Unit 3: Salman Rushdie: “Imaginary Homelands”
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Unit 3 Salman Rushdie: “Imaginary Homelands” UNIT 3: SALMAN RUSHDIE: “IMAGINARY HOMELANDS” UNIT STRUCTURE 3.1 Learning Objectives 3.2 Introduction 3.3 Salman Rushdie: Life and Works 3.4 Explanation of the Text 3.5 Major Themes 3.6 Style and Language 3.7 Let us Sum up 3.8 Further Reading 3.9 Answers to Check Your Progress 3.10 Model Questions 3.1 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After going though this unit you will be able to: • explain the life of Rushdie and appreciate his works • list the significant contributions of Rushdie • describe the essay “Imaginary Homelands” • discuss the major themes of the essay • analyse the style of the essay 3.2 INTRODUCTION This unit introduces you to one of the most famous twentieth century novelists and essayists, Salman Rushdie and his essay titled “Imaginary Homelands”.You will be acquainted with the life and works of Rushdie through this unit. It will be followed by a discussion of the essay and a focus on the significant themes that Rushdie has thrown light into the essay. This unit also 30 Alternative English (Block 1) Salman Rushdie: “Imaginary Homelands” Unit 3 provides you ideas about the exuberant writing style of Rushdie whose skillful handling of language is worth mentioning. To begin with, let us now discuss in greater details the life and contribution of this famous writer. 3.3 SALMAN RUSHDIE: LIFE AND WORKS Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay on 19 June, 1947. He began his studies at Cathedral and John Connor School in Mumbai. At fourteen, he was sent to Rugby School, a public school in Warwickshire, England. His Rugby experience was largely miserable; he found the atmosphere racist and unfriendly. In 1965, he joined King’s College, Cambridge for higher studies, where he studied history. Here, he found the student body far more open and diverse and easy to assimilate. He involved himself in theatre through the Cambridge Footlights Club, in which he shared space with the likes of Germaine Greer and David Hare. Even while he was in England, his parents had moved from Bombay to Karachi in 1964, seventeen years after Partition. One of the reasons cited by Rushdie for the move is that the family started feeling insecure in Bombay due to anti-Muslim prejudice. His father’s properties were taken over by the government as evacuee properties. Rushdie was strongly opposed to the move; with the selling off of ‘Windsor Villa’, the house where he spent his childhood by his father, he writes, he “felt an abyss open beneath [his] feet”. He could never relate to Pakistan as a ‘home’, he always felt a sense of belonging to India, Bombay in particular. To borrow a line from Midnight’s Children, “it was not ‘my’ country – or not then. Not my country, although I stayed in it– as refugee, not citizen”. He says in an interview that Midnight’s Children originated with a long time idea of writing a novel about Bombay, Bombay in the [19]50s and [19]60s. On the other hand, Pakistan became, in both Midnight’s Children and Shame, “a bleak and unforgiving place in contrast to the wonderfully various and endlessly recreated India”. After Cambridge, Rushdie returned to Pakistan for a brief stay. He started working for Pakistan’s television service in Karachi, which was none too happy due to its censorious atmosphere. A screening of Edward Albee’s Zoo Story that he produced and acted in had to be cut because it mentioned ‘pork’ and referred to God as a ‘coloured queen’. An article he had written for a small Alternative English (Block 1) 31 Unit 3 Salman Rushdie: “Imaginary Homelands” magazine was suppressed without any explanation by the press. He went back to England, took British citizenship, and tried a career, first in acting, then in writing, but eventually joined an advertising agency– Ogilvy and Mather– as a copywriter. He produced his first novel Grimus (1975) during his employment at the firm. It was his second book Midnight’s Children (1981) that made him famous overnight. It went on to win the Booker Prize in 1981 as well as the James Tait Black Prize, and rose to the status of a literary masterpiece both in and outside India. When Rushdie toured the country in 1983, hundreds of people flocked to see him. Within a year, publishers claimed, the novel had sold 4000 copies in hardcover and 45000 in paperback, quite unprecedented figures for an Indian English novelist. CHECK YOUR PROGRESS Q1. Why did Rushdie’s family move from Bombay to Karachi? Q2. What was the name of the house where Rushdie spent his childhood? Q3. Why was the reason of Rushdie’s