Director Deepa Mehta and British author Salman Rushdie will collaborate on an adaptation of Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children.

Speaking to Playback Daily, Mehta’s longtime producing partner David Hamilton said the duo will start working on the script in March, with an April deadline. Hamilton said he is in discussions with two studios, both of which have expressed interest in the story and the pairing of masters of film and literature.

Published in 1981, Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize for that year and shot Rushdie to the forefront of the international literary establishment. The book has since earned the ‘Booker of Bookers’ prize, as part of the award’s 40th anniversary celebration.

The 650-page story defies summarizing. Born at the stroke of midnight on Aug. 15, 1947, at the precise moment of India’s independence, Saleem Sinai grows up believing he is the twin of the nation itself. Then he discovers he has telepathic powers that link him to 1,000 other ‘midnight’s children’, born like him in the first hour of independence. Saleem is convinced his biography is India’s history and begins to feel responsible or take credit for every disaster and triumph in the sub-continent.

Highly regarded for its dense and allegorical prose, and compared with such iconic titles as James Joyce’s Ulysses and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the text is equally feared as film-proof, while the content might cause concern in less-tolerant circles of the world’s Hindu and Muslim communities — a possibility given the author’s infamy. Rushdie was marked for death by Iran’s religious leaders for the perceived blasphemy of a later novel, The Satanic Verses.

Rushdie wrote a television adaptation of Midnight’s Children in the 1990s that was to be filmed in Sri Lanka, but the production was shut down by the local government. Mehta experienced her own setbacks with her original production of Water. The Indian locations and sets were sacked by local zealots, while the production was harassed by spurious legal claims. Ironically, it was in Sri Lanka where she successfully completed a second production of Water.

Asked how the collaboration came about, Hamilton said he and Mehta were at a dinner with Rushdie in Toronto when the director and author shared the above experiences. ‘They realized they had a lot in common.’

Still, Hamilton played down the political and social issues. ‘It’s a story about an individual growing up and, reflected in his maturing, is the maturing of the nation… The book ends at a point a long time ago. So audiences will look on it as historical.’

Regardless of local reaction, another challenge will be finding locations that can double for the lost Bombay of decades past. ‘Things have changed dramatically,’ he said.

Hamilton predicted a 2010 start date for production, given Hamilton-Mehta Productions’ commitment to the Kamagata Maru project with the working title Exclusion. He expects to start shooting that project in 2009.

As to the level of commitment to Midnight’s Children from the unnamed studios, he said, ‘They will have to see the screenplay. They will want to see how we can make an epic book into a two-hour film.’ As for a projected budget, he added, ‘I’ll have to read the script, too.’

He said two of Mehta’s on-screen collaborators have signed on for roles, Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das, both of whom appeared in Mehta’s 1996 film Fire and 1998’s Earth. As well, Rushdie plans to take a small role as a fortune teller.

The announcement was made at a press conference in New York on Wednesday following the premiere of Mehta’s latest film, Heaven on Earth, the previous night as part of the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival.