I find Midnight’s Children (and Rushdie’s writing overall) to be nothing but a joyous and generous admission of the important role played by the literary legacies of previous authors. And he makes this quite blatant. Trying to ascertain the value of his work in terms of originality is in a way undermining what he is trying to do: he’s reassessing Indian colonial and postcolonial history in a way nobody had done before. The elements borrowed from previous writers (Grass, Kafka, Forster, Kipling, Marquez) are all there, but despite his willing engagement with previous texts, he’s ultimately doing his own thing.

Perhaps the key to appreciating Rushdie is to recognise that, beyond his sources, he has many things to say about his chosen topics. In Midnight’s Children, Saleem is a Muslim, although his constantly debated parenthood links him to Hinduism and Christianity. (This is in itself a deliberate attempt at portraying the religious complexities of the country.) But Saleem self-identifies as Muslim, and is therefore part of a cultural minority in India, which is key to his character. The fact that you find the Hindu and Muslim faiths interchangeable possibly means (and I apologise in advance for making a strong point here) that you haven’t engaged that much with the content of Rushdie’s novel and have remained in the surface of form.