Title: Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 Author: Salman Rushdie Creation Date: 1991 Location: London (Granta Books / Penguin) Collection: Empire and Its Shadows
Brief
Imaginary Homelands collects the essays, reviews, and occasional pieces that Salman Rushdie wrote between 1981 and 1991 — a decade that began with the publication of Midnight's Children and ended with the third year of his life under the fatwa. The book appeared in 1991 in the middle of that ordeal, and the timing gives it an additional charge: a writer who had been forced literally underground by the violence of cultural politics was making, in this book, a sustained argument about what writing is for. The collection was received immediately as a manifesto — not only for Rushdie's own practice but for the wider project of postcolonial and diasporic literature in English.
The thematic core is the idea of the migrant imagination as a productive, not merely compensatory, position. Rushdie argues that the writer who has left home — who sees the country of origin through memory, from distance, with all the distortion that distance and time impose — is not at a disadvantage. The cracked mirror, the imperfect memory, the doubled perspective: these are not failures of representation but the conditions of a particular kind of truth. The argument, developed most fully in the title essay, became one of the foundational theoretical positions of postcolonial literary culture.
What makes the collection distinctive is its range and its polemical energy. Rushdie writes about Indian cinema with the same intensity he brings to British immigration politics, to Günter Grass, to Thomas Pynchon. His prose is the prose of Midnight's Children in critical mode: digressive, punning, full of lateral connections, impatient with orthodoxy. The collection is also a record of the intellectual atmosphere in which the postcolonial novel in English came to self-consciousness — the debates about authenticity, about who gets to speak for whom, about the relationship between fiction and politics that defined the 1980s literary moment.
The Imperial Machine
The colonial system Imaginary Homelands engages is the British Empire in its twilight and aftermath — specifically, the partition of British India in 1947 and the post-imperial migration that brought South Asian, Caribbean, and African populations to Britain in the decades that followed. Rushdie writes from the position of the post-imperial migrant: born in Bombay in 1947, educated at Rugby and Cambridge, living in London, writing in English about a country he left as a teenager. His essays map the colonial machine not as an administrative apparatus but as a system of representation — a machine for producing images, narratives, and categories that organised both the coloniser's understanding of the colony and the colony's understanding of itself.
The British Empire in India operated through a specific cultural machinery: the English education system Macaulay designed, the literary tradition it transmitted, the English language that became the medium of administration, law, and intellectual life for the Indian educated classes. Rushdie is a product of this machinery, and the essays are simultaneously a description of its operations and a demonstration of what its products are capable of when they turn the machinery's tools against its assumptions.
The post-imperial machine the essays describe — the Britain of the 1980s, Thatcher's Britain, the Britain of the Brixton riots and the National Front — is the colonial system in its domestic phase. The populations the empire brought to its peripheries now live at its centre, and the centre does not know what to do with them. Rushdie's essays on British racism trace the colonial relationship as it operates within metropolitan space: the gaze that reduces the post-colonial subject to his skin, the institutional violence that policing, housing, and education direct at non-white populations in ways that reproduce the colonial hierarchy within the mother country.
The Subjected People
The subjected people in Imaginary Homelands are the migrant and diasporic populations whose experience the essays theorise — the Indians, Pakistanis, Caribbeans, and Africans who came to Britain in the post-war decades and whose presence transformed the country they entered while their own transformation was simultaneously imposed and resisted.
Rushdie writes from inside this population, and his essays grant it the interiority and specificity that the British public discourse of the 1980s systematically withheld. The immigrant in Thatcher's Britain was a "problem" — of housing, employment, cultural compatibility. Rushdie insists on the specificity the problem-framework erases: the Bombay Muslim's relationship to the city he left, the Caribbean intellectual's relationship to the English literary tradition she was educated in, the second-generation child's relationship to a homeland she has never seen but cannot stop being asked about.
The title essay's central argument — that the migrant imagination is a productive position rather than a deficit — is itself an assertion of the subjected person's capacity. The cracked mirror through which the migrant sees the homeland is not a broken instrument; it captures what the unbroken mirror misses. The essay "Outside the Whale" addresses the writer of colour in Thatcher's Britain who is told that the artist's proper position is withdrawal from the political world. Rushdie rejects this counsel on behalf of writers who do not have the option of withdrawal — for whom the political world is not an external force to be avoided but the air they breathe.
