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“Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.”
- Salman Rushdie , Imaginary Homelands
Imaginary Homelands is a collection of Salman Rushdie’s essays. These essays also a different collection of various articles, seminar papers, reviews published over a decade of his literary lifetime during 1981-1991.Imaginary Homelands is incisive, intellectual, probing, eloquent and lively. From this essay one can take issue with its wide scope. Salman Rushdie selects different subjects like political, social, and literary topics in this essay with various deals and critical approaches. After reading this book, reaction to such book can only be personal and subjective and it is not a story that can be discussed with some degree of detachment. Imaginary Homelands is a personal conversation by Rushdie. From his writing we can see a power of Rushdie over media and he is that kind of a writer. Every reader has different view about this book. It is depend on our individual mindset. Rushdie’s literary style is full of innovation because of being a migrant and an author. It’s base on reality and Rushdie feels a kinship with the writers who writes their books with fantasy and reality.
In the first essay – Imaginary Homelands, there is a description about “past” and “present” memories of Salman Rushdie. As per his writing, the part of Imaginary Homelands starts from a memory of an old photograph. He said that, “ the past is a foreign country but the photograph tells me to invert this idea, it reminds me that it’s my present that is foreign, and the past is home- a lost city “ Bombay “.Salman Rushdie shows his experiences about Bombay where he was born. Now he revisited there and when he saw and opened the telephone dictionary he found his father’s name and address as per past before migration. Then salman said about his perspective of “ My India “. He said that, my India may only have been one to which I was, let us say, willing to admit I belonged. Rushdie found himself in his past during that time- clothes of people, as example of we can see this song,
Critical
Analysis on imagery homeland with example of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake”
Name :-
Charmi Vyas
Roll No. :-
3
Sem:- 3
Paper No. :-
11, The Postcolonial Literature
Submitted To
:- Department of English, M.K.B.U
About Salman Rushdie
Salman
Rushdie is a British novelist and essayist. He won the Booker Prize in 1981 for
his second novel – “ Midnight’s children” (1981). Salma Rushdie’s much of
fiction is set on the Indian Subcontinent. He was born in Bombay, the son of
Anis Ahmad Rushdie who studied in university of Cambridge educated lawyer than
turned businessman . They are from Muslim family of Kashmir
descent. Following partition of British India , his family later migrated
to Karachi, Pakistan.Salman Rushdie’s name “ Rushdie “ is adopted by his father
from in honor of “Averroes”. He has three sisters. He was educated at
Cathedral and John Cannon school in Mumbai, then in Warwickshire and finally
King’s Collage , University of Cambridge. He got knowledge of history at
University of Cambridge.As a basic of career, Rushdie was a copywriter.
he
wrote his first novel – “Grimus” in 1975, which is a part science fiction. It
ignored by the public and literary critics. Then his next novel “ Midnight’s
Children” wrote in 1981 catapulted him to literary notability.Rushdie also
published many books, short stories and essay also. In 2012 Rushdie became one
of the first major authors to embrace book track, when he published his short
story “ In the south “ on the platform. Rushdie is also successful writer of
novels but he says that he would have become an actor if his writing career had
not been successful. From his childhood he liked to appear in Hollywood movies.
Rushdie includes fictional television and movie characters in some of his
writings.
INTRODUCTION
OF “ IMAGINARY HOMELANDS”:-
“Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.”
- Salman Rushdie , Imaginary Homelands
Imaginary Homelands is a collection of Salman Rushdie’s essays. These essays also a different collection of various articles, seminar papers, reviews published over a decade of his literary lifetime during 1981-1991.Imaginary Homelands is incisive, intellectual, probing, eloquent and lively. From this essay one can take issue with its wide scope. Salman Rushdie selects different subjects like political, social, and literary topics in this essay with various deals and critical approaches. After reading this book, reaction to such book can only be personal and subjective and it is not a story that can be discussed with some degree of detachment. Imaginary Homelands is a personal conversation by Rushdie. From his writing we can see a power of Rushdie over media and he is that kind of a writer. Every reader has different view about this book. It is depend on our individual mindset. Rushdie’s literary style is full of innovation because of being a migrant and an author. It’s base on reality and Rushdie feels a kinship with the writers who writes their books with fantasy and reality.
ABOUT
IMAGINARY HOMELANDS:-
In the first essay – Imaginary Homelands, there is a description about “past” and “present” memories of Salman Rushdie. As per his writing, the part of Imaginary Homelands starts from a memory of an old photograph. He said that, “ the past is a foreign country but the photograph tells me to invert this idea, it reminds me that it’s my present that is foreign, and the past is home- a lost city “ Bombay “.Salman Rushdie shows his experiences about Bombay where he was born. Now he revisited there and when he saw and opened the telephone dictionary he found his father’s name and address as per past before migration. Then salman said about his perspective of “ My India “. He said that, my India may only have been one to which I was, let us say, willing to admit I belonged. Rushdie found himself in his past during that time- clothes of people, as example of we can see this song,
“ Mera joota hai JapaniYe patloon
InglistaniSir pe lal topi RusiPhir bhi dil hai Hindustani…
ABOUT
JUMPA LAHARI AND THE NAMESAKE :-
As a
daughter of an Indian American family who came to America after 1965, Jhumpa
Lahiri is always living in the shadows of two cultures. Brought up in a
traditional Indian American family, she shares her parents’ sadness of loss and
displacement in an exile life. Her wrings are always concerned about such
issues like belonging, home and identity. She is already a famous Indian
American author when she published her first novel The Namesake. Her first book
Interpreter of Maladies made great success and won her Pulitzer Prize, Best
American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize. The New Yorker names her one of the
20 most important young American writers of the new century. The Namesake was a
New York Times bestseller and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist. Released
in 2007, the book was adapted into a major film in the US, and achieved a
commercial success.
