Salman Rushdie's 'Imaginary Homelands'

 Salman Rushdie's 'Imaginary Homelands'

I. World Behind the Text

·         Indo-Anglican Seminar on Indian Writing in English at London in 1982 during Festival of India.

·         It was attended by Indo-Anglican writers: Nirad Chaudhari, Anita Desai, Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand

·         During the time period 1982  

o   India – Indira Gandhi’s rule

o   Pakistan – Zia Regime & Execution of Ali Bhutto

o   Britain – Thatcher Revolution

o   USA – Ronald Reegan & cold war

·         Emergence of new possibilities, uncertainties & dangers

·         In such circumstances Salman Rushdie writes Midnight’s Children in 1981.

II. World in the Text:

·         The text is a collection of 75 essays written from 1981 to 1992.

·         It is an essay that propounds an anti-essentialist view of place.

·         This essay was written after the publication of the Midnight’s Children. This was well responded in western countries but in Indian it was rejected.

·         It is written out of pain to go to the roots of one’s origin. The desire of belonging to somewhere, it is desire of an individual to claim a country as his/her homeland. 

·         Text is divided into 12 sections comprising 6 major sections:

I           – Work roughly grouped around Midnight’s Children

II         – Politics of India and Pakistan

III        – Indo-Anglican Literature

IV        – Movies and Television – Gandhi movie

V         – 5 pieces of expressions & experiences of Indian migrants to Britain

VI        – 3 pieces of Thatcher Revolution: Margaret Thatcher's policies as British prime

minister changed many aspects of British life, and were collectively called Thatcherism

VII-XI – Writers of Africa, Britain, Europe, South America & USA

XII      – Reflection on Satanic Verse

III. Textual Analysis

Introduction

·         'Imaginary Homelands' is the title essay of Salman Rushdie's collection of total 75 essays.

·         In this piece, Rushdie describes the situation of those writers who are born in one place and choosing to live elsewhere, fighting to get back or to get away from their homelands.

·         According to Rushdie: "exiles (deported) or emigrants (migrant) or expatriates (voluntarily absent from home), are haunted (troubled) by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back.

ü  The seed of the imaginary homelands were sown in the indo-Anglican seminar at London. Mighty pens of Indian English writing were present.

ü  Some of the participants described Indian culture not as a rich mixture of all inclusive tradition but an exclusive one (Sanskrit sloga), though Christian, Parasi, Muslim, Sikh participants were present.

ü  The second day, an eminent Indian academician delivered a paper on Indian culture that utterly ignored all minority communities.

Writer and the Homeland

·         Rushdie claims that any writer, who writes about his homeland from the outside, must necessarily “deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost".

·         Rushdie calls the migrants the "translated men" (having been borne across the world, we are translated men, there may not be originality).

·         Rushdie raises the point that duality in an author's identity: a dual sense of identity from both culture – British and Indian, a geographical and national identity, gender and race. He says: "Our identity is at once plural and partial.” Sometimes we feel that we belong to two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.

Description of India in Midnight’s Children

·         “Politician and writers are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own image; they fight for the same territory and the fiction is one way of denying the official, politician’s version of truth.”

·         Some claim that the descriptive of India that Midnight’s Children attempts, is very pessimistic. But Rushdie denied that the book is nihilistic (lack of meaning). The form of the story is optimistic.

·         He tried to set up a tension in the text, a paradoxical opposition between form and content of the narrative. He makes use of memory, magic realism and telepathy (thought transference) which take us back to the ancient India.

Diaspora:

·         ‘Imaginary Homelands’ is all about feeling to belonging nowhere.  The feeling of insecurity always remains there in his mind which got reflected in his work.

·         He is a member of marginalized group, member of Indian Muslim family in Bombay, a Pakistani, and at present a British Asian. Thus, there is not a fix root which he can claim.

·         In creating a story like “Midnight's Children” he is in a way trying to establish a relationship that he has a land somewhere he belongs to. As he writes “I too had a city and a history to reclaim”.

·         Diasporic writers could not claim their belonging to the country and they could not completely mingle with the new one, as the memory of the past doesn’t allow him/her to accept it. They held up between two cultures, two languages, two nations, and lost identity.

·         He declares that to live in British society is to face everyday problems:

o   What does it mean to be an Indian outside India?

o   How can culture be preserved without become ossified (fixed)?

o   How to turn away our self which one goes to another country?

o   How are we to live in the world?

Conclusion

In the conclusion of the essay, Rushdie compares a writer within himself with a dog from the novel The Dean’s December. Protagonist Dean imagines dogs’ barking outside. The barking of the dog symbolizes the protest against his limit of experience.  “for god’s sake,” the dog is saying, “open the universe a little more”. It is the limitation of the diasporic writers that they were protesting, what they really want is to be accepted as a human being. They need little more freedom of expression, and we have to accept them as they belong to somewhere.

Salman Rushdie's 'Imaginary Homelands' portrays a migrant's inner conflict between his strong urge to reclaim his homeland and his inability to capture its true essence. This conflict leads the author to create a number of "imaginary" homelands in his fictions such as, Indias of the mind. These imaginary homelands capture the essence of reality as seen through the eyes of characters who, like their author, face the challenge of straddling two cultures.