The subjected people also include the populations within India who are represented — and misrepresented — by the diaspora's literary production. Rushdie acknowledges, more candidly than many of his peers, that the migrant's imaginary homeland is a construction serving the migrant's needs rather than the homeland's reality. The authority of the diasporic writer is always partial, always contested by the people who stayed.
The Reckoning
The reckoning in Imaginary Homelands is with the condition of the post-imperial subject — the person produced by the colonial encounter who must now decide what to do with the colonial inheritance. Rushdie does not reject the inheritance wholesale; he cannot, because the English language, the English literary tradition, the novel form he has mastered are all products of the imperial machine. His reckoning is with the terms on which the inheritance can be held.
The title essay's image of the cracked mirror is the reckoning's central figure. The mirror is cracked because the migrant writer has been broken off from the reality she is trying to represent. But the cracks are not defects; they are the conditions of a new kind of seeing. The post-colonial writer's task is not to repair the mirror but to use its cracks — to show that all mirrors are cracked, and that the pretence of the unbroken mirror is itself the colonial illusion.
The fatwa essays represent the most extreme reckoning the collection contains — a writer confronting the possibility that his work has produced a death sentence and insisting that the novel's freedom to imagine cannot be surrendered. The collection's implied reader is the English-speaking intellectual — in London, New York, Bombay, or Lagos — who is grappling with the post-imperial condition. Rushdie writes for the reader who knows that the imperial inheritance cannot be simply accepted or simply rejected, that the tools of the coloniser are also the tools of the colonised, and that the work of making something genuinely new from the encounter is the work of literature itself. If Conrad wrote from the deck of a European subject observing the empire, and Naipaul from the more complicated vantage of a Trinidad-born Indian educated at Oxford who returned to the former colonies as a visiting outsider rather than an inhabitant, Rushdie writes from inside the metropolitan diaspora itself — a Bombay child who became a London novelist and refuses to choose which of those identities is the real one.
The Reading
The Photograph
A photograph of a house in Bombay. The house where I grew up — left in 1961, no longer belonging to my family, existing now only in memory and in this image. I am trying to write a novel set in that house and that city, and the photograph is both evidence and accusation: a reminder that what I am constructing is necessarily partial, necessarily distorted by the decades and the distance. My response to this recognition is not apology but method. All literature is partial. The migrant's partiality is merely more legible than the native's. The immigrant writer has an advantage of sorts — she knows she is constructing, selecting, arranging, because she cannot mistake memory for presence. The writer who never left may have that same illusion of presence confiscate her critical distance.
The Bombay of Midnight's Children is not Bombay; it is my Bombay, the Bombay of a Muslim family in a city that was already disappearing when I left it. This is not a failure of the novel. It is the novel's proper subject: not India but India-as-it-was-to-one-observer, India refracted through a particular class position and religious identity and family circumstance. The cracks in the mirror are not flaws to be repaired but the texture of the glass itself. You must work with what you have, and what you have, if you work it honestly, has its own kind of authority.
Bollywood and the Refusal of Apology
The essays on Indian cinema argue that Bollywood's most characteristic formal moves — the song sequence that suspends narrative time, the melodramatic excess that exceeds any realistic register — are not primitive holdovers from a pre-cinematic culture but the marks of a distinctly Indian aesthetic intelligence adapting borrowed technologies to local uses. The excesses are the form, not deviations from a form. The musical interludes that Bollywood uses to rupture realist convention are structurally analogous to the magical-realist interruptions in Midnight's Children — both are attempts to make narrative encompass more than the strictly verisimilar permits, and both are rooted in Indian storytelling traditions that predate the Western genres they appear to violate.
The refusal to apologise for these excesses is the same refusal extended to the migrant imagination: the supposed deficiency is the actual method. What looks like a failure of discipline from the European perspective is a different discipline entirely, one whose rules were written before Europe arrived.
Indira and the Emergency
The piece on Indira Gandhi — written before Midnight's Children was published, in anticipation of a libel suit Mrs Gandhi actually filed — is a precise account of the Emergency of 1975–77, the period when she suspended Indian democracy, censored the press, and authorised a mass sterilisation campaign in the name of population control. The analysis of the Emergency is not journalistic but literary: what matters is the language of authoritarianism, the way political violence requires a certain kind of prose to sustain it, the gap between the rhetoric of national development and the experience of the bodies subject to it. The essay anticipates the novel's treatment of the same period — Saleem's forced sterilisation, the Widow's terror — fiction and criticism operating on the same material from different angles, each illuminating what the other cannot reach.
