Dreaming India/India Dreaming - Proceedings of the SARI 2019 Conference Geetha Ganapathy-Doré, Cécile Oumhani, Pascale Hassoun, Hannah Freundlich, Ludmila Volná, Ahmed Mulla, Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, Maëlle Jeanniard Du Dot, Jitka de Préval, Madhura Joshi, et al. To cite this version: Geetha Ganapathy-Doré, Cécile Oumhani, Pascale Hassoun, Hannah Freundlich, Ludmila Volná, et al.. Dreaming India/India Dreaming - Proceedings of the SARI 2019 Conference. May 2019, 2020. hal-02936618v2 HAL Id: hal-02936618 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02936618v2 Submitted on 18 Sep 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference compiled and edited by Geetha GANAPATHY-DORE Société d''Activités et de recherches sur le monde indien,, Saint-Ouen l''Aumône,, 2020 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………..i Introduction by Geetha GANAPATHY-DORE………………………..……………..iii Poems by Cécile OUMHANI…………………………………………………………..vii Featured Article by the guest speaker Pascale HASSOUN Dreaming as a Transferential Figure……………………………………………………xiii Part I - Dreams of the City, Dreams of the Jungle 1. Dreams, Fantasies and Memories in Manil Suri's The Death of Vishnu Hannah FREUNDLICH…………………………………………………………………...1 2. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: The Sundarbans as a Dream Experience Ludmila VOLNÁ…………………………………………………………………………11 Part II – Dream India, Diasporic Homelands 3. Sri Aurobindo's Dreams: A Reassessment - Geetha GANAPATHY-DORE………….29 4. Dreams of Lost and Found Countries in Shailja Patel's Migritude - Ahmed MULLA..51 Part III – Indian-American Dreams 5. Dreams and Realities of US Relocation in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Queen of Dreams - Maria Sabina DRAGA ALEXANDRU……………………………..63 6. 'What does a walking man dream of?': Dreaming and moving in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission - Maëlle JEANNIARD DU DOT………………………………………….75 Part IV – Out of the Indian Cinema Dream Factory 7. The Poetics of the Dream in Hindi Popular Cinema - Jitka de PRÉVAL……………..95 8. Dreams and Films in Indian Marriages - Madhura JOSHI & Himabindu TIMIRI…..113 Part V – Oceanic Dreams 9. An "Indian" Ocean: Dream or Reality? – Ingrid SANKEY………………………….129 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The editor wishes to thank Corinne ALEXANDRE-GARNER for identifying the guest speaker in the person of Pascale HASSOUN and opening the conference with a foreword on dreams and their interpretation. Cécile OUMHANI for recording her poems for the opening session and giving us permission to reproduce them in this volume. Pascale HASSOUN for delivering the keynote address and kindly letting us include it in this volume. Maëlle JEANNIARD DU DOT for her creative input in the drafting of the initial call for papers and her involvement in the organization of the SARI 2019 Conference on Dreaming India/India Dreaming. The CREA (Paris Nanterre University) and IDPS (formerly CERAP) research centres, Claudine MOUTARDIER, Sandrine CARON and the Communications Wing of the Sorbonne Paris Nord University for their invaluable support for SARI conferences over the past five years. Michel NAUMANN, Jitka de PREVAL, Caroline TRECH and Ludmila VOLNA at SARI without the support of whom the publication of this "Dream" volume would not have become a reality. The authors of the several contributions for their willingness to feature in an open-access and on-line publication and for their unfailing cooperation. All attempts have been made to identify the authors of the quotations and images. These citations and pictures have been used for academic purposes only and in conformity with the fair use clause of copyright regulations. The ownership of the passages and images belongs to their rightful authors to whom our collective gratitude is expressed. INTRODUCTION Little did the members of the learned society SARI imagine that barely a year after they chose to work on the topic "India Dreaming/Dreaming India" for their annual conference that the onset of the pandemics will perturb their lives and dreams and give them a glimpse of the dystopian world depicted in the novels of writers such as Laura Kasischke (In a Perfect World, Harper Perennial, 2009) and Karen Thompson Walker (The Dreamers, Scribner UK, 2019). However, dreams are essential to heal and to imagine a better future. "Without dreams life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly," wrote Langston Hughes. Despite the fact that some dreams have been for ever shattered, some voluntarily abandoned or transformed, and