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

From a post-colonial standpoint, the subject is—with respect to the existential or psychoanalytical systems—a construction of the gaze of the colonizer or a subject formed by the discourse of colonialism.

These novels, however, provide a quite different basis for viewing the colonial subject. For while accepting that the subject is not a stable and static being (it is the construction of its surroundings), the subject can also deform and destabilize those very surroundings from which it emanates. Both these notions are suspended within the textual weave of the novels. The two notions chase each other round, as though engaged in a never-ending game of tag. As well as providing a richer and more complex theoretical view of the subject than much of post-colonial theory, these novels also have a very important impact on identity politics as it is practiced today. The basis that underlies the politics of race and ethnicity as they are practiced today—particularly in the North American and Western European policies of multiculturalism—is the sanctity and inviolability of identity. As Kwame Anthony Appiah points out (though he has some qualms over the matter), “the major collective identities that demand recognition in North America currently are religion, gender, ethnicity, ‘race,’ and sexuality.”¹⁰ This recognition, this belief (held almost by consensus) in identity as the central component of the political being of a citizen is precisely the stance that these novels question.

Rushdie, Mukherjee, and Naipaul all hold (much against the grain of the liberal consensus) the notion that a person must be confined by his “religion,” “gender,” “ethnicity,” “race,” and “sexuality” to be untrue. For the central tenet of identity politics is that the subject is created by cultures that are entirely and inviolably in the world. None of these writers believe in the full efficacy of this claim. The subject can make an intervention in the cultural milieu that has created him or her; the landscapes are as much a creation of the subject as the subject is created by identity. Perhaps this is why there is no notion of unquestioning nationalism in any of the three writers’ works. Mukherjee, for one, has actively spoken out against immigrants’ intransigence when it comes to assimilating the cultures of their new homes. Rushdie has gone even further in distancing himself from his old identity, a fatwa being issued by the followers of the religion of his homeland.