There is also the question — characteristic, self-aware — of whether a novelist can be sued for the political implications of fiction. The fatwa would answer this grotesquely within a few years. The collision between imaginative freedom and political authority runs through the collection like a fault line. Fiction has a responsibility precisely because it exceeds the literal — because it can say what reportage cannot, imagine what ideology forbids, hold contradictions that polemic must resolve. This is not the aesthete's retreat into art for art's sake. The novel's specific power lies in its refusal to be reduced to a single meaning, and that refusal is itself a political act in societies that demand ideological clarity.
Outside the Whale
"Outside the Whale" takes aim at a tradition in English letters — personified by George Orwell's "Inside the Whale" — that argues the writer's proper position is withdrawal, the Jonah-like acceptance of the belly of the whale, the cultivation of private virtue in the face of public madness. I reject this position with considerable force. The disengaged perspective is itself a political position, and in the context of Thatcher's Britain — with its race riots, its unemployment, its casual official contempt for the post-war welfare settlement — it is not a position available to a person of colour with family connections to the subcontinent.
The essay defends committed fiction, but it is careful to distinguish commitment to politics from commitment to a party line; what is wanted is fiction that takes the full weight of the political world as its subject without reducing itself to propaganda. The distinction matters because the writers championed here — Garcia Marquez, Grass, Kundera — are all committed writers who have refused the party line, and their refusal is what makes their commitment literary rather than instrumental.
Grass and the Carnival of Truth
The review of Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum reads like a declaration of literary kinship — Grass as the precursor from whom Midnight's Children's formal ambitions derive their licence. In Grass's Oskar Matzerath I find the prototype of the unreliable, physically grotesque, morally compromised narrator who nonetheless produces truth about history precisely through his unreliability. Grass showed that the novel's relationship to the historical past could be one of productive deformation: the historical novel did not need to be decorous and sequential; it could be excessive, distorted, carnivalesque, and still — or therefore — be true. If the mirror of realism is cracked, then the cracks are where the light gets in, and the novelist who acknowledges the cracks writes more honestly than the novelist who pretends the glass is whole.
The Booker as a Gate
The essay on the Booker Prize is comic in register but serious in argument — the history of the prize reviewed with an eye for the cultural politics embedded in its judging practices: which kinds of fiction get valorised, which registers and forms count as literary, how the prize has interacted with the postcolonial literary tradition in ways that are simultaneously enabling and limiting. The prize gave Midnight's Children an audience it would not otherwise have had, but its prestige creates pressure toward a certain kind of accessibility that can domesticate difficult work. The Booker functions as a gate the postcolonial novel must pass through to reach its metropolitan audience, and the gatekeeping inevitably shapes what kind of postcolonial fiction gets produced.
There is awareness here of being a primary beneficiary of the system under critique, and no pretence otherwise; but the critique stands, because the question of who controls the circulation of literature is inseparable from the question of who controls the representation of the formerly colonised world.
The New Empire Within Britain
"The New Empire Within Britain" is the collection's most directly angry piece and also its most prescient. The British media in the early 1980s discussed race with a vocabulary that needs cataloguing: the language of flooding and swamping applied to immigrant communities, the casual equation of Blackness with crime, the editorial assumption that the presence of non-white people in England was a problem to be managed rather than a fact to be inhabited.
This media discourse connects to the Nationality Act of 1981, which created categories of British citizenship designed to exclude people from the former colonies — the very people the empire had made British — and to the Brixton and Toxteth riots, which the press covered as eruptions of irrationality rather than responses to documented, systematic police harassment. The empire came home. The techniques of racial classification developed in the colonies were now being applied within Britain itself, and the refusal to acknowledge this continuity was itself a form of the imperial imagination's persistence. The Britain described here in 1982 is recognisably the Britain of the Windrush scandal of 2018; the argument has aged with devastating accuracy.
