ABSTRACT
Salman Rushdie begins his well-known 1982 essay, ‘Imaginary Homelands’, with an observation that is both remarkable and obvious. Describing an old photograph of the house in which he was born in Bombay, which now hangs on his study wall in London, Rushdie is reminded of the famous opening sentence of L. P. Hartley’s novel The GoBetween: ‘The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there’ (Rushdie 1992: 9). The phrase has become a byword of heritage studies (e.g. Lowenthal 1985) and acquires a particular literalness in migrant contexts when applied by or to those who have left their pasts behind them in an old country. What is remarkable, however, is Rushdie’s qualification of this truism. He writes, ‘the photograph tells me to invert this idea; it reminds me that it’s my present that is foreign, and that the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time’ (1992: 9). Rushdie’s sense of alienation or foreignness is experienced in the present, part of the ‘here and now’, not the ‘there and then’. Despite the ‘urge to reclaim’, the past remains irrecoverable, and, thus, writing for himself and other Indian ‘exiles, emigrants or expatriates’, Rushdie concludes that,
Our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means 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, Indias of the mind. (ibid.: 10)
As ‘partial beings’, ‘wounded creatures’ seeing through ‘cracked lenses’ and ‘capable only of fractured perceptions’ (ibid.: 12), such fictions must be improvised from a hotchpotch of impressions and dispositions – ‘scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved’ (ibid.). Moreover, Rushdie suspects that this sense of alienation and the constructive compensations of the mind are not restricted to ex-pat Indians, but are the universal predicaments of modernity. ‘It may be argued’, he writes, ‘that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity’ (ibid.: 12). It is tempting to posit some kind of Lévi-
Straussian structural logic to this process: the langue of the universal myth of the Fall, the parole of the particular past felt to have been lost, the latter constructed in the manner of the bricoleur from the scraps and dogmas at hand (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 1968).
