Imaginary Homelands

 #Thinking Activity

⇨ Imaginary Homelands: Selected Essays: Salman Rushdie

Hello Readers!

   welcome to my blog. here i would like to write about some brief notes on all essays, which is prefered by Salman Rushdie, these all are part of the post colonial studies, so let's begin....

    Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (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 Wester Civilizations, with much of his fiction being set on the Indian Subcontinent.

# Essays

  # Imaginary Homelands

# Attenborough's Gandhi

# Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist

# New Empire Within Britain

# On Palestine

  # Imaginary Homelands:

The book ‘Imaginary Homelands’ is 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

     “Writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates,” Rushdie says in this collection’s title essay, “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.” Such a writer comes to understand, however, 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, India’s of the mind.” In his own fictions, Salman Rushdie has created just such imaginary homelands: India of the mind in Midnight’s Children, a Pakistan of the mind in Shame, an Islam, Bombay, and London of the mind in The Satanic Verses. While they are not precisely real, these imaginary homelands capture the essence of reality as seen through the eyes of characters who, like their author, face the challenge of straddling two cultures.

# Commonwealth Literature Doesn't Exist

  According to Rushdie, one of the rules, one of the ideas on which the edifice rests, is that literature is an expression of nationality. Literature is a general representation of cultural particularities  that is, literature varies from culture to culture, from one period to another. There is another element of literature that shocks the literary mind. A respectable literary piece, according to Rushdie must meet the demands of authenticity. Authenticity demands that sources, forms, style, language and symbol all derive from a supposedly homogenous and unbroken tradition.

There is where tragedy falls to the ground. What the term authenticity reveals, so much in the use inside the little world of Commonwealth literature would seem ridiculous outside this world. Now, the lexicon of Commonwealth literature (as it applies to the literary aspect of British colonialism) is an innovation. Literary critics often praise the achievements of Commonwealth literary figures, forgetting the most essential element of literature. Today, literary works are not mutually exclusive  in the sense that, they are simultaneously influenced by different cultures. In some Indian novels, both the form and style resemble that which Europeans used in the early 20th century. This is not an intentional event. Many of these writers are Western educated. As such, it is inevitable that their style would follow the Western model.

Commonwealth literature is therefore an unreliable face of historicity. It is neither founded on one form nor guided by an encompassing set of norms. Indeed, when one talks of Commonwealth literature, one needs to look beyond the borders of the nation-state  to the land of the West. In short, according to Rushdie, Commonwealth literature is an encompassing myth.

# New Empire Within Britain:

     In this essay Rushdie discuss the prime quandary of Britain is racism and the problem of immigrants among whites. How they suffers of racial issues. 

    " I want to suggest that racism is not a side-issue in contemporary Britain; that it's not a peripheral minority affair. I believe that Britain is undergoing a critical phase of its post-colonial period, and this crisis is not simply economic or political. It's a crisis of the whole culture, of the society's entire sense of itself. And racism is only the most clearly visible part of this crises, the tip of the kind of iceberg that sinks ship."

  The 'Racial differences' is the central focus of Rushdie in this essay. Black or Brown or Colored people suffered a lot when British colonies were established in different Asian countries. Their euro-centric mindsets put other into the periphery; which grounded on the racial differentiations; the way colour holds its place in cultural hierarchy with different terms and conditions or colour of skin decides the place of an individual in society. It also creates complex of inferiority in the mindsets of Negros, where the term 'Negritude' takesplace. Many renewed post-colonial writers tried to capture this situation in their master pieces. This was not only happening with colonized people it creates more troublesome situation when they immigrant from their land to Whites' land.