The literature of exile and imaginary homelands in salmon rushdie, bharati mukherjee, and v. s. naipaul - Essay Example

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Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee, and V.S. Naipaul can all, in different ways, be considered writers in exile. They have all traveled across the sea, all have come to a new, "foreign" land, and each one interacts with the English language as both "a home" for words and an alien tongue. In addition, within these three writers' works, we can see the operations of exile, how the thesethbiographical and linguistic exile of these writers come to be processed and represented, reflected and distorted, and the effect that the concept of exile (that resounds throughout their works) has on the literary and historical contexts that are their new "homes." These novelist's treat exile not simply as a condition of the post-colonial world, but as a central means to understand the self. Rather than labeling them proponents of any post-colonial literature, therefore, we should perhaps call these three novelists the most important artists of a new genre: a literature of exile.
Salman Rushdie is an...
d Mumbai) on 19 June 1947-the year of Indian independence and the year that acquires so much importance in his most critically acclaimed novel, Midnight's Children (1981). However, while still a child, he moved to England and was schooled at two of the pillars of the British establishment: Rugby and Cambridge. Consequently, his homeland was necessarily doubled, between the Indian subcontinent (where he later lived again, in Pakistan, with his family) and the British Isles to which he returned a second time to work in an advertising agency before beginning his career as a novelist.
It is precisely this double identity that informs a great deal of Rushdie's literature-from his first novel, Grimus (1975), to his most recent non-fiction and travel-writing works, such as Step Across the Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002 (2002) and "The East is Blue" (2004). He is able to write about both the culture of his parents and his newly adopted culture from the position of a partial outsider to both, and is able to understand both sides of a sometimes (often violently) opposed set of cultural constructions. This is not to say that Rushdie's writing career has been one in which he feigns a transcendental stance, a distanced style, that sets him above both cultures as an objective and unbiased third party. The case is quite the reverse. His writing is very much "at ground level": it locates itself within the heady back and forth of cultural interchange. Like a geneticist he splices (and inextricably interweaves) a double helix from the quite separate societies of which he has been a part. Rushdie crosses English literary references with Quoranic exegesis and mixes Indian folklore with modern American slang. It is precisely within this interweaving that is born the exciting ...Download file to see next pagesRead More