Critical Analysis on" Imaginary Homelands"- Salman Rushdie

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Name:-ParmarMilankumar L.

Roll. No.:- 16

Enrollment no:- 14101026

Subject:- Post-colonial Literature

Topic:- Critical Analysis on 'Imaginary Homelands' by Salman Rushdie

Submitted to:- Dr. Dilip Barad

                        Department of English,

                        M.K.B.U. Bhavnagar.

INTRODUCTION-:

Salman Rushdie is the most controversial writer among Indian writing in English. His book published under the title “Imaginary Homeland” is the collection of the essay written between 1981 and 1992. All the essays are based on Salman Rushdie’s experience of the contemporary time scenario. This book is the collection of the controversial issues of the decade. In those days Indira Gandhi was the prime minister of India.

            “This book is an incomplete, personal view of the interregnum of 1980s, not all of whose symptoms it has to be said, were morbid.” (introduction-1) It clearly says that all are his personal views that may be are may not be completely right, according to him it was a decade, what Gramsci has said “the old was dying and yet new could not be born.” (Rushdie, 1992)

            His first glorious work was ‘Midnight’s Children’, it was for the first-time people liked his book, before that he had published ‘Grimus’. Then in the year 1988 he published his most controversial work ‘Satanic Verses’.

            The seed of the imaginary homelands were sawn in the Indo-Anglian seminar at London, where mighty pens of Indian English writing were present. Rushdie was excited to listen to them but soon he realized that some of the participants’ “the desire to describe Indian culture-which I had always thought of rich mixture of tradition-in exclusive, and excluding, Hindu terms” (2.pg)

In this session one of the novelist whose name Rushdie did not revealed, begun his contribution by reciting a Sanskrit Shloka, and then, instead of translating the verse he declared.

“Every educated Indian will understand what I have just said”. It is stupid way in the room were Indian writers and scholar coming from conceivable backgrounds, like Christian, Parasi, Muslim, Sikh. None of them rose in Sanskrit tradition and they were reasonably educated. The question surrounded his minds were

-what were we being told?

-we aren’t Indian’?

The second day, an eminent Indian academic delivered a paper on Indian culture that utterly ignored all minority communities, and he presented “then characterization of Muslim culture as imperialist and inauthentic, this made him write a book, in order to search for his ‘existence. For him the conference was a bitter experience which was pricking him like a thorn.’(2.pg).

The book ‘Imaginary Homelands’ divided into six sections. They are.

1) Midnight’s children.

2) Politics of India and Pakistan.

3) Indo-Anglian literature.

4) Movie and Television.

5) Experience of migrants, -Indian migrants to Britain.

6) Thatcher/ flout election –question of Palestine

“IMAGINARY HOMELANDS”

This essay was written after the publication of the Midnight’s Children. This never was well responded in western countries but, in Indian it was rejected by Indians, and it was a request from a diasporic writer to the country of his origin to accept him.

It is written out of anguish to go to the roots of one’s origin. The desire of belonging to somewhere, it is the desire of an individual to claim a country as his/her homeland.  So, let’s analyze the essay in detail.

Problems with ‘Midnight’s Children’

Rushdie starts his essay with a photograph which was taken in 1946 before his birth in India. This photo was an inspiration for the novel ‘Midnight’s Children’. When he was writing ‘Midnight’s Children’ very far from India, it is India from macrocosm view. He says. “it may be that writers in position exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss. The physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will in short create fiction, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homeland, India in mind.” (10.pg) Further he declares that

“What he was actually doing was a novel of memory and about the memory.” Thus, it is India of his memory and of his perspective. There he presented his version of India. Presentation of the dark picture and political matter in ‘Midnight’s Children’ drags the work in political controversy. And as an answer to that he gives explanation.

“I wasn’t trying to write about the emergency in the same way as I wrote about event halt a century earliest. I felt it would be dishonest to pretend, when writing about the day before yesterday, that it was possible to see the whole picture. I showed certain blobs and slabs of the scene.”

            Further he takes support of playwright for the justification of his act, he writes, the description itself is a political act, and for him “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 novel is one way of denying the official, politicians’ version of truth.”  (14.pg)

Another point which increases the complexity of the controversy is that the description of India that Midnight’s Children attempts, is very pessimistic. Thus, it is critical in India for its despairing tone. But he denied that the book is not despairing or nihilistic, rather he would say “he tried to set up a tension in the text, a paradoxical opposition between form and content of the narrative. The story of Saleem does indeed lead him to despair. But the story is told in a manner designed to echo, as closely my abilities allowed, the nonstop regeneration. The form of the story is optimistic.

In response to the argument that he had portrayed India in bad light. He gives excellent answer to the riddle. He said ‘It is rater a postcolonial (rejecting the British notion of writing) voice he tried to claim by this work but in country like India these things remain unnoticed. They only like “Shining India”. The form and the manner of telling story is itself rejecting the traditional way of writing novel. It is the Indian talent rejecting the colonial way and norms of writing, as he makes use of memory which itself is not reliable, the use of magic realism which give a new spark to story, the use of telepathy it takes us back to the ancient India.

In concluding his view on the ‘Midnight’s Children’, he gives answer to the last question which I like the most. The question is for whom he is writing? he says, “I never had reader in mind. I have ideas, people, events, shapes, and I write for those things, and hope completed work will be interest of others. (20.pg) he clearly says about ‘Midnight’s Children’ for whom it was written. He felt that if its sub-continental rejected the work, he should have thought it as a failure, no matter what the reaction in the west. So, it becomes clear that he is writing for the people who feel the part of the things he had write about, but also for everyone else up to whom his work can reach.

Diaspora -:

‘Imaginary Homelands’ is all about the feeling of belonging nowhere.  The Feeling of insecurity always remains there in his mind which got reflected in his work. His life experience as always, a member of marginalized group, member of Indian Muslim family in Bombay, then as Pakistani, and as present time as British Asian. Thus, there is not a fix identity/root which he can claim. Even in Britan he is not accepted as a member of that country. His experience is no better as he wrote in his essay titled ‘New Empire Within New Britan.’

In creating a story like ‘Midnight’s Children’ he is in a way trying to establishing relationship or making a proof that even he has a land somewhere he belongs to. As he writes “I too had a city and a history to reclaim”. For writers like him, who are exiled, emigrants, or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutilated pillars of salt.” He rightly points out that he knows that the feeling of belonging is just momentary for writers like him and soon it will wash out, but still they take risk at list temporary they felt they exist.

Diasporic writers held up in such situation that they wish but they could not claim their belonging to the country once they leaved or forced to leave. And they even could not completely mingle with the new one, as the memory of the past doesn’t allow them to accept it. They held up between two cultures, two languages, two nations, and lost identity. He declared that to live in British society is to face everyday problems of definition

What does it mean to be an Indian outside India?

How can culture be preserved without become ossified?

How to change without seeming to play into the hands of our racial enemies?

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

How are we to live in the world?

Conclusion: -

A work of literature is an expression of feeling, experience, but it doesn’t mean to force him to leave the country, we Indian really need to understand it that the freedom of thinking can bring better life in society by the writer and free thinkers like Salman Rushdie. In the conclusion of the essay, as a radical thinker he compared a writer within himself with a dog from the novel “The Dean’s December”, as barking of the dog protagonist Dean imagine dogs’ barking as 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

Works Cited

Rushdie, S. (1992). Imaginary Homelands. In S. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (pp. 1-25). London.

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