The Sundarbans: Rushdie’s Dreamlike World

International audienceSalman Rushdie's magic realism owes a lot to Hindu cosmology and it is especially the concept of reality vs illusion, maya, that is reflected in his storytelling. A counterpart to reality, imagination as related to dream is part and parcel of Rushdie's act of creation, the different uses and representations of dream being found in e.g. Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Satanic Verses and Midnight's Children, as well as in Imaginary Homelands. Grounded in cosmology, the concept of maya has nevertheless become a convenient tool for interpretations of the psyche's processes and conditions, of the unconscious, first of all, the "In the Sundarbans chapter" of Midnight's Children being an example of such treatment. The water world of the Sundarbans jungle is portrayed as a dreamlike environment into which the four protagonists are drawn and where they embark on a kind of spiritual voyage towards recognition and finally towards responsibility and adulthood. The paper will analyse the ways in which Rushdie constructs this environment and the characters' progress in terms of dream as representative of the unconscious