Imaginary Homelands is a collection of Rushdie’s essays, seminar papers, articles, reviews published over a decade of his literary life time, Like any collection of essays it is wide ranging, from the popular to the obscure. The essays deal with varying political, social and literary topics.4/5 December Learn how and when to remove this template message First edition publ Granta Imaginary Homelands is a collection of essays written by Salman Rushdie covering a wide variety of topics. Devout households in India often contained, and still contain, persons in the habit of kissing holy books IMAGINARY HOMELANDS From Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism — London: Granta, /New York: Viking Penguin, N OLD PHOTOGRAPH IN A CHEAP FRAME hangs on a wall of the room where I work. It's a picture dating from of a house into which, at the time of its taking, I had not yet been born
"Imaginary Homelands" the Essay by Rushdie - Words | Essay Example
An old photograph in a cheap frame hangs on a wall of the room where I work. The house is rather peculiar — a three-storied gabled affair with tiled roofs and round towers in two corners, each wearing a pointy tile hat, imaginary homelands essay. A few years ago I revisited Bombay, which is my lost city, after an absence of something like half my life. And, amazingly, there it was: his name, our old address, the unchanged telephone number, as if we had never gone away to the unmentionable country across the border.
It was an eerie discovery. I felt as if I were being claimed, or informed that the facts of my faraway life were illusions: that this — this continuity — was the reality.
Then I went to visit the house in the photograph and stood outside it, neither daring nor wishing to announce myself to its new owners. I was overwhelmed, imaginary homelands essay. The photograph had naturally been taken in black and white; and my memory, feeding on such images as this, had begun to see my childhood in the same way, monochromatically. Bombay is a city built by foreigners upon reclaimed land; I, who had been away so long that I almost qualified for the title of imaginary homelands essaywas gripped by the conviction that I, too, imaginary homelands essay, had a city and a history to reclaim.
Writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by an urge imaginary homelands essay 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 — 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, lndias of the mind.
I tried to make it as imaginatively true as I could, but imaginative truth is simultaneously honourable and suspect, and I knew that my India may only have been one to which I who am no longer what I was, and who by quitting Bombay never became what perhaps I was meant to be was willing to admit I belonged. This is why I made my narrator, Saleem, suspect in his narration: his mistakes are the mistakes of a fallible memory compounded by quirks of character and of circumstance, and his vision is fragmentary.
It may be that when the Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost. But there is a paradox here. The broken mirror may actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed. I was genuinely amazed by how much came back to me.
The shards of memory acquired greater status, greater resonance because they were remains : fragmentation made trivial things seem like symbols, imaginary homelands essay, and the mundane acquired numinous qualities, imaginary homelands essay. 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 me self-evidently true: but the writer who is out-of-country, even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form.
This may enable him to speak properly and concretely on a subject of universal significance and appeal. The broken glass is not merely a mirror of nostalgia. It is also a useful tool with which to work in the present.
Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death.
The Fowles position seems to me a way of succumbing to the guru-illusion. Writers are no longer sages, dispensing the wisdom of the centuries. And those of us who have been forced by cultural displacement to accept the provisional nature of all truths, all certainties, have perhaps had modernism forced upon us.
until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality.
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. A few months ago I took part imaginary homelands essay a conference.
Various novelists, myself included, were talking earnestly of such matters as the need for new ways of describing the world. Then the playwright Howard Brenton suggested that this might be a somewhat limited aim: does literature seek to do no more than to describe? Flustered, all the novelists at once began talking about politics. Can they do no more than describe, from a distance, the world that imaginary homelands essay have left?
This is, of course, a political question, and must be answered at least partly in political terms. It should be said, first of all, that description is itself a political act, imaginary homelands essay.
The black American writer Richard Wright once wrote that black and white Americans were engaged in a war over the nature of reality. Their descriptions were incompatible. So it is clear that redescribing a world is the necessary first step towards changing it. And it is particularly at times when the state takes reality into its own hands, and sets about distorting it, altering the past to fit its present needs, that the making of the alternative realities of art, including the novel of memory, becomes politicised.
Both groups try imaginary homelands essay make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory. This version is sanctified by many people who would describe themselves as intellectuals. And the official version of the Emergency in India was well expressed by Mrs Gandhi in a recent BBC interview. She said that there were some people around who claimed that bad things had happened during the Emergency, forced sterilisations, things like that: but, she stated, this was all false.
