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This task related to Imaginary Homelands: Selected Essays: Salman Rushdie, Department of English MKBU university.
INTRODUCTION-:
Salman Rushdie is the most controversial writer among Indian writing in English. His book published under the title “Imaginary Homeland” is the collection of the essay written between 1981 and 1992. All the essays are based on Salman Rushdie’s experience of the contemporary time scenario. This book is the collection of the controversial issues of the decade. In those days Indira Gandhi was the prime minister of India.
“This book is an incomplete, personal view of the interregnum of 1980s, not all of whose symptoms it has to be said, were morbid.” (introduction-1) It clearly says that all are his personal views that may be are may not be completely right, according to him it was a decade, what Gramsci has said “the old was dying and yet new could not be born.” (Rushdie, 1992)
The book ‘Imaginary Homelands’ divided into six sections. They are.
1) Midnight’s children.
2) Politics of India and Pakistan.
3) Indo-Anglian literature.
4) Movie and Television.
5) Experience of migrants, -Indian migrants to Britain.
6) Thatcher/ flout election –question of Palestine
The moral rage, then, is genuine. So too is the idealism. They are both in their own way impressive and on a number of occasions they hit their targets. The problem is that moral rage and idealism are a highly destructive combination, and unless they are guided by real insight and by a great deal of ordinary human sensitivity they can often end by hitting the wrong targets – with disastrous consequences.
One indication that there is something wrong with Rushdie’s aim is provided by the text of his celebrated – or notorious – Channel 4 broadcast on racism. A particular section of his talk disturbed me when I first heard it in 1982 and it disturbs me still:
In Germany, after the fall of Hitler, heroic attempts were made by many people to purify German thought and the German language of the pollution of Nazism … But British thought, British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism. It’s still there, breeding lice and vermin, waiting for unscrupulous people to exploit it for their own ends.
British racism, of course, is not our problem. It’s yours. We simply suffer from the effects of your problem. And until you, the whites, see that the issue is not integration, or harmony, or multi-culturalism, but simply facing up to and eradicating the prejudices within almost all of you, the citizens of your new and last Empire will be obliged to struggle against you.
What we encounter in Rushdie’s broadcast is not the rhetoric of liberation. It is the rhetoric of mastery being pressed into service on behalf of the oppressed. So long as Rushdie spoke on behalf of the powerless against the powerful, this rhetoric seemed just and humane to many. Tragically, however, when his own sophisticated insensitivity to the language of faith brought him into conflict with Muslims who, at their most extreme, were themselves rigid and even racialist in their response, he reacted by using similar rhetoric. Instead of recognising that Muslim extremism, like white racialism, is the reaction of people who themselves feel oppressed, vulnerable and wounded, and that moderate Muslims were deeply offended too, he made the mistake of treating all those who opposed the novel as though they were part of a demonic host. As a result a tragedy which might have been defused in its early stages was inexorably deepened.
Rushdie seems not to have recognised that the rhetoric of pollution and the images of lice and vermin which he uses here were part of the very substance of National Socialist propaganda. What such language perfectly expresses is the extreme racialist’s assumption that he is himself an island of purity and that all corruption, cruelty and uncleanness reside outside him in an alien people which must be cleansed from the face of the earth. Instead of seeking to analyse this self-righteous and repressive frame of mind Rushdie comes perilously close to adopting it himself. The result is a kind of racialism-in-reverse in which he speaks out as the member of a class of wronged and all-virtuous victims against the enemy – the corrupt, all-sinful whites.
Essays & Criticism 1981-1991
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.
Praise
“Whether he is analyzing racial prejudice in Britain or surveying an India riven by fundamentalism and politics of religious hatred, he writes as an impartial observer, a citizen of the world. Subtle and witty, these concise, eloquent pieces are a pleasure to read.” —Publisher’s Weekly
Conclusion: -
A work of literature is an expression of feeling, experience, but it doesn’t mean to force him to leave the country, we Indian really need to understand it that the freedom of thinking can bring better life in society by the writer and free thinkers like Salman Rushdie. In the conclusion of the essay, as a radical thinker he compared a writer within himself with a dog from the novel “The Dean’s December”, as barking of the dog protagonist Dean imagine dogs’ barking as protest against his limit of experience. “for god’s sake the dog is saying open the universe a little more”.
Works Cited
Rushdie, S. (1992). Imaginary Homelands. In S. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (pp. 1-25). London
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