Hello Readers warmly welcome to my blog. This blog is based on the Thinking Activity of Imaginary Homeland by Salman Rushdie.
Salman Rushdie is the most controversial writer among Indian writers in English. Rushdie's migrant status encapsulates a paradox, in his own queries in his essay Commonwealth Literature does not exist in his collection "Imaginary Homelands" (1991/1992).
"In my own case, I have constantly been asked whether I am British or Indian. The formulation "India-bom British writer" has been invented to explain me. But, as I said last night, my new book deals with Pakistan. So what now?" "British resident Indo-Pakistani writer"? You see the folly of trying to contain writers inside passports.
In his essay, Rushdie consistently opposes any effort to restrain as well as enchain any ambitious author within any "Literary Ghetto" like the term "Commonwealth Literature".
Any rules which tend to confine any author within the parameters of tradition are basically conservative in character. Literature, according to Rushdie, transcends national boundaries and can, therefore, never occupy such "phantom" categories as English Literature or Commonwealth Literatures in isolation. Such boundaries are primarily designated by political or linguistic concerns.
The book ‘Imaginary Homelands’ is divided into six sections. Like..
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” is a vivid imagination of a vivid mind.
The essay includes controversial topics such as…
Attenborough’s Gandhi
Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist
New Empire within Britain
On Palestine
The term diaspora is at the center in Salman Rushdie's work, being a discourse the term has changing connotation, it depends upon which lens you develop to watch diaspora. Diasporic literature may not showcase longing for native rather it is a portrayal of problems they have to face in multicultural nations mainly regarding racism and social equality.
In Attenborough’s Gandhi, Salman Rushdie deconstructs the Oscar winning Attenborough’s film Gandhi with that deep postcolonial insight. The very first sentence of the essay is,
Commonwealth Literature does not exist
Salman Rushdie talks on commonwealth literature as an imaginary idea which doesn’t exist. This question was already there as it is a highly debatable term but got legitimacy and validity when Salman Rushdie started to ask about it. As a term by commonwealth literature, generally we mean that it is a literature written in one place by people from another place. The idea of Commonwealth literature is never founded on any particular form or neither defined by a single norm. In today’s time we can not find mutually exclusiveness in the literature, it is simultaneously influenced by different cultures.
Diaspora
The discourse on homeland reflected in Imaginary Homelands of Salman Rushdie provides a very critical framework to analyse all these aspects. Though some research has been made on the Rushdie. In this study an attempt has been made to study the issues of homeland, imaginary homeland, identity, authenticity, selfhood, predicaments of migration in Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands.
Salman Rushdie in his book Imaginary Homelands speaks about the diasporic lives, and the imaginary homeland which is often portrayed as the source of origin, purity of culture and nostalgic longing for the diaspora. These are the current features of diasporic lives in today’s world of multicultural society and age of capitalism with common features of high migrants across the globe. As Salman Rushdie has written:
It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge in which gives rise to profound uncertainties that our 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 fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind. (Imaginary Homelands 10)
CITATIONS
"Hobsonjobson." Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. Lon-don: Granta/Viking, 1991. 81-83.
Kumar, Deepak. “A Note on the Notion of Home in Salman Rushdie's 'Imaginary Homelands'.” International Journal of Engineering Technology Science and Research, Volume 2, no. Issue 11, 0AD, pp. 196–197., www.ijetsr.com. Accessed Nov. 2020.
Laguerre, Michel S. "Dediasporization: Homeland and Hostland." Journal of nonverbal behaviour, Springer (2006): 131-161.
Rushdie, S. (1992). Imaginary Homelands. In S. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (pp. 1-25). London.
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