Name :- Dharti makwana
Batch :- 2019-2021
Roll No. :- 5
Semester :- M.A. Sem-3
Enrollment No. :- 2069108420200024
Submitted :- Smt. S.B. Gardi Department of English, M.K.Bhavnagar University
Email :- dharteemakwana789@gmail.com
Paper No. :- Postcolonial Literature
Topic :-
Diaspora in Imaginary Homeland
Introduction
The term ‘diaspora’ has broadened its compass to include a variety of groups. For the diaspora homeland is the sacred place with which the diaspora is attached very emotionally. Home is not a physical symbol only. It has the essence of purity, emotion and legacy, and it connects people with each other. So, people cannot forget home or homeland. The place is deeply rooted in the mind and memory of the people. Moving from one place to another place is always painful as one is not moving physically only but socio-culturally also. Without a homeland, the diaspora does not exist. Homeland is the most precious and sacred place for the diaspora groups. The homeland for the diaspora is the ultimate truth. They have a strong emotional attachment with the homeland. They live outside the geographical boundary of their homeland, but still they maintain their relationship with their homeland.
It is not possible for the people in diaspora, frequently physically visit their homeland; therefore, they draw the images of their homeland in their minds. They create an imaginary homeland in the diaspora. The creation of an imaginary homeland in diaspora not only provides the diaspora groups the strength of sustenance in the host land but also it helps them in retaining their culture and tradition and maintaining their ties with the homeland. Here, I am trying to show my understanding of diaspora, imaginary homeland and other issues faced by Indian diaspora as depicted by Salman Rushdie in his novel.
Objective of this Assessment
To display the picture of Diasporic writing like postcolonial writing is often understood as a displaced deregulated practice. Therefore, diasporic writing is associated with metropolitan, migrant and multicultural. Diasporic writers are cosmopolitans and cosmopolitans belong to more than one world but to no one entirely. However, a connection binds the diaspora with the homeland and homeland with the diaspora. The two physical spaces of the homeland and host land are bridged by an imaginary of the diaspora. The study attempts to analyse these aspects pertaining to homeland, imaginary homeland, identity, diaspora etc.
Question related to the Assignment:
The study will concentrate on the following questions:
How far has Salman Rushdie portrayed diasporic elements in the Imaginary Homeland?
Is it displaying the issues of homeland, imaginary homeland, identity, authenticity, selfhood, predicaments of migration in Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands ?
About Authors: Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie, in full Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie, (born June 19, 1947, Bombay [now Mumbai], India), Indian-born British writer whose allegorical novels examine historical and philosophical issues by means of surreal characters, brooding humour, and an effusive and melodramatic prose style. His treatment of sensitive religious and political subjects made him a controversial figure.
Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands is a collection of his essays, seminar papers, articles and reviews, which were published over a decade of his literary lifetime, 1981-1991. This collection of his critical writings deal with various political, social, cultural, literary and immigration, identity, racial prejudice etc. related issues. They have relevance to the issues pertaining to diaspora. As a part of the diaspora, Rushdie has himself faced those difficulties that generally happens to all the diaspora people. Salman Rushdie in the beginning of the
“The essay from which this collection takes its title was actually his contribution to a
seminar about Indian writing in English held in London during the Festival of India in
1982” (Rushdie 1).
NOTABLE WORKS:
“The Satanic Verses”
“Midnight’s Children”
“Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights”
“Quichotte”
“The Golden House”
“Shalimar the Clown”
“Step Across This Line”
“Shame”
“The Moor's Last Sigh”
“Luka and the Fire of Life”
AWARDS AND HONORS:
Costa Book Awards (1995)
Costa Book Awards (1988)
Booker Prize (1981)
What is Diaspora?
“All diasporas are unhappy, but every diaspora is unhappy in its own way” (Mishra 1996: 189).
Diasporas refer to people who do not feel comfortable with their non-hyphenated identities as indicated on their passports. Diasporas are people who would want to explore the meaning of the hyphen, but perhaps not press the hyphen too far for fear that this would lead to massive communal schizophrenia. They are precariously lodged within an episteme of real or imagined displacements, self-imposed sense of exile; they are haunted by spectres, by ghosts arising from within that encourage irredentist or separatist movements. Diasporas are both celebrated and maligned.
From the Greek word meaning 'to scatter,' a diaspora is defined as a community of people who do not live in their country of origin, but maintain their heritage in a new land. Many of you can probably relate to this issue, since you've got ancestral roots from one country but reside in a different place. For instance, in the United States, a plethora of ethnic communities exist. Americans can be classified according to subcultures, such as African-American, Mexican-American, Irish-American, and Indian-American. Inclusion of emigrants, or people who have left their homelands to settle permanently in a different one, is a major characteristic of a diaspora.
But we need to be a little cautious, a little wary of either position. Celebrating diasporas as the exemplary condition of late modernity diasporas as highly democratic communities for whom domination and territoriality are not the preconditions of “nationhood” is a not uncommon refrain. In the late modern celebratory argument on behalf of diasporas, diasporic communities are said to occupy a border zone.
