Imaginary Homelands

 Salman Rushdi

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie[a] FRSL (born 19 June 1947) is a British Indian novelist and essayist[3] whose work, combining magical realism with historical fiction, is primarily concerned with the many connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, with much of his fiction being set on the Indian subcontinent.

Imaginary Homelands 

Salman Rushdie at his most candid, impassioned, and incisive—Imaginary Homelands is an important and moving record of one writer’s intellectual and personal odyssey. These 75 essays demonstrate Rushdie’s range and prophetic vision, as he focuses on his fellow writers, on films, and on the mine-strewn ground of race, politics and religion.

 "Imaginary Homelands" -- "Essays and Criticism 1981-1991" -- is perhaps too grand a term for this assemblage of Salman Rushdie's seminar papers, television broadcasts, book reviews, movie reviews, public lectures, interviews and articles. Would it have been published now -- and in its present form -- were it not for the high and terrible drama of the author's recent life? Probably not, given the scrappy and occasional nature of a considerable part of its content. Still, enough strong pieces are included to make the book welcome to anyone who has grappled -- in delight or exasperation or both -- with Mr. Rushdie's tumultuous novels or who shares his interest in the political and cultural plight of the migrant.

In his view, the migrant -- whether from one country to another, from one language or culture to another or even from a traditional rural society to a modern metropolis -- "is, perhaps, the central or defining figure of the twentieth century." On the complex situation of this emblematic figure, Mr. Rushdie himself can of course speak with unique authority, for he has embodied the outsider, "the Other," all of his life: first as a Muslim in predominantly Hindu India, then as an Indian migrant to Pakistan, next as an Indian-Pakistani living in Britain and, since the publication of "The Satanic Verses," as a "blasphemer" against Islam, a man in hiding, marked for murder.

Mr. Rushdie does not pull his punches when it comes to the failings of his adopted land (and by extension Western Europe and the United States) in the matter of racial prejudice. Writing from the position of the British left, in a 1984 essay with the neo-Orwellian title "Outside the Whale," Mr. Rushdie voices his scorn for the current nostalgia for the empire and the raj as exemplified in what he calls "the blackface minstrel-show of 'The Far Pavilions' in its TV serial incarnation" and the "overpraised" "Jewel in the Crown"; nor has he much good to say about Richard Attenborough's "Gandhi" or David Lean's film of "A Passage to India." He writes that "there can be little doubt that in Britain today the refurbishment of the Empire's tarnished image is under way. The continuing decline, the growing poverty and the meanness of spirit of much of Thatcherite Britain encourages many Britons to turn their eyes nostalgically to the lost hour of their precedence. The recrudescence of imperialist ideology and the popularity of Raj fictions put one in mind of the phantom twitchings of an amputated limb."

In a piece called "Home Front" (1984), Mr. Rushdie analyzes racism in terms of "the fear of the primal Dark" and "the idea of the Other, the reversed twin in the looking-glass, the double, the negative image, who by his oppositeness tells one what one is" -- only to conclude that "it will not suffice to blame racism and the creation of lying images of black peoples on some deep-bubbling, universal failing in humanity." Nor will it do to excuse racial prejudice on the grounds of its universality. While "it is obviously true that blacks and Asians need to face up to and deal with our own prejudices, it seems equally clear that the most attention must be paid to the most serious problem, and in Britain, that is white racism. If we were speaking of India or Africa, we would have other forms of racism to fight against. But you fight hardest where you live: on the home front."