Midnight's Children

[Robin Kornman]

I just read Anita Desai's introduction to _Midnight's Children_ by Salman
Rushdie. She associates his book with post-colonialism as if it were a
discrete political and cultural movement. And she sees his book as an
example of magical realism. She makes it sound, if I am reading her
correctly, that his style owes much to Gabriel Marquez and Gunter Grass. But
I see it as going back much further than that--- to the modernists, such as
Joyce and to twentieth century fantastic fiction at large, such as Nabokov's
early novels. 
    
It seems to me that she has unfairly appropriated the heterogeneity and
polyglotism of Anglo-Indian literature for post-modernist political
discourse when it is simply consistent with literary movements which have
been welling up since WWI. 

Does anybody have any ideas about this?
Robin Kornman