Imaginary Homelands: Selected Essays: Salman Rushdie

 Hello Readers,

 
Imaginary Homelands is a collection of essays written by Salman Rushdie. He wrote these essays between 1981 to 1992. 

As part of the postcolonial studies, four essays from "Imaginary Homelands" are taken. The essays are as follows.

1. Imaginary Homelands
2. 'Commonwealth Literature' does not exist

3.New Empire within Britain

4. Attenborough's Gandhi

 So, let's Discuses about more about the easy....

 “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.Salman Rushdie selects different subjects like political, social, and literary topics in this essay with various deals and critical approaches. After reading this book, the 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.

1. 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. 

2. 'Commonwealth Literature' does not exist :- 

In the second essay “ Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exit “ there is a matter of English studies are taken to include commonwealth literature. Rushdie also gave many examples of an importance and an ignorance of commonwealth literature. Commonwealth literature appears, it is that body of writing created. Now days commonwealth literature was sounding very unlikeable indeed. Not only was it a ghetto ,but it was actually an exclusive ghetto. Rushdie says that as now days commonwealth literature has a lack of interest by people, on another side English is by now the world language. It achieved this status partly as a result of the physical colonization of a quarter of the globe by the British. But in India English is not so important language even in schools, collages. The children of independent India seem not to think of English as a part of their communication in routine life style. 

3. New Empire within Britain :- 

“ The New Empire Within Britain “ , this essay based on “ Power of British empire” on black people. Here Salman Rushdie shows his different experiences of white and black in Britain. He also gives information about real roots of Britain.He says that “ Britain isn’t Nazi Germany. The British Empire isn’t the Third Reich, but in Germany after the fall of Hitler heroic attempts were made by many people to purity German thought and the German language of the pollution of Nazism. The Britain is under going a critical pose of its past colonial period, and this crisis is not simply economics or political. It is a crisis of the whole culture , of the society’s entire sense of itself.Second thing is happens in there is the numbers of “ Immigration “. The main fact of white immigration as well as black , that the annual number of emigrants leaving these shores is now larger than the numbers of immigrates coming in and of the black communities over 40 percent are not immigrants but black Britons born and bred, speaking in the many voices and accents of Britain , and with no homeland but this one.

4. Attenborough's Gandhi :- 

Last essay of Salman Rushdie focuses on the view of “Attenborough’s Gandhi “- a film based on biography of Mahatma Karamchand Gandhi. This is the best film of 1983 in film industry.Salman Rushdie says God help the film industry after making this type of film. He critically shows his ideas on that film. He says that , why film is about only Gandhi ? why no Subhas Bose? Why no Tagore ? In the film there are many scenes of violence happened before 1947.In this essay Salman Rushdie says about the scene of Amritsar Massacre and the scene of killing Gandhi by Nathuram. He also says another fact of Gandhi’s “ Brahmacharya “.Nehru was not Gandhi’s disciple. They were equals and they argued fiercely in a matter of freedom movement.

Thank You...