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

Land partakes of what we breathe into it, is touched by our mood and memories” (301). Here, the narrator accepts that landscapes are, to some extent, imaginary constructions, constructions created by the individual who looks over them. A similar point is made in The Holder of the World , when the author, Bharati Mukherjee, imagines a scenario from science fiction, in which the scientist boyfriend of her narrator creates a virtual-reality machine that will show the world of 17th-century India, but that presents the world filtered through what the individual “most care[s] about” (The Holder of the World 281). The same process occurs in Salman Rushdie’s fiction: The subcontinent and important political events (e.g. the war between India and China or Islamist extremism) are filtered through the magical-realist life story of his protagonists. All the landscapes in these novels seem to have the consistency of the city described in the second book of The Satanic Verses , that is, shaped but not solid—“The city of Jahilia is built entirely on sand, its structures formed of the desert whence it rises.” The city’s sand is “the very stuff of inconsistency” (93).

This understanding—that the notions of culture, nationality, ethnicity, and race are as unstable as the subject—has an enormous impact on both our theoretical standpoint and our understanding of the possibility of post-colonial politics. In terms of a theoretical basis for some kind of epistemology of the colonial being, we can neither accept the existentialist model of being (the notion that the authenticity of the subject derives from its being in the world) nor the Lacanian psychoanalytical model (which contends that the Imaginary self—our notion of a stable self which is illusion—is constructed through the language of the “Other” in the Symbolic realm or, to put it another way, through the discursive practices inherent in the world). For despite the very different approaches of these two schools of thought, they both reach the same general conclusion. The subject is, necessarily, created at the whim of the outside world (whether it is his or her relationship with others or his or her place in the linguistic hierarchy).