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Assignment Paper No. 11

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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 IMAGINARY HOMELANDS

“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.
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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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