Midnight's Children

About five years ago I picked up a used copy of 'The Satanic Verses'. I knew the book had created a fuss (actually a fatwa) and I was curious. So on a vacation to Hawaii I read it. And enjoyed it. A couple years later I picked another Salman Rushdie novel, 'Midnight's Children'. And I loved it.
It's a sprawling book (to put it lightly). The idea is simple, a child is born at the precise moment that India becomes an independant nation. His life and his families history strangely mirror the events that happen to his country. This novel details a complex interwoven family tree. It deals with mixes of religions, politics and cuisine. Rushdie's talent for a turn of phrase is nothing short of delightful.
Since then I've read four or five other of his books. Loved them all (except 'Fury'). Recently I decided to reread 'Midnight's Children'. What I didn't realize is that this is the 25th anniversary of it's publication. And I've run across the new introduction. (My personal rule is to skip the intro on a first reading but I find it useful to read it on the second pass.) What I hadn't realized is how much controversy this book had caused. Apparently Rushdie was sued by then Prime Minister Indira Ghandi for a brief passage regarding her relationship with her son. The legal theory that he came up with was novel.

The case never came to court. The law of defamation is highly technical, and to repeat a defamatory rumour is to commit the defamation oneself, so technically we were in the wrong. Mrs Gandhi was not asking for damages, only for the sentence to be removed from future editions of the book. The only defence we had was a high-risk route: we would have had to argue that her actions during the Emergency were so heinous that she could no longer be considered a person of good character, and could therefore not be defamed. In other words, we would have had, in effect, to put her on trial for her misdeeds. But if, in the end, a British court refused to accept that the Prime Minister of India was not a woman of good character, then we would be, not to put too fine a point upon it, royally screwed.

A few weeks later she was assassinated. Very interesting stuff.