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Here on my blog. This blog related to the Salman Rushdie's essay.
☆Introduction about Salman Rushdie:
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie FRSL (born 19 June 1947) is a British Indian novelist and essayist whose work, combining magical realism with historical fiction, is primarily concerned with the many connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, with much of his fiction being set on the Indian subcontinent.
His second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be "the best novel of all winners" on two occasions, marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize. His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was the subject of a major controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries. Death threats were made against him, including a fatwā calling for his assassination issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on 14 February 1989. The British government put Rushdie under police protection.
The publication of The Satanic Verses in September 1988 caused immediate controversy in the Islamic world because of what was seen by some to be an irreverent depiction of Muhammad. The title refers to a disputed Muslim tradition that is related in the book. According to this tradition, Muhammad (Mahound in the book) added verses (Ayah) to the Qur'an accepting three goddesses who used to be worshipped in Mecca as divine beings. According to the legend, Muhammad later revoked the verses, saying the devil tempted him to utter these lines to appease the Meccans (hence the "Satanic" verses). However, the narrator reveals to the reader that these disputed verses were actually from the mouth of the Archangel Gabriel. The book was banned in many countries with large Muslim communities
☆Novels (fiction):
《1》Grimus (1975)
《2》Midnight's Children (1981)
《3》Shame (1983)
《4》The Satanic Verses (1988)
《5》The Moor's Last Sigh (1995)
《6》The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999)
《7》Fury (2001)
《8》Shalimar the Clown (2005)
《9》The Enchantress of Florence (2008)
《10》Two Years Eight Months and
Twenty-Eight Nights (2015)
《12》The Golden House (2017)
《13》Quichotte (2019)
Collections Edit
《14》East, West (1994)
《15》Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947–1997 (1997, Editor, with Elizabeth West)
《16》The Best American Short Stories (2008, Guest Editor)
☆ Children's books:
《1》Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)
《2》Luka and the Fire of Life (2010)
☆Essays and nonfiction:
《1》The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987)
《2》"In Good Faith," Granta, (1990)
Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (1992)
《3》"The Wizard of Oz: BFI Film Classics," British Film Institute (1992)
《4》"Mohandas Gandhi," Time (13 April 1998)
《5》"Imagine There Is No Heaven," Letters to the Six Billionth World Citizen by Uitgeverij Podium (16 October 1999)
Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992–2002 (2002)
《6》"The East Is Blue" (2004)
《7》"A fine pickle," The Guardian (28 February 2009)
《8》"In the South," Booktrack (7 February 2012)
《9》 Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012)
☆Brief brief introduction about " Imaginary Homelands" :
"Imaginary Homelands" is a collection of essays written by Salman Rushdie .In addition to the title essay, the collection also includes "'Commonwealth Literature' Does Not Exist". Salman Rushdie's “Imaginary Homelands” is an essay that propounds an anti-essentialist view of place.Salman Rushdie is the most controversial writer among Indian writing in English.
His book, Imaginary Homeland, are essays written during 1981 to 1992, collecting controversial issues of the decade. They are based on the experience of Rushdie's and his contemporary time scenario when Indira Gandhi was in power.One of the novelists whose name Rushdie did not reveal, began 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”.
“Read every page of this book; better still, re-read them. The invocation means no hardship, since every true reader must surely be captivated by Rushdie’s masterful invention and ease, the flow of wit and insight and passion. How literature of the highest order can serve the interests of our common humanity is freshly illustrated here: a defence of his past, a promise for the future, and a surrender to nobody or nothing whatever except his own all-powerful imagination.”
-Michael Foot, Observer
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 America, racial prejudice; and the preciousness of the imagination and of free expression. For this paperback edition, the author has written a new essay to mark the third anniversary of the fatwa.
●The book ‘Imaginary Homelands’ divided 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.
“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.”
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.’
Rushdie then goes on to clarify another criticism made against Midnight’s Children; the book is accused of portraying a pessimistic image of India. But he claims that he does not see the book as despairing or nihilistic. That may appear to be the point of view of the narrator, but it is not necessarily the view of the author. He says that his aim was to create a tension between the form and content of the narrative in his book. He says that the story does lead to a despairing end, but the book has been designed to echo the Indian talent for non-stop self-generation. The multitudinous form of the narrative, he says, stands for the infinite possibilities of the Indian society and he considers this as
an optimistic counterweight to Saleem’s personal tragedy.
