The New Empire within Britain- Imaginary Homelands by Salman Rushdie

Name: Miss. Jayati Rudresh-Kumar Thakar 

Roll. No: 30

Year: Batch 2015-1017

M.A. Semester: 3

Paper no. 11 Post-Colonial Studies

Unit: 2

Assignment topic: The New Empire within Britain- Imaginary Homelands by Salman Rushdie

Email.Id: jjayti.thakar94@gmail.com

Submitted to: 

Smt.S.B.Gardi          

Department of English,                              Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University, Bhavnagar, Gujarat, India

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Imaginary Homelands

-by Salman Rushdie

* Nostalgia and Memory

“.....The photographs 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.”

It is impossible to re- create the past. There is always remains gap between pasts and you can fill that gap with creating fiction. Exactly ‘The Imaginary Homelands’ is all about through which Rushdie tries to fill up that gap.

The New Empire within Britain

In this essay Rushdie discuss the prime quandary of Britain is racism and the problems of immigrants among whites. How they suffers because of racial issues.

(Here, I as a Salman Rushdie speaks)

“British isn’t South Africa. I am reliably informed of this. Nor is it Nazi Germany. I’ve got that on the best authority as well. You may feel that these two statements are not exactly the most dramatic or revelations.”

“I want to suggest that racism is not a side- issue in contemporary Britain; that it’s not a peripheral minority affair. I believe that Britain is undergoing a critical phase of its post- colonial period, and this crisis is not simply economic or political. It’s a crisis of the whole culture, of the society’s entire sense of itself. And racism is only the most clearly visible part of this crisis, the tip of the kind of iceberg that sinks ship.”

The ‘Racial differences’ is the central focus of Rushdie in this essay. Black or Brown or Colored people suffered a lot when British colonies were established in different Asian countries. Their euro-centric mindsets put other into the periphery; which grounded on the racial differentiations; the way colour holds its place in cultural hierarchy with different terms and conditions or colour of skin decides the place of an individual in society. It also creates complex of inferiority in the mindsets of Negros, where the term ‘Negritude’ takes place. Many renewed post- colonial writers tried to capture this situation in their master pieces- 1 ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ by Frantz Fanon, 2 ‘A Tempest’ by Amie Cesaire.

This was not only happening with colonized people it creates more troublesome situation when they immigrant from their land to Whites’ land.

“Now the people whom I’ve characterised as members of a new colony would probably be described by most of you as ‘immigrants’.  And still the word ‘immigrant’ means ‘black immigrants’;  the myth of ‘swamping’ lingers on; and even British-born blacks and Asians are thought of as people whose real ‘home’ is elsewhere. Immigration is only a problem if you are worried about blacks; that is, if your whole approach to the question is one of racial prejudice.”

 “One last point about the ‘immigrants’, It’s a pretty obvious point, but it keeps getting forgotten. It’s this: they came because they were invited. The Macmillan government embarked on a large- scale advertising campaign to attract them. They were extraordinary advertisements, full of hope and optimism, which made Britain out to be a land of plenty, a golden opportunity not to be missed. And they worked. People travelled here in good faith, believing themselves wanted. This is how the new Empire was imported.”

Immigration never holds the place as a problem, but the racial prejudices and biases are center of all. Naturally, they (whites) never give the higher position in commercial field to Brown or Black even though they are much deserving than their people. Even though the colored people have nationality of Britain, they born into the Britain, they are treated as outsiders on the grounds of where their ancestors belonged to.  Generally the land on which one born is became your homeland; it is one’s natural right, but in Britain it became a gift of government (In 1981, the act of nationality snatches the right of the soil, which they possessed for 900 years).      

“In the streets of the new Empire, black women are abused and black children are beaten up on their way home from school. In the run- down housing estates of the new Empire, black families have their windows broken, they are afraid to go out after dark, and human and animal excrement arrives through their letter-boxes. The police offer threats instead of protection, and the courts offer small hope of redress.” 

“Britain is now two entirely different worlds, and the one you inhabit is determined by the colour of your skin. Now in my experience, very few white people, except for those active in fighting racism, are willing to believe the description of contemporary reality offered by blacks. And black people, faced with what Professor Michael Dummett has called ‘the will not to know- a chosen ignorance, not the ignorance of innocence’, grow increasing suspicious and angry.”

“But, I’ve saved the worst and most insidious stereotype for last. It is the characterisation of black people as a Problem. You talk about the Race Problem, the Immigration Problem, and all sorts of Problems. If you are liberal, you say that black people have problems. If you aren’t, you say they are the problem. But the members of the new colony have only one real problem, and that problem is white people.”

Our fair relation with their people remains in fairytale, because their biases will never die and they whole heartily never accept the people who are not belonging there.

Let me repeat what I said at the beginning: British isn’t Nazi Germany. The British Empire isn’t the Third Reich. But in Germany, after the fall of Hitler, heroic attempts were made by many people to purify German thought and the German language of the pollution of Nazism. Such acts of cleansing are occasionally necessary in every society. But British thought, British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism. It’s still there, breeding lice and vermin, waiting for unscrupulous people to exploit it for their own ends. One of the key concepts of imperialism was the military superiority implied cultural superiority.

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