Post-colonial writers like Rushdie use history as a subject for their fiction. Reclaiming history and retaining certain memories are important for the post-colonial condition. In fact, it is very difficult to draw a line of demarcation between reality and imagination. In Midnight's Children, Saleem Sinai, the protagonist, claims he is central to India and India's history. But the novel is not merely about his story. Saleem's version of hi(story) comes through his own views which he thinks to be authentic. Rushdie depicts an India that is completely diverse where there is no coherent center. India is multiple, fluid and complex and can only be imagined through fragmented memories and histories. The open-endedness of historical `truth' is the central issue of the novel where the reader is taken to see a nation that is partly brought into existence through a collective fantasy/imagination. This paper tries to explore how Rushdie in his landmark work, by blending fiction, politics, magic and memory, has taken the reader to a world of imagination where reality appears to be fiction and vice versa.

History is a favorite theme for post-colonial writers who often find a need to negotiate, understand, and recover from their traumatic past and in order to depict their concerns, these writers usually refer to the idea of a nation. Reclaiming history and retaining certain memories are important for the post-colonial condition. Post-colonial writers like Rushdie do this task by taking their readers to a world of make-believe or of imagination, where (hi)story appears to be true. The narrative is often like our thoughtsleaky, uncertain and digressive, neither organized linearly, nor do they claim any originality.

Benedict Anderson's thesis that nations are `imagined' points out that literature is at the center of `imagining' (1991). Novel is a literary form for `re-presenting' a kind of imagined community that eventually becomes the nation and it is a process of imagination. This does not mean real place and people do not exist. It only means that we can `connect' to people from the unexplored parts of the territory only by imagining them. Rushdie has done this task in his Booker winning novel Midnight's Children by a masterful blending of fiction, politics, magic and memory.

English Studies Journal, Midnights Children, Supernatural Elements, Post-colonial Writers, British Colonial Rule, Monolithic Notion, Sterilization Campaigns, Magical Elements, Magic Realism, Latin American Literature, European American Literature, Religious Myth, Supernatural Invasion.