Midnight's Children Trivia
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50 free Midnight's Children trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Midnight's Children trivia quiz covers Salman Rushdie's 1981 novel from its first page to its afterlife. You will meet Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947 with a telepathic gift and a perpetually dripping nose, his nemesis Shiva of the Knees, Parvati-the-witch, the midwife who swapped two babies, and the Widow whose Emergency ends the children's powers. The questions move from the plot and the sprawling cast to the book's prizes, the Indira Gandhi lawsuit, the word chutnification, the aborted BBC series and the 2012 Deepa Mehta film shot secretly in Colombo with a script Rushdie sold for one dollar. The early questions are friendly to anyone who has read the opening chapters; the late ones reward readers who remember the boatman Tai, the CUTIA dog unit and a 512-year-old courtesan. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which later novel by the author of Midnight's Children brought a fatwa calling for his death?
The Satanic Verses
The Satanic Verses appeared in 1988, and its fallout reached this book too: a BBC series of Midnight's Children collapsed in 1997 when the country chosen for the shoot withdrew permission after protests.
Q 02Which leader writes to the newborn Saleem that his life will be 'the mirror of our own'?
Jawaharlal Nehru
Jawaharlal Nehru's letter, addressed 'Dear Baby Saleem', promises that the nation will watch over his life 'with the closest attention', a promise the boy grows up taking all too literally.
Q 03At what exact moment is Saleem Sinai born?
Midnight, 15 August 1947
Midnight, 15 August 1947 is the instant of India's independence, so his photograph makes the front page of the Times of India and he grows up, in his own phrase, handcuffed to history.
Q 04What part-time job paid Rushdie's bills while he wrote Midnight's Children?
Advertising copywriter
Advertising copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather, where his slogans included 'Naughty but nice' for cream cakes; he was broke, and the long, strange novel in his head was going to take years.
Q 05Saleem's race to finish his tale before his body fails echoes which story collection?
The Arabian Nights
The Arabian Nights gives the novel more than its frame: Saleem says he must work 'faster than Scheherazade', and its 1,001 gifted children take their number from her thousand and one nights.
Q 06What special prize did Midnight's Children win in 1993, for the Booker Prize's 25th anniversary?
Booker of Bookers
Booker of Bookers was a judges' choice; when the prize turned 40 in 2008 the public was asked to vote for the Best of the Booker, and picked the same novel again.
Q 07During which hour are all the gifted children of Midnight's Children born?
Midnight to 1 a.m.
Midnight to 1 a.m. on the first day of independence is the window, and timing decides everything: the nearer to the stroke of twelve a child arrived, the stronger the gift.
Q 08What special power does Saleem use to gather the other children?
Telepathy
Telepathy turns his head into the meeting hall of a Midnight Children's Conference, which soon splits along the same lines of language, religion and class as the country outside.
Q 09Which body-part nickname does Saleem's great rival Shiva carry?
Of the Knees
Of the Knees, because his are abnormally large and he fights with them; before the boys were born a seer had foretold them both in a chant of 'knees and a nose, a nose and knees'.
Q 10What is the nickname of the girl from the conjurers' ghetto who befriends Saleem?
The witch
The witch is no stage name: among the ghetto's illusionists Parvati alone can work real magic, and she uses it to smuggle Saleem home from Bangladesh in a basket of invisibility.
Q 11In which city, Rushdie's own birthplace, is Saleem Sinai born and raised?
Bombay
Bombay was the city Rushdie was trying to get back: he called the novel an attempt to reclaim his Indian origins from a flat in north London, and it is full of images of land reclaimed from the sea.
Q 12During the 1971 Bangladesh war, in which jungle does the amnesiac Saleem recover his memory?
The Sundarbans
The Sundarbans swallow him and three boy soldiers for months, until a blind, translucent snake bites his heel and its venom jolts him back into his past, which pours out of him in stories.
Q 13Which real crisis in India's history ends the powers of the midnight's children?
The Emergency
Q 21Which company staged a theatrical adaptation of Midnight's Children in 2003?
The Royal Shakespeare Company
The Royal Shakespeare Company succeeded where television had failed: a BBC series had collapsed a few years earlier, and Rushdie co-wrote the stage script, which went on from London to New York.
