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.[8]
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.[9][10][11][12]
Rushdie also coined the word chutnification in the book to describe the adoption of Indian elements into the English language or culture.[13][14] A chutney is a sauce for a dry base, originating from the Indian subcontinent.