Nothing of this type imaginary homelands essay ever occurred, imaginary homelands essay. The interviewer, Robert Kee, did not probe this statement at all. Instead he told Mrs Gandhi that she had proved many times over her right to be called a democrat. So literature can, and perhaps must, give the lie to official facts.
But is this a proper function of those of us who write from outside India? Or are we just dilettantes in such affairs, because we are not involved in their day-to-day unfolding, because by speaking out we take no risks, because our personal safety is not threatened? What right do we have to speak at all? My answer is very simple. Literature is self-validating. There are terrible books that arise directly out of experience, and extraordinary imaginative feats dealing with themes which the author has been obliged to approach from the outside.
Literature is not in the business of copyrighting certain themes for certain groups. And as for risk: the real risks for any artist are taken in the work, in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think.
Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over imaginary homelands essay — when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared. So if I am to speak for Indian writers in England I would say this, paraphrasing G. Imaginary homelands essay the migrations of the s and s happened. We are here. On the other hand, the Indian writer, looking back at India, does so through guilt-tinted spectacles. I am, of course, once more, talking about myself.
I am speaking now of those of us who emigrated and I suspect that there are times when the move seems wrong to us all, imaginary homelands essay, when we seem, to ourselves, postlapsarian men and women. We are Hindus who have crossed the black water; we are Muslims who eat pork, imaginary homelands essay. And as a result imaginary homelands essay as my use of the Christian notion of the Fall indicates — we are now partly of the West.
Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools but however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not an infertile territory for a writer to occupy. If literature is in part the business of finding new angles at which to enter reality, then once again our distance, our long geographical perspective, imaginary homelands essay provide us with such angles.
Or it may be that that is what we must think in order to do our work. I am a member of that generation of Indians who were sold the secular ideal, imaginary homelands essay. One of the things I liked, imaginary homelands essay, and still like, about India is that it is based on a non-sectarian philosophy. I was not raised in a narrowly Muslim environment; I do not consider Hindu culture to be either alien from me or more important than the Islamic heritage.
I believe this has something to do with the nature of Bombay, a metropolis in which the multiplicity of commingled faiths and cultures creates a remarkably secular ambience. Saleem Sinai makes use of whatever elements from whatever sources he chooses. It is a point about pessimism. The book has been criticised in India for its ultimately despairing tone. And the despair of the writer-from-outside may indeed look a little easy, a little too pat.
But I do not see the book as despairing or nihilistic. The point of view of the narrator is not entirely that of the author, imaginary homelands essay.
What I tried to do was to set up a tension in the text, a paradoxical opposition between the form and the 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 as my abilities allowed, the Indian talent for non-stop self-regeneration, imaginary homelands essay. I do not think that a book written in such a manner can really be called a despairing work.
Some of us, imaginary homelands essay instance, are Pakistani. Others Bangladeshi. Others West, or East, or even South African. And V. Naipaul, by now, is something else entirely. Indian writers in England include political exiles, first-generation migrants, affluent expatriates whose residence here is frequently imaginary homelands essay, naturalised Britons, and people born here who may never have laid eyes on the subcontinent.
Clearly, nothing that I say can apply across all these categories, imaginary homelands essay. But one of the interesting things about this diverse community is that, as far as Indo-British fiction is concerned, its existence changes the ball-game, because that fiction is in future going to come as much from addresses in London, Birmingham and Yorkshire as from Delhi or Bombay, imaginary homelands essay.
One of the changes has to do with attitudes towards the use of English. Those of us who use English do so in spite of our ambiguity towards it, or perhaps because of that, perhaps because we find in that linguistic struggle a reflection imaginary homelands essay other struggles taking place in the real world, struggles between the cultures within ourselves and the influences at work upon our societies.
Imaginary homelands
, time: 4:18Salman Rushdie · Imaginary Homelands · LRB 7 October
Salman Rushdie’s essay “Imaginary Homelands” begins with an image of a photograph in the room where he writes. It is a picture of the house in which he lived as a child, taken before he was born Imaginary Homelands by Salman Rushdie depicts the criteria for a successful or unsuccessful work of literature. His input on an author having past correlations, separate identities, and memories to right their novel is shown in the writings of Art Spiegelman’s Maus series. Spiegelman demonstrates that the connections from where you are from Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands is an important record of one writer’s intellectual and personal odyssey. The seventy essays collected here, written over the last ten years, cover an astonishing range of subjects –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 Cited by:
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