Lahiri’s diasporic background and her
combination of ethnic and universal themes in her novels have instigated great
interest among the literary critics. There is great controversy about
how to label her and her works. In the introduction to Naming Jhumpa Lahiri: Canons
and Controversies, Lavina Dhingra, the editor, mentioned her multiple
categories as Asian American writer, ethnic writer, diasporic writer and
American writer and also affirm her canonic position by comparing her with
American literary masters like VS Naipaul, Salmam Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee
and Maxine Hong Kingston. When commenting on The Namesake, Benjamin
Austin notes elements that pale in comparison with those in her short stories
but concludes that the author remains “one of today’s most promising young
talents” (Austen, 2003). From the post-colonial angle, Shao-ming Kung
investigates the negotiation of hybrid cultural identities by South Asian
immigrants and concludes that Lahiri is a “seasoned translator” between
cultures. (Kung, 2009) Aparajita De focuses on the main character Gogol to
explore the formation of transnational diasporic identity (De, 2010). Other
papers also explore the themes like women’s subjectivity, identity politics and
the theme of death etc…
Despite the diversity of topics
and concerns to The Namesakes, no attention is paid to approaching the book
from the aspects of home, diaspora and nostalgia. Born to Bengali parents in
London and raised in Rhode Island, Lahiri is British by birth, American by
citizenship and Indian by origin, so she is a representative of Indian
diaspora. She feels a strong sense of loss, displacement and homing desire.
When she talked of India, she had a kind of intensive attachment for the
country, “Calcutta nourished my mind, my eyes as a writer, and my interest in
seeing things differently from different points of view." There’s a legacy
and tradition there that we just don’t have here” (Das, 2008). She expressed
this kind of nostalgia and longing for her hometown in her second book The
Namesake. Nostalgia as an expression of ethos, considered “twilight zone
between history and memory” by Dennis Walder (2011), goes back a long way—at
least to Homer’s Odyssey. But the word is of recent origin, and was derived
from a Greek neologism, combining nostos (home) and algos (pain or longing).
The Swiss doctor, Johannes Hofer, in the 17th century first identified this
symptom among displaced Swiss soldiers.
The soldiers who missed their
homes tended to lose their appetite, have a fever and feel depressed. In the
old good days, nostalgia was a curable disease. A return to homeland was
considered as a best remedy. However, for 19th century romanticists, nostalgia
was no longer a physiological illness but a way to express dissatisfaction with
reality by being sentimental and escaping to nature. The 20th century thinkers
like Freud, treated nostalgia as a mental problem in the same way as melancholy
and tried to solve the problem by resorting to psychotherapy. The increased
migration and diaspora in modern society made nostalgia develop from a personal
malady to a social disease. In The Future of Nostalgia, Sevtlana Boym points
out its’ contagion and spread in modern world.
She comments that “The Twentieth
century began with a futuristic utopia and ends with nostalgia” (2001). She
expands the connotation of nostalgia by defining it as both a longing for lost
places and time as well. In her book, she also makes two categories of
nostalgias like restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia. For Boym,
restorative nostalgia “stress nostos and attempts a transhistorical
reconstruction of lost home…reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of
human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of
modernity. Reflective nostalgia focuses on longing for home, so it contains
suffering and pain, being sentimental, conservative and melancholy. It is what
cultural critics like bell hooks rejected and called “a kind of useless act”
(Hooks, 1990, p.147). But restorative nostalgia spurs the people in
exile to imagine an ideal homeland in their homeland which is conducive to
soothing their anxiety in assimilation and construction of a new identity.
This paper will focus on restorative
nostalgia and explore its positive function through a close reading of The
Namesake. The paper argues that restorative nostalgia can keep the diaspora’s
own ethnic heritage and meanwhile facilitate the diaspora’s assimilation into
mainstream society by constructing an imaginary homeland to release the
pressure of assimilation and sooth the pain of rootlessness. From this sense,
nostalgia bears some positive qualities just as John Su in Ethics and Nostalgia
in The Contemporary Novel mentions “it facilitates an exploration of ethical
ideals in the face of disappointing circumstances” (Su, 2005, p.4). Nostalgia
for the past is a hint that the present is not satisfactory, so it is a concern
for the present by looking back at the past. Nostalgia is a bridge between
past, present and future.
Conclusion :-
Svetlana Boym in The Future of
Nostalgia holds that nostalgia is a positive emotion because it is “not always
about the past; it can be retrospective and prospective” (Boym, 2001). The
purpose of homesickness is to create a better future by returning to the past.
Salman Rushdie in Imaginary Homelands says migrants “straddle two cultures
…fall between two stools” (Rushdie, 1981. p. 15). Restorative nostalgia urges
the characters in The Namesake to create an imagined homeland in which they
practice their cultural ritual and reconstruct their national identity.
Their hybridity is a compromise they have to make in order to survive in a
different culture but meanwhile it can also be a way to resist against the main
stream ideology. In this way, they transcend their former nostalgia and become
a more open, global nomad in the world.
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