Q 22Who directed the 2012 film of Midnight's Children?
Deepa Mehta
Deepa Mehta had been daydreaming of filming a different Rushdie novel when the two friends agreed to work together, then heard herself say the only book she wanted was Midnight's Children.
Q 23Which actor played the adult Saleem in the 2012 film of Midnight's Children?
Satya Bhabha
The Emergency of 1975 to 1977 is when the novel has the children rounded up and sterilised, a grim echo of the mass vasectomy campaign of those years.
Q 14Which German novel is Midnight's Children often compared to for fusing a personal with a national story?
The Tin Drum
The Tin Drum has a narrator, Oskar Matzerath, whose stunted body carries Germany's history much as Saleem's carries India's; Rushdie names its author, Günter Grass, among his early influences.
Q 15Which word does Saleem coin in Midnight's Children for what his chapters do to history?
Chutnification
Chutnification is his name for what the novel itself does, preserving the past in thirty chapters, a jar apiece; critics have since borrowed the word for English spiced with Indian languages.
Q 16To whom does Saleem recount his life story aloud?
Padma
Padma is no passive audience: she scolds, sulks and keeps bullying him back to the plot, complaining that at his rate he will be two hundred before he gets to his own birth.
Q 17Midnight's Children is a landmark of which literary style?
Magic realism
Magic realism is the usual label for it; in India, Rushdie says, the novel was pirated so widely that the pirates sent him greeting cards, which he called the ultimate compliment.
Q 18Where did Midnight's Children finish in the BBC's 2003 Big Read poll of the nation's best-loved novels?
100th
100th, the last place in the published top hundred and one spot behind The Princess Diaries; the public's favourite was The Lord of the Rings.
Q 19What does Saleem's rival Shiva, raised in the slums, grow up to become?
A decorated war hero
A decorated war hero: the boy with a gift for violence rises to major in the Indian army, and it is he, not Saleem, who fathers the child Saleem brings up as his son.
Q 20To whom is Midnight's Children dedicated, with the joke that he was 'born in the afternoon'?
Rushdie's son
Rushdie's son, Zafar, was born while the book about a midnight birth was being written, hence the dedication's joke that he arrived 'contrary to all expectations'; a general's son in the novel shares his name.
Satya Bhabha, until then seen in a small part in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, won the role after a worldwide search; Bollywood star Imran Khan had been the first name considered.
Q 24Which part did Rushdie himself perform in the 2012 film of Midnight's Children?
The narrator
The narrator: Rushdie voices the grown Saleem looking back on his life, in a film he also wrote, cutting his own 600-page novel down to a feature script.
Q 25In which city was the 2012 film of Midnight's Children secretly shot?
Colombo
Colombo kept the shoot away from protesters in both countries where the story is set, and its century-old streets had survived better than those of the Indian city they stood in for.
Q 26Which country's complaint briefly halted the secret shoot of the Midnight's Children film?
Iran
Iran, whose leader had issued the fatwa against Rushdie in 1989, made its displeasure known and the crew was told to stop; the film-makers appealed to the host country's president, who let them carry on.
Q 27Which deliberately bland working title kept the shoot of the Midnight's Children film quiet?
Winds of Change
Winds of Change worked as cover: an Indian newspaper reported one of the cast signing for a film of that name, with no word of Rushdie's novel; the director's own verdict on the title was 'very Hallmark'.
Q 28At which festival did the film of Midnight's Children have its gala premiere on 9 September 2012?
Toronto
Toronto was a home crowd, since the film is a Canadian production; it went on to eight nominations, Best Picture among them, at the first Canadian Screen Awards and won two.
Q 29Which streaming service announced a series of Midnight's Children in 2018, then abandoned it?
Netflix
Netflix announced the series in June 2018, but by the end of 2019 it was dead: showrunner Vishal Bhardwaj wanted a bigger special-effects budget than the company would agree to.
Q 30Who was to star in the BBC's aborted 1990s mini-series of Midnight's Children?
Rahul Bose
Rahul Bose did reach the screen in the story some fifteen years later, though not in the lead: in the 2012 film he plays General Zulfikar, Saleem's uncle by marriage.