Rushdie, Mehta (below) .

New York, Nov. 7: Salman Rushdie has announced he would collaborate with director Deepa Mehta to fulfil a long-held dream of turning his acknowledged masterpiece, Midnight’s Children, into a feature film.

But among directors and producers attending the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival in New York, where the announcement was made, there was one overriding apprehension. As one producer put it to The Telegraph today: “Can such a film be shot on location in India?”

His opinion was: “The film will probably have to be shot outside India.” He recalled that when Mehta attempted to shoot Water in India as part of a trilogy, the project was cleared by the Indian government but the movie was sabotaged by self-styled guardians of Hindu culture.

Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das, who cut their hair in order to portray widows, found that their tresses had regained their original length without the film being made (they may be in the cast of Midnight’s Children).

In 1997, a similar fate befell the BBC which had invested a substantial sum doing pre-production on Midnight’s Children. The project to adapt the novel and make a television serial was pulled.

The film was cleared by the Indian government and a cast even assembled but the authorities withdrew permission after it became concerned about a possible backlash from sections of the minority community.

Rushdie, who had written the script after others had tried and failed to satisfy the author, had the consolation of seeing Midnight’s Children enacted on stage in London.

Others producers and directors say that Midnight’s Children, which has won the Booker Prize and the Booker of Bookers twice, is a work whose time has come in cinematic terms and that it can only be shot on location in India.

Unlike Mehta’s Water, it would look wrong if filmed in Sri Lanka, for Midnight’s Children would require large crowd scenes.

Rushdie’s old script will not do either. The new screenplay will be written by him with Mehta’s help. She will be able to tell him what works cinematically and what does not. The author has in the past been willing to let others leave out sizeable chunks of the story. That the book is known for its magic realism won’t make it easier to arrive at a script.

The two have set an ambitious deadline of releasing the film in 2010. “I am delighted that my friend Deepa Mehta has agreed to make the film of Midnight’s Children,” Rushdie told a news agency. “Her passion for the book, combined with her immense talent as a filmmaker, means that my novel has been placed in the best possible hands. I also look forward to working with her on the screen play.”

Mehta said that in literature, there were only a handful of characters that remained indelible in her mind — “on top of the list is Saleem”.