The Fatwa Section
The essays written under or about the fatwa — gathered in the final section — are necessarily different in register. They are documents of a crisis, and they read as such: urgent, sometimes repetitive, occasionally moving in ways the argumentative essays are not. The piece about the night the fatwa was announced has the quality of documentary witness — the phone calls, the police arriving, the dawning recognition that life has changed in a way that cannot be undone. The immediacy of these essays — their refusal of the critical distance that the earlier pieces maintain — is itself a statement about what happens when the questions literature raises are answered with violence rather than interpretation.
What holds the fatwa section together is the insistence that the crisis was not merely personal or even merely Islamic — it was a crisis about the nature of fiction, about the claim that the novel makes to exceed the literal, to produce meaning that is not reducible to statement and therefore not subject to the same rules as statement. The fatwa was an attack on that claim, and I defend it in the only way available: by insisting, repeatedly and at length, on what fiction is and what it is for. The defence is also an elegy — for the world before the fatwa, for the public life lost, for ordinary freedoms taken for granted. But the elegy does not collapse into self-pity. Anger sustains — principled anger: if the novel cannot imagine freely, then the novel is dead, and the culture that produced the novel — the culture of doubt, of multiplicity, of the unsettled question — dies with it.
Language as Inheritance and Invention
The English of the former colonies is not a borrowed or degraded version of metropolitan English but a new thing, produced by the colonial encounter and now available for purposes the coloniser never imagined. Indian English is not bad English; it is a different English, shaped by the pressure of other languages beneath it — Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Bengali — and by the social realities of a multilingual society that uses English differently from a monolingual one.
The argument extends to literary form: the postcolonial novel written in English is not an imitation of the English novel but a transformation of it, carrying within its sentences the rhythms and assumptions of other narrative traditions, other ways of organising time and causality, other understandings of the relationship between the individual and the collective.
This is where the sharpest divergence from Ngugi wa Thiong'o opens up. Ngugi's case for African languages — published in English five years before this collection — argued that the colonial tongue was the last fortress to fall and could not be safely occupied. The political logic of that position is not denied; a different bet is simply made — that the migrant writer's relationship to English is not the colonial subject's and that the English the diaspora is producing is no longer the property of its inheritors. The two positions are not reconcilable. They are both serious, and the essays know they are.
The Manifesto Behind the Manifesto
The prose throughout operates in a register distinct from the fiction — more controlled, more linear, less given to pyrotechnic excess. The essayistic voice is erudite without being academic, impassioned without being hysterical, capable of holding multiple positions in play without losing the thread of the argument. It works the way a man talks at a dinner party when he has read more than anyone else in the room and knows it and is trying not to be insufferable about it — not always successfully, but the lapses are part of the charm.
The collection's relationship to its own moment — the late 1980s, the years of Thatcher's third term, the fatwa's announcement, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the first Gulf War — gives it a documentary weight that the more timeless literary-critical pieces might not suggest. These essays were written about migration and empire during precisely the years when migration and empire were being rewritten in British political discourse, when the post-imperial settlement that had governed British race relations since the 1960s was being replaced by something harder and more explicitly exclusionary. The essays capture this shift as it is happening, not retrospectively but in real time, and the urgency of the writing — the sense of arguing against a current you can feel strengthening — gives the collection a quality that purely academic analysis cannot achieve.
What the collection offers, read as a whole, is a consistent intellectual project pursued in many registers: the argument that the migrant, the marginal, the multiply-located perspective is not a deficit but a resource; that the novel's relationship to politics is direct but not didactic; that excess and unreliability and formal experiment are not obstacles to truth but its instruments. This is the manifesto behind Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses, but it is also a position that other writers — Arundhati Roy, Zadie Smith, Mohsin Hamid — have inhabited and extended.
The book was a manifesto. The fatwa was the world's response to the manifesto. The response confirmed the argument.
This post is part of Empire and Its Shadows, a series on colonialism, power, and the books that answer empire back. See the full collection →
Two paperbacks carry the collection. The Granta / Penguin paperback (1991) is the original edition, with all the essays in the order Rushdie arranged them. The Vintage US paperback (1992) is the standard American teaching copy, with identical text and a slightly altered cover.
The Granta Books paperback distributed by Penguin — the original 1991 collection, used in most British university courses.
The widely available paperback reissue, identical in text to the original.
Disclaimer: some links in this post are affiliate links. If you buy through them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.