Imaginary Homeland

 

Hello....

This great essay writern by Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (born 19 June 1947) is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be "the best novel of all winners" on two separate occasions , marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize. Though Imaginary Homelands consists of a series of disparate essays on a wide variety of topics, threads of migration and the need to recreate the home environment run through many of the essays, playing a prominent role in the overall theme of the book. 

Rushdie writes extensively about his personal experience as an Indian man from a Muslim minority family, who was set apart from others despite the fact that neither he nor his parents have a strong affiliation with Islam. Later, Rushdie attended school in England, where he experienced racism first hand, feeling the pull of living between nations and the identity crisis that can result from that pull. In the title essay of the collection, “Imaginary Homelands,” Rushdie writes explicitly about these racist experiences and the way he felt torn between India and England, where he was making a new home. 

As a bilingual person, Rushdie was torn also between languages – he writes about how, even when returning to one’s home country, those who migrate no longer feel at home, because they have been inundated with ideologies from another world. As such, Rushdie makes it clear that “imaginary homelands” are essentially the fictional creations of migrants, who seek an understanding of the places they live now and the places they come from. 

They recreate these places in order to satisfy their loss in their real, physical lives – something that Rushdie says he did himself, writing on India, Pakistan, and London. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He combines magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, diruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations.