookshops selling it were attacked in other nations and regular street protests were held calling for Rushdie’s death on charges of blasphemy.

However, when Sri Lankan authorities were approached by the BBC to allow them to film Midnight’s Children here, they were ‘sounding positive’ but, ‘ they were making it a condition for giving permission that he (Rushdie) does not attend the shoot.’ The producers were given writ- ten permission from the then President Chandrika Kumaratunga herself but as Rushdie soon learnt it was “another in the long series of false dawns,” for “Midnight’s Children” in its transition from book to movie form. The euphoria over the permission granted was short lived as, Kumaratunga, under pressure from a group of Sri Lankan Muslim MPs in her government, revoked her decision.

Rushdie quotes from a letter that President Kumaratunga personally wrote to the BBC producer of the project Chris Hall apologising for the cancellation. The letter said, “I have read the book titled Midnight’s Children and liked it very much. I would have liked to see it as a film. However sometimes political considerations outweigh perhaps worthier causes and I hope there would soon arrive a time in Sri Lanka when people would begin once again to think rationally and when the true and deeper values of life will prevail. Then my country will once again become the “Serendib” it deserves to be.”

From there on, all projects involving Midnight’s Children were in limbo for 11 years. The turning point came in the autumn of 2008, when Rushdie was in Toronto promoting his novel ‘The Enchantress of Florence’ and was having dinner one evening with his friend the film director Deepa Mehta.

Rushdie recalls the conversation that ensued and how Deepa Mehta got Rushdie’s consent to adapt Midnight’s Children into a movie. “The book of yours I‘d really like to film,” Deepa said, “is Midnight’s Children. Who has the rights?” “As it happens,” he replied, “I do.” “Then can I do it?” she asked. “Yes,”’ he said.

Together Mehta and Rushdie spent the next two years on raising money and writing a screenplay for the movie version. The same year, the book won Rushdie the Best of Booker, a one-off celebratory award to mark the 40th anniversary of the Booker Prize.

“In January 2011, Midnight’s Children, now a feature film, not a TV serial returned to India and Sri Lanka to film, and thirty years after the publication of the book, fourteen years after the collapse of the BBC TV serial, the film was finally made. On the day the principal photography was completed in Colombo he (Rushdie) felt as if a curse had been lifted. Another mountain had been climbed,” Rushdie writes.

There were few hiccups this time around too. Deepa Mehta’s production team had encountered some uncertain days with permission to film in Sri Lanka revoked for two days due to pressure from Iran. Rushdie feared that once again that the letter of permission from the incumbent President (Mahinda Rajapaksa) would be revoked. “However this time the outcome was different. The President told Deepa, “Go ahead and finish your film.”

The rest, as they say, is history.