Rushdie then goes on to explain that not all Indian writers in England hail from India, some of them are Pakistani, some Bangladeshi and even West, East or South African. Thus, the word ‘Indian’ has come to stand for a rather loose concept. He says that in the future Indo-British fiction is going to be produced as much from London, Birmingham or Yorkshire as from Delhi or Bombay.
In the beginning of his essay “Imaginary Homelands”, Rushdie explains how his visit to his ancestral house in Bombay led to being born in him a desire to reclaim his past through a literary project, and since his past, as he saw it, was inseparable from the Bombay and India of his past, his project would involve a reclaiming of the city and the country too. This is how, he says, his novel Midnight’s Children was born. But Rushdie also admits that the process of looking back contains its own dangers; he says that the fact of the physical alienation of diasporic writers from India hinders them from reclaiming anauthentic version of India or Bombay. Instead, they will end up creating fictions,
“not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind”. He says that the Indian writer who writes from outside India has to deal with the world of his homeland in fragments, like pieces of a broken mirror,
“some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost”. However, he also highlights the fact that the fragments of memory are not any less valuable for
that matter. He says that the partial nature of his personal memories of India rendered them more evocative, in his words, “fragmentation made trivial things seem like symbols, and the mundane acquired numinous qualities”. He does not recommend dismissing the broken glass as a mere mirror of nostalgia, but considers it a useful tool with which to work in the present.
■ some idea on " Imaginary Homelands" :
● Postcolonialism:
Postcolonialism or Post-Colonialism is the study of the effects of colonisation on cultures and societies around the world. In the words of M. H. Abrams, it refers to the critical analysis of the history, culture, literature, and modes of discourse that are specific to the former colonies of England, Spain, France, and other European imperial powers.Salman Rushdie generally writes from a conscious postcolonial and diasporic position.
In “Imaginary Homelands”, he deals at some length with the issue of one crucial colonial legacy as far as literature is concerned “the use of the English language in postcolonial societies”. Postcolonial societies have constantly displayed ambivalence towards the continued use of the English language. Rushdie says that the Indian writers who do use English do so in spite of their ambiguous feelings towards it, or even perhaps because of it. In fact, the language used by Rushdie in his fictional works is not the standard or ‘correct’ English, but it is flavoured with local coinages and idioms which better expresses the experiences of the societies of the subcontinent.
●Nationalism :
Salman Rushdie often engages with ideas of the nation and nationalism in his fictional works. In simple terms, nationalism can be defined as a desire by large group of people (such as people who share the same culture, history, language, etc.) to form a separate and independent nation of their own (Merriam Webster). Thinkers since Ernest Renan in the nineteenth century have argued that nations are not ‘natural’ entities. In his influential book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983) Benedict Anderson puts forward a theory about the constructed nature of nations. He defines the nation as “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”. He calls it an ‘imagined community’ because the members of such a community will never know each of the other members personally, and yet, they assume an affinity with the other members through a popular mental image of solidarity. Rushdie is also aware of the contemporary critiques of the concepts of nation and nationalism. It is significant that he chooses to call his essay “Imaginary Homelands”. It is because of the imagined nature of the nation that it is possible to have multiple versions of a single nation. Rushdie says that the India that he has tried to recreate in Midnight’s Children was his version of India, “a version and no more than one version of all the hundred millions of possible versions”.
●Post-modern Literature :
Postmodernism is seen as a continuation as well as a revolt against Modernist approaches to literature and tries to offer a challenge to the elitism of modernist ‘high art’ by recourse to the models of ‘mass culture’s drawn from various sources such as film, television, newspaper cartoons, and popular music. Salman Rushdie displays this postmodernist tendency in his works by constantly diluting the distinction between ‘high art’ and ‘low art’ in his creative works. In “Imaginary Homelands”, he describes memory as a “shaky edifice”which is built out of “scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles,chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved…”
In “Imaginary Homelands” he tries to offer his explanation of the need to mingle fantasy and reality in literature. He says that in the multicultural environment of the society today, fantasy or the mingling of fantasy and naturalism is one way of dealing with the issue of presenting a competent description of the complex modern society. He says that the technique offers writers “a way of echoing in the form of our work the issues faced by all of us: how to build a new, ‘modern’ world out of an old, legend-haunted civilization, an old culture which we have brought into the heart of a newer one”.
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