Welcome Readers,
'Imaginary Homelands' by Salman Rushdie is a collection of essays and criticism - an important record of one writer's intellectual and personal odyssey. Salman Rushdie wrote these essays between 1981 to 1992. It includes the literature of the received masters and of Rushdie’s contemporaries; the politics of colonialism and the ironies of culture; film, politicians, the Labour Party, religious fundamentalism in America, racial prejudice; and the preciousness of the imagination and of free expression.
It is a socio-cultural commentary about what was happening in that era because it is basically a collection of all the articles which were written and published in the newspaper.
The Postcolonial Studies course deals with these essays from "Imaginary Homelands" -
1. Imaginary Homelands
2. 'Commonwealth Literature' does not exist
3. Attenborough's Gandhi
4. Hobson-Jobson
5. New Empire within Britain
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SALMAN RUSHDIE was born in Bombay in 1947. He is the author of five novels, Grimus, Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories. He is also the author of The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey and two documentary films, The Riddle of Midnight and The Painter and the Pest. He has won a number of literary prizes, including the Booker Prize in 1981 and the Whitbread Prize for the best novel of 1988.
1. Imaginary Homelands
In this essay, Rushdie is talking about the notion and nature of diasporic experience. It tries to answer some pertinent questions like -
What constitutes memory and a home?
"The past is a foreign country."
- L. P. Hartley
The experience in Rushdie's words can be framed as "it reminds me that it’s my present that is foreign, and that the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time".
The idea of imaginary and the idea of homeland is in sense observes precisely that how is it that one develops an approach with this conflicting idea and Rushdie finally settles to the idea of home and reality in his essay. Reality is the place where you are living. One's mind, culture and memory are occupied in a homeland. All Indians in a white environment constitutes a cultural memory.
At the beginning of the essay, Rushdie is discussing an anecdote of a photograph of Bombay of his home of the time when he left. He is talking about the lost home and a place which is no longer his home. When Rushdie goes back to the directory and locates the place, it has been sold off. Hence, this experience says that a diasporic imagination is such that one has a vision in one's head fails to connect the reality.
This reality is far different and somewhere this cause is termed as an approach-avoidance conflict in a diasporic dictionary.
Rushdie defines the migrant identity and the themes of Indian Diaspora in “Imaginary Homelands”. It is a chronicle containing ironical implications of culture, film, politicians, the Labour Party, religious fundamentalism in America, racial situation and the true value of the imagination and of free expression.
So in this kind of diasporic experience, one is ceased completely by the memory and wishes to bring back the past which is thoroughly impossible and hence the conflict arises that what one saw and thought is not meeting the experience. Rushdie quotes-
'It was precisely the partial nature of
these memories, their fragmentation, that made them so evocative for me."
(Rushdie)
It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to be self-evidently true; but I suggest that the writer who is out-of-country and even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of his being ‘elsewhere’. This may enable him to speak properly and concretely on a subject of universal significance and appeal.
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2. 'Commonwealth Literature' does not exist
Generally, Commonwealth literature highlights the similarities that exist among different works of literature in English. It is based on the distinctions of centre and periphery. Commonwealth literature was something that represented the amalgamation of newly independent countries from the British Empire. The whole range of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East beginning to opt for independence. And the British had to surrender due to the popular unrest, nationalism and popular uprising.
The Commonwealth of Nations is a body comprised of fifty-three member states that were previously territories of the British Empire. It was formally constituted by the London Declaration in 1949 and has England’s Queen Elizabeth II as its head. The Commonwealth was, primarily, a way to define the relationship of England with its colonies that had gained their independence from the British Empire in the twentieth century. It survives largely as a vestige of colonialism. According to political writer James Astill, as quoted in the BBC article “What Is the Relevance of the Commonwealth Today,” the Commonwealth today is “a large and somewhat anomalous club, which devotes most of its energies to maintaining its strange existence.”
It was believed that all those countries who were the colonies of the British and were formerly colonised have a shared experience and as Britain wanted to perpetuate the idea of dominance, invented the new genre of the commonwealth literature. Salman Rushdie begins his essay-
"When I was invited to speak at the 1983 English Studies Seminar in
Cambridge, the lady from the British Council offered me a few words of reassurance. ‘It’s all right,’ I was told,’ ‘for the purposes of our seminar. English studies are taken to include Commonwealth literature.’ At all other times, one was forced to conclude, these two would be kept strictly apart, like squabbling children, or sexually incompatible pandas, or, perhaps, like unstable, fissile materials whose union might cause explosions."
3. Attenborough's Gandhi
Salman Rushdie focuses on the view of “Attenborough’s Gandhi “- a film based on the biography of Mahatma Gandhi. The essay starts with the word ‘Deification’, and Rushdie further said that deification is an Indian disease-
and in India, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, great soul, little father, has been raised higher than anyone in the pantheon of latter-day gods.
‘But,’ I was asked more than once in India recently, ‘why should an Englishman want to deify Gandhi?’ And why, one might add, should the American Academy wish to help him, by presenting, like votive offerings in a temple, eight glittering statuettes to a film that is inadequate as biography, appalling as history, and often laughably crude as a film?
What it is, is an incredibly expensive movie about a man who was dedicated to the small scale and to asceticism.
Thank you
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