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Kamla Bhasin: Joy at Sunset-by Radhika Coomaraswamy Kamla in brushstrokes Source:Dailynews Kamla Bhasin had a close relationship with Radhika Coomaraswamy, Sunila Abeysekara, Kumari Jayawardena and Savithri Goonesekere Kamla Bhasin always called herself one of India’s ‘Midnight Generation’, a reference to those born at the time of India’s Independence. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s invocation of freedom at midnight later found its way into Salman Rushdie’s award-winning novel Midnight’s Children. Told from the standpoint of Saleem Sinai, born precisely at the time the clock struck midnight, the novel is about a generation that lived to see India as they knew it disintegrate before their eyes. Considered a seminal example of magical realism in South Asian English-language writing, the novel takes us through the violence, the contortions, the messiness, and the heartbreak that is independent India. Written at the time of the Emergency in the 1970s, it would, in the end, tell only ...