Illustrations for Tennyson’s Idylls of the King


	Rushdie depicts the infinite possibilities of the diverse postcolonial world through the use of fantasy, or “magic realism,” a literary form that combines realism and fantasy. For instance, his novel The Satanic Verses opens with the two Indian heroes facing the tragedy of a plane crash as they migrate from India to Britain; however, when both miraculously survive the crash without a scratch after falling thousands of feet from the exploding plane, they’re revealed to be earthly incarnations of an Islamic angel and demon, playing out an ancient mythological/religious conflict in a new environment. The notion that a meeting of old and new worlds can give rise to miracles runs throughout Rushdie’s fiction. He uses the fantastic to suggest the wildly unlikely cultural combinations found in culturally diverse postcolonial societies and the magical potentialities that these unusual combinations create.
	Rushdie’s use of the fantastic to express his experience of Indian culture also derives from his lifelong love of Indian cinema (popularly known as “Bollywood”, since the Indian film industry originated in Bombay), cinema that reflects the fragmented, diverse nature of the postmodern/postcolonial society with its fantastic mixture of filmic genres. An Indian film typically combines features of the musical, action/adventure, melodrama, comedy, and romance, a conglomeration that Rushdie and Indian audiences find “magical”—an escape from a stagnant reality into a realm of possibility and hope. In his essay, “A Short Text About Magic,” Rushdie describes the fantastic formula common to Indian cinema (which also matches Rushdie’s fiction): “Sex goddesses in wet saris (the Indian equivalent of wet T-shirts), gods descending from the heavens to meddle in human affairs, supermen, magic potions, superheroes, demonic villains . . . Have always been the staple diet of the Indian filmgoer” (p. 11). And as in Rushdie’s novels, the fantastic world of the cinema has become reality for a dispersed and diverse Indian population because, as critic Jennifer Takhar notes, Bombay cinema “provides a means of psychological investment for the South Asian diaspora all over the world”; its fantastic conglomeration of disparate cinematic elements reflects the “cultural disorientation . . .experienced by the displaced Indians who try to adapt to their newfound environments” (“Bollywood Cinema in Rushdie’s Fiction,” <http://landow.stg.brown.edu/post/pakistan/literature/rushdie/takhar16.html> Accessed July 20, 2001). Takhar remarks, “The Indian diaspora . . . Have come to heavily depend on Bollywood’s incredible films in shaping their own reality in their new homelands” (“Identity Through Bollywood Cinema: The ‘Reel’ or ‘Real’ Zone?” <http://landow.stg.brown.edu/post/pakistan/literature/rushdie/takhar15.html> Accessed July, 20, 2001). Thus, both in Indian immigrant culture and in Rushdie’s fiction, fantasy becomes reality, a natural consequence of the diverse postmodern condition that is pregnant with remarkable possibilities.
	Finally, in drawing upon the techniques of the cinema in his fiction, Rushdie is distinctly postmodern, using the simulated reality of mass media to express the cultural reality of a fantastic and fragmented world.