Imaginary Homelands and Explanation of essay Commonwealth Literature does not exist

Name:  Reena Khasatiya
Sem -3
Mail Id – kkhasatiyamili21@gmail.com
Paper no. – 11 The Post Colonial Literature
Total Words- 1350
Plagiarism-  74%
To evalute y assignment click here

Topic- Imaginary Homelands and Explanation of essay  Commonwealth Literature does not exist

About Salman Rushdie
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. 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.

About Imaginary Homelands

Salman Rushdie is most controversial writer among Indian writing in English. His book published under the title “imaginary Homeland” Is the collection of the essay written during 1981 to 1992. All essays are based on the experience of Salman Rushdie’s and his contemporary time scenario. This book nicely collected the controversial issues of the decade. In these days Indira Gandhi was ruling. In this session one of the novelist whose name Rushdie did not reveal, began his contribution by reciting a Sanskrit Shloka, and then, instead of translating the verse he declared. “Every educated Indian will understand what I have just said”. This was unacceptable as, in the room were Indian writers and scholars from conceivable backgrounds such as Christian, Parasi, Muslim and Sikh. None of them rose in Sanskrit tradition and they were reasonably educated. The questions that surrounded his mind were -what were we being told? -we aren’t Indian’? The second day, an eminent Indian academic delivered a paper on Indian culture that utterly ignored all minority communities and characterized Muslim culture as imperialist and inauthentic. This made him write a book that searched for his ‘existence'. The conference was for him a bitter experience which pricked him like a thorn.


The book ‘Imaginary Homelands’ is 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


“Writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates,” Rushdie says in this collection’s title essay, “are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt.” Such a writer comes to understand, however, that “we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, India’s of the mind.” In his own fictions, Salman Rushdie has created just such imaginary homelands: India of the mind in Midnight’s Children, a Pakistan of the mind in Shame, an Islam, Bombay, and London of the mind in The Satanic Verses. While they are not precisely real, these imaginary homelands capture the essence of reality as seen through the eyes of characters who, like their author, face the challenge of straddling two cultures.


Commonwealth Literature does not exist
“Many of the delegates, I found, were willing freely to  admit that the term 'Commonwealth literature' was a bad one. South Africa and Pakistan, for instance, are not members of the Commonwealth, but their authors apparently belong to its literature. On the other hand, England, which, as far as I'm aware, has not been expelled from the Commonwealth quite yet, has been excluded from its literary manifestation. For obvious reasons. It would never do to include English literature, the great sacred thing itself, with this bunch of upstarts, huddling together under this new and badly made umbrella.” (Salman Rushdie)


What is commonwealth Literature?
The term "commonwealth" has a long history. It was first used by Oliver Cromwell, after establishing the republican  government in England in 1649. Literally it implied common good or public good; a body-politic in which power is with the people. It came into discuss as a form of government for nearly 300 years, till it was resurrected in the statue of Westminster 1931, when with the creation of the dominions, the British Empire was re-christened as the British commonwealth of Nations. Commonwealth literature concept came into practice in the mid-twentieth century, there are various factors that were responsible feor its growth in the nineteenth century.
important aspect of so-called Commonwealth literature may be that it is written in one place by people from another place. Whereas an earlier generation of writers settled in Britain, many contemporary authors have chosen to live in Canada or the United States. A significant part of the West Indian, or Caribbean, diaspora (itself part of the African diaspora) has found itself in Canada, alongside the Indian/Asian diaspora.


According to Rushdie, one of the rules, one of the ideas on which the edifice rests, is that literature is an expression of nationality. Literature is a general representation of cultural particularities  that is, literature varies from culture to culture, from one period to another. There is another element of literature that shocks the literary mind. A respectable literary piece, according to Rushdie must meet the demands of authenticity. Authenticity demands that sources, forms, style, language and symbol all derive from a supposedly homogenous and unbroken tradition.

There is where tragedy falls to the ground. What the term authenticity reveals, so much in the use inside the little world of Commonwealth literature would seem ridiculous outside this world. Now, the lexicon of Commonwealth literature (as it applies to the literary aspect of British colonialism) is an innovation. Literary critics often praise the achievements of Commonwealth literary figures, forgetting the most essential element of literature. Today, literary works are not mutually exclusive  in the sense that, they are simultaneously influenced by different cultures. In some Indian novels, both the form and style resemble that which Europeans used in the early 20th century. This is not an intentional event. Many of these writers are Western educated. As such, it is inevitable that their style would follow the Western model.

Commonwealth literature is therefore an unreliable face of historicity. It is neither founded on one form nor guided by an encompassing set of norms. Indeed, when one talks of Commonwealth literature, one needs to look beyond the borders of the nation-state  to the land of the West. In short, according to Rushdie, Commonwealth literature is an encompassing myth.

In additiin, He adds that... One of the points I want to make is that what I've said indicates, I hope, that Indian society and Indian literature have a complex and developing relationship with the English language. This kind of post-colonial dialectic is propounded as one of the unifying factors in 'Commonwealth literature'; but it clearly does not exist, or at least is far more peripheral to the problems of literatures in Canada, Australia, even South Africa. Every time you examine the general theories of 'Commonwealth literature' they come apart in your hands. English literature has its Indian branch. By this I mean the literature of the English language. This literature is also Indian literature. There is no incompatibility here. If history -creates complexities, let us not try to simplify them. ) So: English is an Indian literary language, and by now, thanks to writers like Tagore, Dasai, Chaudhuri, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Anita Desai and others, it has quite a pedigree. Now it certainly true that the English-language literatures of England, Ireland and the USA are older than, for example, the Indian; so it's possible that 'Commonwealth literature' is no more than an ungainly name for the world’s Conclusion,(from original essay)

Conclusion
Commonwealth Literature’ is thus used to cover the literary works from territories that were once part of the British Empire, but it usually excludes books from the United Kingdom unless these are produced by resident writers who originate from a former colony. The great irony, however, is that much of the best literature that has emerged from Britain in the last years has been produced by writers from or with roots in colonies.

Reference
http://literature-articles.blogspot.com/2014/12/commonwealth-literature-does-not-exist.html
https://brainly.in/question/1151109
http://literature-articles.blogspot.com/2014/12/commonwealth-literature-does-not-exist.html?m=1