"Imaginary Homelands" - Introduction

Imaginary Homelands by Salman Rushdie is a work that explains how being a diasporic writer gives one an ability to perceive world or cultures from different perspectives. The Introduction begins with Rushdie looking at an old photograph, a black and white photo that takes him to the past. He recalls the opening sentence of L.P. Hartley's novel The Go-Between - "The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there" - and tries to invert this idea of considering the past as alien, instead it is the present that is alien.

Rushdie further recollects memories of visiting Bombay, a city which he refers to as his "lost city". His father's name in the telephone directory and the colourful house which was present monochromatic in the old photograph become reminders of the past. To further this statement, Rushdie gives Midnight's Children, his own novel, as an example that showcased an attempt to restore the past for himself. According to Rushdie, the mere looking back into the past alone does not do any good, instead one must do so in knowledge as well. The knowledge would give rise to profound uncertainties, it would make the individual aware of his physical alienation from India and to reclaim the past or what was lost can be achieved through fictions, creating "imaginary homelands", "Indias of the mind".

Midnight's Children is an illustration portraying a version of India, precisely Rushdie's version of India. What Rushdie did in Midnight's Children was to make it "a novel of memory and about memory", so that he could come up with a version, of the hundreds of millions of possible versions, of India which he later calls - "my India". Though it is a version created through imagination, there is still a sincere attempt of making it as authentic as possible. However, imaginative truth is simultaneously honourable and suspect, and Rushdie's version of India could be a time when Rushdie actually belonged to it.

This leads us to his next line of thought where Indian writers writing from outside India try to reflect that world, they are obliged to deal with broken mirrors, some of those fragments have been irretrievably lost. But, for Rushdie, the 'broken mirror' can actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed, for it helps one to recollect memories from the past, even the trivial things become important when the past is revisited (example - the slogans, advertisements, songs, etc.). These fragmentations, therefore, made trivial things seem like symbols. The past is reconstructed provisionally, yet there is an excitement in its discovery even if they are pieces of the most common objects.

Human beings do not perceive things on the 'whole', the 'whole sight' is almost impossible to achieve. As Milan Kundera says, "The struggle of man against power, is the struggle of memory against forgetting". In context to this, Rushdie elaborates that human beings do not perceive things whole, they are wounded creatures and cracked lenses. The meanings that we construct become shaky edifices that we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated and people loved.

Rushdie further foregrounds few questions keeping his arguments of being a diasporic writer as the base: "Does literature seek to do no more than describe?" - "Can the writers do no more than describe, from a distance, the world that they have left?" - "Or does the distance open any other doors?" Before attempting to arrive at ab answer, Rushdie gives an example of Mrs. Gandhi (Indira Gandhi) and her statement given to the press/media during the Emergency. According to the statement recorded by a reporter, Mrs. Gandhi claimed that there were no bad things or forced sterilizations that happened during the Emergency. Rushdie questions the 'state truth', because as an outsider, how does one get to know the truth and this inevitably leads one to arrive at a conclusion that politicians and writers often become rivals. And, for a writer, a novel becomes one way of denying the official, politicians' version of truth.

There are no fixed answers or solutions to the raised questions but one can answer only in the hope of arriving at a probable solution. The function of "literature is self-validating". It is to say that "a book is not justified by its author's worthiness to write it, but by the quality of what has been written". Books become good when it goes to that edge and risk falling over it - "when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared".

Further, the Indian writer, who looks back at India, does so through guilt-tinted spectacles. The writer's identity is at once plural and partial where he straddles between two cultures yet does not consider it as an infertile territory for him to occupy. There is also a linguistic struggle which becomes a reflection of other struggles taking place in the real world, the struggles between the cultures within ourselves and the influences at work upon our societies. By translating, Rushdie is forging his 'British-Indian' identity, he is 'bearing across' meanings of one culture to the other. He argues that something always gets lost in translation, but there is also the notion that something can also be gained.

In conclusion, Rushdie elaborates on how plurality equips a writer to build a new, 'modern' world out of an old, legend-haunted civilization, an old culture which one has brought into a newer one. Literature, then, functions to find new angles to enter into the reality, and the long geographical perspective with distance provides one with such angles. However, there is a trap that we fall into unconsciously, the trap of having a 'ghetto mentality' where we confine ourselves within narrowly defined cultural frontiers.

In this context, Rushdie's personal take is that he has no reader in mind, he writes for ideas, people, events, shapes and 'things' that will be of interest to others. International writers have the pleasant freedom of being a literary migrant, which provides them with a larger literature, a polyglot family tree to which they learn from. Rushdie ends the essay by quoting from Saul Bellow's novel The Dean's December - "For God's sake, open the universe a little more!" - which means a writer must look at the world from a holistic perspective which will allow him to appreciate and critically look at his own culture and other cultures.