Rushdie writes “The broken mirror may actually be as valuable as the one

which is supposedly unflawed.” Comment upon the importance of residual

memories for a writer of the Diaspora.

Anupriya Palni

19 ENM 36

GL 7294

MA (Prev.) 2nd Sem

Prose & Fiction from Postmodern to Contemporary Period

In the beginning of his essay Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie describes how his
return to his ancestral home in Bombay led to a desire to reclaim his history and homeland. He
felt that his life was inseparable from his roots in Bombay and India and through a literary work
he wanted to reclaim not his city, country and heritage. This he says was responsible for the
inception of his novel, Midnight’s Children. At the same time believes that this reclaiming of
heritage and reliance on old memories for recreating an image of his homeland has to be
practiced with caution. Diasporic authors face the danger of presenting an unauthentic version of
their homelands to their audience. They rely on old memories that have over the time depleted
and at times even changed. They often end up spinning tales of fictional hometowns and
homelands that no longer exist or never did.

Having been born and raised in Bombay, Rushdie feels attachment towards the city as
well as the country. He calls Bombay a city that has been founded upon by foreigners on
reclaimed land. He feels that since he’s stayed away from his country for so long he was almost
qualified to be called a foreigner as well and hence he must reclaim his city too. “Bombay is a
city built by foreigners upon reclaimed land; I, who had been away so long that I almost
qualified for the title of farangi, was gripped by the conviction that I, too, had a city and a history
to reclaim.” (Rushdie, 10) He feels that all displaced writers, the ones who’ve been exiled, who
have emigrated or are expatriates, all feel a similar sense of loss and longing to recover all that is
lost even if it comes at the cost of turning into a salt pillar. He makes a reference to the Old
Testament when three angels visited Abraham’s nephew Lot. They told him to gather his family
and leave Sodom which would soon be demolished. They presented the condition that none of
them must look back towards the cities while leaving. Lot took their advice and left Sodom with
his wife and children but his wife looked back towards their burning house and she was turned to
a salt pillar. According to Rushdie, if writers try to recover their homelands, they must do so only
if they realize they can’t recover what they had lost. They can only recover a part of what they
had left behind. Their homelands have not been static like their memories in their time of
separation.

He further says that for an Indian writer to write from beyond the borders of India is like
writing with fragmented memories. He only has a country made out of these fragmented
memories to recreate the settings for his novels and stories from. “It may be that when the Indian
writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken
mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost.” (Rushdie, 11) His memory is
like a broken mirror and some pieces have been lost forever. To rely on these memories means
that he can at times be guilt of unauthentic and incorrect recreations. This however doesn’t mean
that there are only fatalities that emerge out of this nostalgia. He feels that when a writer looks
back on these memory fragments, even insignificant objects are amplified into symbols. “The
shards of memory acquired greater status, greater resonance because they were remains:
fragmentation made trivial things seem like symbols, and the mundane acquired numinous
qualities.” (Rushdie, 12) Even personal memories grow stronger when they are recovered from
these fragments and the simplest everyday activities become mysterious. Rushdie claims that
while writing his novel Midnight’s Children, he found that trying to recover his memories of
India opened new doors for him. It emphasized what had been trivial to him in his memories. It
was only because he had just these memory fragments to work with that he could focus on
pointed issues instead of being distracted by the big picture.

Rushdie adds that even though it is said that “the past is a country from which we have all
emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity” (Rushdie, 12), it is the displaced writer
who feels the loss the most. It is because the writer is not just away from his past; he’s also away
from where his past happened. He must live in a country where he doesn’t speak or write the
language of his native land which makes it all the more necessary to recover his homeland.

He hence feels that recovering these broken glass memories is not just about nostalgia or
satisfy a longing for the homeland. It is a valuable tool for writing and connecting to the present.
While there’s no way to guarantee authenticity from this practice, if the writer makes peace with
this lack of authenticity he can give room to creating an ‘Imaginary Homeland’.

Works Cited

 Rushdie, Salman. “Imaginary Homelands.” IMAGINARY HOMELANDS .ESSAYS AND

CRITICISM 1981-1991, Granta Books, 1991, pp. 9–21.