Introduction: The Past as a Foreign Country
Salman Rushdie’s essay Imaginary Homelands (1982) is a meditation on displacement, memory, and the writer’s struggle to reconstruct a lost past. It begins with a photograph of a Bombay house—one he had never lived in but which symbolizes his fractured connection to India. Rushdie inverts L.P. Hartley’s famous line, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” to argue that for the migrant, the present is foreign, while the past is home—even if that home is irretrievable.
This essay explores Rushdie’s key arguments:
The migrant’s fragmented memory – How nostalgia distorts the past.
The politics of description – Why rewriting history is an act of resistance.
The necessity of “broken mirrors” – Why partial truths are more honest than “whole sight.”
The remaking of language – How English must be reinvented by postcolonial writers.
Through these themes, Rushdie articulates the condition of the diasporic writer—one who is neither fully of the homeland nor the adopted land, yet must write from this liminal space.
1. Fragmented Memory and the “India of the Mind”
Rushdie describes revisiting Bombay after decades and finding his father’s name still in the phone directory—an eerie reminder of a life that continued without him. This uncanny experience underscores a central dilemma: the migrant’s past is not just lost but actively rewritten by memory.
Memory as a Fading Photograph
Rushdie recalls Bombay in "black and white," but upon returning, he is struck by the vivid colors—red tiles, green cactus, bougainvillea.
This realization births Midnight’s Children—not as a historical record, but as an attempt to restore the past in “Cinemascope and glorious Technicolor.”
The Fallibility of Memory
Rushdie’s narrator, Saleem Sinai, is unreliable, his story full of gaps and distortions.
The migrant’s memory is a broken mirror—some shards are lost forever, but the remaining fragments gain symbolic weight.
“The shards of memory acquired greater status, greater resonance, because they were remains.”
This fragmentation is not a weakness but a strength—it forces the writer to confront the constructed nature of history.
2. The Politics of Description: Rewriting Official History
Rushdie argues that redescribing the world is a political act. When the state controls history (e.g., India’s Emergency, Pakistan’s denial of Bangladesh atrocities), literature becomes a weapon against forgetting.
Literature vs. State Truth
Midnight’s Children challenges Indira Gandhi’s sanitized version of the Emergency.
Rushdie cites Milan Kundera: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
Who Has the Right to Speak?
Critics argue that expatriate writers, safe abroad, have no right to critique India.
Rushdie rejects this: literature is self-validating. A book’s worth lies in its artistic truth, not the author’s proximity to trauma.
“A book is not justified by its author’s worthiness to write it, but by the quality of what has been written.”
This stance justifies Rushdie’s own project—writing India from London, not as an insider, but as someone whose distance offers a unique perspective.
3. The Necessity of “Broken Mirrors” Over “Whole Sight”
Rushdie critiques John Fowles’ ideal of “whole sight”—the notion that one must see the past completely to understand it. For the migrant, such wholeness is impossible.
Partial Perception as Truth
Human memory is flawed; we build meaning from “scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles.”
Rushdie’s narrative in Midnight’s Children becomes more fragmented as it nears the present—reflecting how closeness distorts clarity.
The Migrant as a “Cracked Lens”
Unlike omniscient historians, migrants see history through “stereoscopic vision”—both inside and outside their cultures.
This duality allows for new angles on reality, making diasporic literature uniquely valuable.
“We are Hindus who have crossed the black water; we are Muslims who eat pork.”
The migrant’s hybrid identity is not a weakness but a creative force.
4. Remaking English: Language as Liberation
Rushdie acknowledges the colonial baggage of English but insists that postcolonial writers must reclaim it.
The Necessity of Reinvention
Indian writers in England cannot use English as the British did—they must “remake it for their own purposes.”
This linguistic struggle mirrors the cultural negotiation of migration.
Translation as Gain, Not Just Loss
While something is always lost in translation, something is also gained—new idioms, new ways of seeing.
Rushdie embraces this, arguing that “having been borne across the world, we are translated men.”
This linguistic hybridity defines diasporic literature, from Naipaul’s irony to Arundhati Roy’s lyrical subversions.
Conclusion: The Migrant’s Cry – “Open the Universe a Little More!”
Rushdie ends with Saul Bellow’s image of a barking dog protesting the limits of its existence: “For God’s sake, open the universe a little more!” This, Rushdie suggests, is the migrant writer’s mission—to push against boundaries, to refuse ghettoization, and to claim multiple literary ancestries (Gogol, Kafka, Tagore, Melville).
Key Takeaways:
Memory is creative, not archival – The past is not fixed but reconstructed.
Literature is political – It challenges state-controlled narratives.
Fragmentation is honesty – The migrant’s broken mirror reflects deeper truths.
Language must be decolonized – English, like identity, must be remade.
Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands is not just about loss but reinvention—the migrant’s right to reimagine the past and, in doing so, reshape the future.
“We are here. And we are not willing to be excluded from any part of our heritage.”
In a world of borders and belonging, Rushdie’s essay remains a manifesto for the power of diasporic storytelling.
