Imaginary Homelands of Writers in Exile: Salman Rushdie, Bharati ...

Chapter 1

Introduction

The effects of the displacement of peoples—their forced migration, their deportation, their voluntary emigration, their movement to new lands where they made themselves masters over others or became subjects of the masters of their new homes—reverberate down the years and are still felt today. The historical violence of the era of empire and colonies echoes in the literature of the descendants of those forcibly moved and the exiles that those processes have made. The voices of its victims are insistent in the literature that has come to be called “post-colonial.” Although the term “post-colonial” is insufficient to capture fully the depth and breadth of those writers that have been labeled by it (for it is itself something of a colonial instrument, ghettoizing writers in English who are still considered to be “foreign”), there is a common bond among the works of those novelists who understand the process of exile and see themselves as exiles—both from their homes and from themselves.

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 their words and an alien tongue.