Imaginary Homelands by Salman Rushdie (Themes)

 

Imaginary Homelands

by Salman Rushdie

(Themes) 

One of the greatest practitioners of fictional art in contemporary Indian Writing in English, Salman Rushdie was born to a rich Muslim family in Bombay on 19th June, 1947. In an earlier career, he worked in an advertising agency as a copywriter. He has created the fictional works like Grimus, Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic-Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Fury, Shalimar the Clown and The Enchantress of Florence. He has won a number of literary awards, including the Booker Prize in 1981 and the White bread Prize in 1988. In June 2007, he was appointed a Knight Bachelor for services to literature… He also holds, in France, the highest rank — Commandeur.

Imaginary Homelands, divided into twelve sections, is a collection of critical pieces, written by him during 1981-1991. The essays reveal the sharp literary sensibility of Rushdie. They discuss everything under the sun, including the problems of diasporic immigrants, the debate between eclecticism and censorship, the dragon like power of the Empire and several other contemporary social, political and literary issues.

 

Major Themes in Imaginary Homelands

The Riddle of Diaspora

Diaspora can be the voluntary or forced movement of peoples from their homelands into new regions. Having arrived in a new geographical and cultural context, they negotiate two cultures: their own and the new one. This diasporic culture is necessarily mixed and an amalgamation of the two cultures. Robin Cohen thinks that “the old country” always has claim over the psyche of the diasporans. Imaginary Homelands displays the diasporic sensibility of Rushdie at its best. Nostalgia for the homelands and misbehavior with the diasporic immigrants in alien lands are exhibited in typical postcolonial manner. The main focus of Rushdie in the first section of the book is on memory and nostalgia for the past.

The displaced individual in the alien lands does not find the situation to be favourable to his plans and desires. The intensity of anguish is enhanced by the fact that the person had come to the West, considering it to be a place of enlightenment. The diaspora experiences the worst type of racial prejudice in the West. Rushdie outlines the fact that the immigrants face racial bigotry everywhere in Britain. The diaspora has ‘double consciousness’—nostalgia for the imaginary homelands and alienation in foreign lands.

 

The Emergence of the New Empire

Rushdie asserts that there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss. He has recommended a tradition of making as big a fuss, as noisy a complaint about the world as is humanly possible. In several of his pieces in the book, Rushdie makes a protesting fuss against the revival of the Empire in Britain. In ‘The New Empire within Britain’ he states, “British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism”. According to Rushdie, Attenborough’s movie Gandhi is the best example of these imperialistic tendencies of the English. This movie is the result of the undiminished and maniac nostalgia of the British for the Great Pink Age of the Empire.

 

Debate between Censorship and Eclecticise

In the essay on censorship, Rushdie dwells upon the effects of censorship. It suppresses the truth and spreads the falsehood. It can deaden the imagination of people. In place of censorship, Rushdie propagates the eclectic free flow of thought. This eclectic belief permits dissent and demonstrates that opposition is the bedrock of democracy.

 

Ideals of Hybridity and Multiplicity

The contemporary world, variously depicted as ‘a salad bowl’ or ‘a melting pot’, is marked by hybridity and multiplicity. Rushdie celebrates these ideals in his works and Imaginary Homelands is no exception. The postcolonial social order is notable for “new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs”. In the essay ‘In Good Faith’, Rushdie favours the mongrelization and abhors “the absolutism of the pure”. According to him, “Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world”.

This emphasis of Rushdie on the concept of hybridity makes him a man of secular credentials; he believes in the coexistence of several religions/ cultures/ ethnicities.