unhappy career in the television service of Karachi? Q4. Which literary work made Salman Rushdie world famous? Some of his works include: Shame, published in 1983; Rushdie’s first full- length work of non-fiction, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey, a travelogue based on his Nicaraguan experience was published in 1987; The Satanic Verses, published in 1988 uses Magic Realism and became a 1988 Booker finalist and won the 1988 Whitbread Award for novel of the year; Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) which won the Writer’s Guild Award. Meanwhile, Midnight’s Children was declared the ‘Booker of Bookers’ in 1993, the best book in 25 years of Booker history. During this time he also published a collection of essays, Imaginary Homelands (1991). The British Film Institute pamphlet The Wizard of Oz was published in 1992.A short story 32 Alternative English (Block 1) Salman Rushdie: “Imaginary Homelands” Unit 3 collection by Rushdie East, West appeared in 1994.Then in 1995, he published his fifth novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh, which went on to win the Whitbread Prize for the best novel of that year and the Aristeion Prize in 1996 besides being short listed for the Man Booker Prize for 1995. Rushdie’s sixth novel The Ground Beneath her Feet was published in 2000. It is based on the Orpheus-Eurydice myth with rock music replacing Orpheus’s lyre. His seventh novel is Fury published in 2001. The least-known of Rushdie’s novels, Fury is the story of a Cambridge educated millionaire from Bombay. In 2005, Rushdie produced his eighth novel, Shalimar the Clown. This was followed by his ninth novel, The Enchantress of Florence in 2008. In 2010, Rushdie produced Luka and the Fire of Life, a sequel to Haroun and the Sea of Stories. His latest work Joseph Anton-A Memoir (2012) is an extraordinarily frank and honest account of his life after the fatwa, a story of how a writer was forced underground, moving from house to house, with the constant presence of an armed police protection team. Published in September, 2015, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is his latest novel. He has co-edited Mirrorwork, an anthology of contemporary Indian writings. He has also co-edited the anthology of The Best American Short Stories of 2008. CHECK YOUR PROGRESS Q5. Name the travelogue by Rushdie based on his Nicaraguan experience. Q6. Name the latest novel by Salman Rushdie. 3.4 EXPLANATION OF THE TEXT Rushdie opens his essay with the description of an old photograph that hangs on the wall of his office room. It’s a photograph of the old house in Bombay where he was born and spent his childhood. The photograph reminds him of a line in a novel which says that “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there”. But Rushdie sees that in his case it is the reverse which Alternative English (Block 1) 33 Unit 3 Salman Rushdie: “Imaginary Homelands” is true. For him, it is his present which is foreign, in all senses of the term. For him, it is his past that embodies a home, although, he says, it is “a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time”. Rushdie then goes on to describe his visit to his hometown, Bombay which is the “lost city” referred to in the previous line. He had made the visit after a quite long gap. While going through the telephone directory on an impulse, he found to his surprise as well as delight that it still contained his father’s name, number and address. He took this “eerie discovery” as a sign that he was being claimed by his homeland which was trying to show him that it was not a part of his past alone, but has continued significance in his identity and being. When he went next to visit the house of his childhood, the one in the photograph mentioned previously, he was met by an overwhelming experience. His memories of his long lost home were kept alive only through photographs and the photograph of the house with him was taken in black and white. But what he now stood facing in Bombay was a piece of his memory in all its living colours. Rushdie says that that was perhaps the moment when his novel Midnight’s Children was born. He says that it was born out of his desire to restore his past to myself, not like a black and white movie but on a grand glorious scale, like that of a movie shot in CinemaScope and Technicolor. The city of Bombay was initially a group of seven islands. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the islands were merged into a single land mass mainly through land reclamation under the supervision of the British government. Rushdie, who was born and raised in Bombay, has a special attachment to the city.