“Diaspora” turns out to be a very culture-specific term. The Oxford English Dictionary refers quite explicitly to John vii, 35 the first use of the term in Deuteronomy xxviii, 25 where we find: “thou shalt be a diaspora (or dispersion) in all kingdoms of the earth.” The recent opening up of the word to signify the lives of “any group living in displacement” (Clifford 1994: 310) is a phenomenon that probably marks a postmodern move to dismantle a logocentric and linear view of human affairs that connected narratives and experiences to specific races.
Diaspora in the Imaginary Homeland
The absence of teleologies, this intense meditation on synchronicity, thus opposes the tyr Many linear times and blasts open the continuum of history to reveal moments, fragments, traces that can be re-captured and transformed into another history.
Elements of Diaspora in India Narratives:
Drawing on Lacan’s definitions of “enjoyment” is attempting something rather different: he brings a corporeal element to definitions of the nation-state so that the nation is more than just a structure of feeling, an “imagined” construct, without any foundation in the real. Here is crucial qualification made with an eye to definitions of the nation that have emerged in the wake of Benedict Anderson’s influential work:
To emphasize in a “deconstructionist” mode that Nation is not a biological or transhistorical fact but a contingent discursive construction, an overdetermined result of textual practices, is thus misleading: such an emphasis overlooks the remainder of some real, non discursive kernel of enjoyment which must be present for the Nation qua discursive entity-effect to achieve its ontological consistency. (1993: 202)
in the typically Lacanian form of the speaker getting back from the
“address his own message in its true, inverted form” (208).
In diasporas, then, the nation-state sees the loss of an ideal, the loss of its own organic connection to the Thing, which it had always taken for granted. Diasporas signify a Gesellschaft, an alienated society without any “organic laws,” against the nation-state’s own Gemeinschaft or “traditional, organically linked community” (211). The nation-state sees in diasporas reflections of its own past, its own earlier migration patterns, its own traumatic moments, and its memories of settlement. In the extended form of this argument, it is the absence of diasporic enjoyment of the Nation Thing in the dominant group itself (and which enjoyment is the presumption upon which the nation-state itself is based) that gives rise to the exclusion of diasporas from the national imaginary.
Diaspora in Homeland:
In the diaspora homeland means,
“Homeland is the desh (in Hindi) against which all the other lands are foreign” (Mishra 2).
The interconnection of the imaginary with the real constructs intimate personal relationships with the homeland. However, it is always difficult to replace the real physical home. As Gal and others, opine,
“Homeland in diaspora is preserved as a symbol and shared memory and gives it practical shape through processes of liberation and migration. It was reconstructed as a linkage for the community as an ethnic history that would both explain and inspire the community map and morality for the direction of its route to the desired goal. The member of a community with liberty, unity and identity by liberating the homeland of its foreign oppressors, and restoring them to it, the symbolism of diaspora and restoration have not been lost on others” (Gal and Allon 7).
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)
We cannot trace the growth of diasporas in any systematic form here. All we can do is refer very schematically to one particular diasporic development that has a direct bearing on the texts discussed.
In the present study, some of his essays and critical writings have been analysed to study Salman Rushdie’s perception about the homeland, the imaginary and the imaginary homeland. In Imaginary Homelands Rushdie makes an attempt to find a balance between multiple cultures that is felt by every member of a community of diaspora or victim or exile. The diaspora groups resident in different countries maintain connection with their home country. This connection may not be physical always, it may be imaginary.
The year the Beatles exploded on the world scene, may also be chosen as the watershed year in global migration. Demand for labour in Western Europe and Britain and the collapse of the colonial empires of Britain, France, and Holland meant that millions of non-white migrants from the outposts of the Empire, as well as guest workers from Turkey, began to enter the European city on a scale unprece dented since the Moorish invasions.
Conclusion
If one looks at the diasporic literature, one finds that all the diasporic writers have written on displacement, socio-cultural identity, nostalgic experiences, authenticity, selfhood, ethnicity, hyphenated identity etc. Generally, the diaspora people have experienced these issues. In the diaspora group, itself there is the existence of various kinds of cultures. When people migrate, they carry their cultural norms and practices with them. Through their cultures, the diaspora groups represent their identity. Identity has an authenticity in its relationship with the homeland. However, the geographical displacements cannot restrict the
Citations
Anderson, Benedict. Imaginary Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso Publication. 2006.
Gal, and Allon. The Call of the Homeland: Diaspora Nationalism Past and Present. Boston: Brill Publication, 2010.
"Hobsonjobson." Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. Lon-don: Granta/Viking, 1991. 81-83.
Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta/Vik-ing. 1991
Mishra, Vijay. The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary. Boston: Routledge, 2007.
Mishra, Vijay.“(B)ordering Naipaul: Indenture History and Diasporic Poetics.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1996. 5.2: 189-37.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essay & Criticism 1981-1991. New York: Cambridge UP, 1992.
Stock, Famk. “Home and Memory.” Diaspora, Concept, Interaction, Identity. Eds. Kim Knott and Machoughlin. New York: Zed Books. 2010. 24-29.
