1 chapter 1 Midnight’s Orphans, or the Postcolonial and the Vernacular I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic.—But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. —Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Minute on Indian Education” ( 1835) 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 non-fiction—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 still burgeoning, ‘Indo-Anglian’ literature rep- resents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books. The true Indian literature of the first postcolonial half-century has been made in the language the British left behind”