some simply postponed, dreams should not, and cannot end because in dreams lies the possibility to overcome the limits of the human condition and envision a new life and a new world thanks to the doors to new knowledge that they open. Dreams have always fascinated human beings because their unsubstantial nature acts as a bridge between phenomena and noumena. They give us intimations about another and alternative reality, be it bright as heaven or dark as hell. They liberate us from our ordinary existence and give us escape routes to the extraordinary. Creative flights of fancy accompany us at all times of the day and all stages of our life. Great inventions and works of art and fiction were churned out of dreams. In the current volume, two poems by writer Cécile Oumhani - one in English on the dreamy India remembered by her mother that pulls her towards it and another in French on the Indian reality that the poet herself has observed and sublimated – help us smoothly enter the dream world. The featured article by the guest speaker, Psychoanalyst Pascale Hassoun underscores the process through which the psychoanalytic cure endows dreams with regenerative potential. During transference, she observes, the endo-psychic perception that is the dream finds an outward shift and becomes a fresh area for psychic inscription. The articles that follow have been organized into five sections for the sake of thematic coherence. They recall the definition of dreams and their significance in different cultures. They deal with different types of dreams – day dreams, night dreams, pipe dreams, fantasies, hallucinations, Dreaming India/India Dreaming - SARI 2019 Conference nightmares, shattered dreams, unfulfilled dreams, onirical journeys, divinations, aspirations, dreams of displacement and displaced dreams. They discuss a variety of concepts - dreamwork, dreamcape, dream experience, dream journals, dream sequence, dreamocracy. They dwell on the notion of Indian night and the status accorded to the sleeping self in Indian philosophy. While the body is rested and psychic energy regenerated, the soul reaches out to the cosmos away from the sound and fury of materialistic existence. If what distinguishes man is his capacity to laugh, what distinguishes his psyche is his ability to dream and make meaning of it. The Indian theory of Maya goes a step further and sees the phenomenal world itself as a dream of Lord Vishnu. In the West, apart from the ancient Greeks' idea of dreams as supernatural signs to be read, the modern theories of Freud, Jung and Lacan have become incontrovertible references in the study of literature and cinema. Freud's conceptualization of dreamwork and Lacan's definition of fantasm as a staging of desire have been put to good use in Jitka de Préval's analysis of the poetics of dreams and fantasies in Hindi popular cinema which tries to preserve the beauty and magic of dreams by inventing a new pictorial language. Ludmila Volná deconstructs Rushdie's attempt to write a Kiplingesque but postmodern jungle book by analyzing the Sundarbans chapter of Midnight's Children with the help of Hindu mythology and the dream theories of Freud, Jung, Spitta and Bauer among others. A counter point to the psychoanalytical geometry of human conscience is the romantic poet Sri Aurobindo's higher dimensional geometry of the psyche. Geetha Ganapathy-Doré's article revisits his dreams of the ideal Indian nation which was but a step in the direction of an evolution to postnational dwelling and multilateral citizenship. Lucid dreaming is what makes this synthesis between the East and West possible. Ahmed Mulla's discussion of the Kenyan writer and activitist Shailja Patel is premised on the idea that "migritude" is the condition of the citizen in the globalized world. As older generations are caught in the web of deluded immigrant dreams, the third generation has to rebel and fight for their own dreams. Words and narratives are indispensable for recounting and interpreting dreams. In India, there exists a curious situation wherein the imaginary of cinematic fiction contaminates reality and determines the choice of marriage partners and the modalities of wedding in real life. Madhura Joshi and Himabindu Timiri's use of cultural anthropology to interpret India's iv Ganapathy-Doré, Introduction multicultural cinema provides us insight into the weaving of personal lives with cinematic strands, whether at home or while living abroad. Similarly, Hannah Freundlich's explication of the dream sequences in which the memories of a dead man, ironically named Vishnu,