Indian widow

The Indian widow is the novel’s unnamed Prime Minister, a ruler whose government treats the Midnight’s Children as a political threat and subjects them to imprisonment and sterilization. Her authority ends with a crushing election defeat, but the damage remains: four hundred and twenty children leave captivity unable to bear the sight of one another, and disperse into the crowds. The ending also exposes a limit to her power. Shiva, whom the narrator calls the traitor and the destroyer of the Midnight’s Children, has fathered children of his own; the Widow’s campaign cannot prevent another generation from coming into being.

Power and the Midnight’s Children

The Widow appears through Saleem’s experience of imprisonment in the “palace of the howling widows.” Her government has confined the children and subjected them to what Saleem calls “snip-snip.” In the cell, he hears the hopeless whispers of four hundred and nineteen prisoners, while he alone speaks aloud to ask what has happened to Major Shiva. The scene makes the children’s isolation tangible: they are together in confinement, but the violence done to them has left them with little but whispered despair.

The Widow’s authority is exercised over bodies as well as political life. Saleem’s question about Shiva receives the answer that the Major has undergone “voluntary vasectomy.” The official-sounding word cannot conceal what has happened to the Midnight’s Children, and Saleem’s subsequent laughter turns on the contradiction between the regime’s claim of control and the consequences it has failed to anticipate.

Election and Release

Late in March 1977, Saleem is unexpectedly released. He emerges blinking in the sunlight, without knowing why he has been freed. Only afterward does he learn that the Prime Minister had called a general election on January 18, the very day the sterilizations ended. The timing connects the fate of the imprisoned children to the political crisis that brought their captor’s rule to an end.

The election ends in the Widow’s crushing defeat. Saleem learns later that files were burned and that the nation’s hopes had been placed in the hands of a leader he describes as an “ancient dotard.” The change of government does not immediately feel like a new dawn to him: the incoming Janata Party includes a leader dependent on a kidney machine, and Saleem suspects he may finally have recovered from the optimism that had once made political change seem redemptive. By the time he is free, he has had more than enough of politics.

The Dispersal

In the gullies of Benares, the four hundred and twenty stand blinking in the sunlight and tumult. They look at one another and see the memory of their gelding in each other’s eyes. Unable to bear that recognition, they mumble farewells and disperse for the last time into the “healing privacy of the crowds.” Their release ends their collective captivity but not the community they had once shared: it survives as a painful memory, while its members lose the possibility of remaining together.

Shiva and the Limits of Control

Shiva is placed under military detention by the new regime but is allowed one visitor: Roshanara Shetty. She reaches his cell by bribery and flirtation, carrying her husband’s enormous German pistol in her handbag, and shoots him through the heart. His death is instantaneous. This act of violence closes Shiva’s story after the Widow has lost power, rather than as a direct consequence of her rule.

Before his death, however, Shiva’s sterilization has not ended his capacity to father children. Remembering tales told by Parvati or Laylah about his philandering and the many children born to women across the country, Saleem imagines a new generation being raised in the nation’s boudoirs and hovels. Shiva has been both the destroyer of the Midnight’s Children and, under another aspect of his name, a procreator. The Widow’s regime has inflicted irreversible harm on the children it imprisoned, but the children it sought to control have not been the last generation. Saleem’s closing judgment—that every Widow forgets something important—makes that surviving future the measure of her failure.