The year 2012 saw the release of two films adapted from Booker Prize-winning novels: Midnight's Children by the British Indian writer Salman Rushdie, published in 1981, the film version of which was directed by Deepa Mehta; and Life of Pi by the Québécois writer Yann Martel, published in 2001, the adaptation directed by Ang Lee. In addition to their place in internationally celebrated literature as Booker Prize winners and their focus on Indian characters and Indian history in the twentieth century, including the Emergency as a key event, the two novels also share an engagement with magic realism. This chapter examines how these two films adapt the magic realist elements of their source texts, discussing the elements from the novels that have and have not been visually presented, and the implications of what the audience is made to see. The visual content of the films conceals the locations of production: both films are transnational, with Life of Pi having been made all over the world. Indeed, Lee's film (and its source text) itself gestures to the economics of transnational cultural production. In different ways, both films incorporate the figure of the author: Life of Pi as part of its fictional narrative; and Midnight's Children via Rushdie's voice-over narration. Although both films engage in the representation of India, only Life of Pi, whose Indian setting constitutes a far briefer proportion of the narrative, was (partly) filmed in that country, a representation complicated by a transnational production that configures what is visible to the audience. Given the elements of magic realism, then, both films engage questions of visibility and veracity at the level of production as well as narrative. That production should be transnational, with Mehta (like Rushdie) and Lee part of the Indian and Taiwanese diasporas, respectively, inflects what is visible in particular ways.

Midnight's Children

Given the status of Midnight's Children, particularly in the postcolonial literary canon and the late twentieth-century literary canon more generally (the novel not just winning the Booker Prize, in fact, but also the ‘Booker of Bookers’ in 1993), it is perhaps unavoidable that there would be a considerable weight of expectation accompanying the film adaptation. Indeed, as Rushdie has noted, Midnight's Children's Booker success immediately prompted proposals to adapt the novel, first for television, then as a film; these plans not materialising, more proposals ensued once the novel won the Booker of Bookers.