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

In large part, the cause of this change in the direction of Mukherjee’s prose and political position can be found in the author’s willingness to accept her new homeland (she had moved to the United States before either novel was written). Mukherjee now considers herself very much an American citizen, “not because I’m ashamed of my past, not because I’m betraying or distorting my past,”¹ but because the American context puts in place the preconditions necessary to examine the intermingling of cultures that forms the bedrock of her novels. In the same way as Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee has been considered a traitor to her history, having been accused of becoming Americanized by the Western neo-colonial machine. But Mukherjee’s devotion to America is not that of one who has given up an old nation to embrace a new one. For Mukherjee, America is the land of opportunity and, most important of all, a nation based entirely on immigration. Mukherjee is not interested in a new American nationalism; rather, she views America as the representation of her own condition. She sees it as a landscape both formed upon and promoting the condition of exile.

V. S. Naipaul is a Nobel and Booker prize-winning author, and even more than either Rushdie or Mukherjee, he can be considered an excellent example of an exile—a product of the wide movements of the colonial period that echo in the novels he writes. Born in Trini­dad in 1932, the child of indentured immigrants from India, Naipaul traveled—much like the narrators of both The Mimic Men (1967) and The Enigma of Arrival (1987)—to England when still a young man, desperate to become a writer. Like Rushdie, he studied at one of the pillars of the British establishment; while the young boy from India went to Cambridge University, the Trinidadian won a scholarship to Oxford. Naipaul felt that even at the moment of his birth, on an island thousands of miles away from the homes of his fathers, he was already an exile. In whatever place he came to rest, he could never consider himself to be at home. Even when, as a freelance writer, he traveled to India (in the early period of decolonization), he did not recognize that country as truly a part of him, despite the fact that it had such a large role in his history.