Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity 1786836661, 9781786836663

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New Dimensions in Science Fiction

Indian Science Fiction

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New Dimensions in Science Fiction

Series Editors Professor Pawel Frelik University of Warsaw Professor Patrick B. Sharp California State University, Los Angeles

Editorial Board Grace Dillon Portland State University Tanya Krzywinska Falmouth University Isiah Lavender III University of Georgia Roger Luckhurst Birkbeck University of London John Rieder University of Hawai‘i

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Indian Science Fiction Patterns, History and Hybridity

Suparno Banerjee

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS 2020

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© Suparno Banerjee, 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cathays Park, Cardiff, CF10 3NS. www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-78683-666-3 eISBN 978-1-78683-667-0 The right of Suparno Banerjee to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Typeset by Marie Doherty Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Melksham

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For Irabati You are the future

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Writing pages:Layout 1

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Page 291

Series Editors’ Preface

Science fiction (SF) is a global storytelling form of techno-scientific modernity which conveys distinct experiences with science, technology and society to a wide range of readers across centuries, continents and cultures. The New Dimensions in Science Fiction series aims to capture the dynamic, worldwide and media-spanning dimensions of SF storytelling and criticism by providing a venue for scholars from multiple disciplines to explore their ideas on the relations of science and society as expressed in SF.

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Contents

Acknowledgements xi

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A Brief Chronology of Indian Science Fiction

xiii

Introduction: To Mark or Not to Mark Territories Defining SF Defining ‘Indian’ The Trajectory

1 2 9 12

1

Genealogies: A Brief History of Indian SF 21 1835–1905: Revolutionary Futures, Scientific Education 23 and Influence of Western SF 1905–47: Utopias, Popular Culture and Experimentations 30 1947–95: The Golden Age of SF in Indigenous Languages, 36 Rebirth of Indian English SF and SF on Screen 1995–2019: The Rise of Indian English SF, Globalisation, 48 SF Films and Web Mags Conclusion 57

2

Cognitions and Estrangements: Epistemes and 61  World Building in Indian SF Knowledge, Science and Science Fiction 62 Science and Fiction 69 Vedic Science and Fiction 74 Subaltern Science and Fiction 78 SF and the Mythological Paradigm 85 Reinterpreting Hindu Myths 86 Indian SF and Non-Hindu Myths 93 Conclusion 95

3

Other Times: Alternative Histories, Imagining the  Future and Non-linear Temporalities Alternative Histories

97 98

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Other Tomorrows 109 The Present, Forking Paths and Non-linear Temporalities 121 Conclusion 127 4

5

Other Spaces: Utopian Discourses and  Non-expansionist Journeys Indian SF and Utopian Discourses Indian SF and Space Travel Conclusion

129

The Others: Aliens, Robots, Cyborgs and Other Others The Other as the Self The Other as the Other Conclusion

161 164 174 189

Conclusion: Close Encounters

131 149 158

191

Notes 199 Bibliography: Primary Texts 221 Bibliography: Secondary Texts 226 Index 241

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Acknowledgements

Writing a book about Indian literature is daunting, to say the least, and would not have been possible without help from many friends, family and colleagues. I thank Sarah Lewis of University of Wales Press and Patrick B. Sharp, series editor of New Dimensions in Science Fiction, for their guidance in navigating through the publication process. I am highly indebted to my friend Tanja Stampfl, who read the whole manuscript and provided invaluable comments. I am grateful to Eric Smith, Amy J. Ransom, Himadri Lahiri and Rich Cooper for their valuable feedback on several chapters. Their suggestions greatly helped me in revising the manuscript. I am thankful to Texas State University for providing me with a one-semester sabbatical and a Research Enhancement Grant for this project. I must thank the National Library at Kolkata, Visva-Bharati Central Library and Bangiya Sahitya Parishad for giving me access to their respective archives. I thank Sudev P. Basu, Samantak Das, Anindita Bandyopadhyay, Amrit Sen and Arpita Chatterjee for their help in this matter. Anil Menon, Sanjib Mukhopadhyay, Dhrijoti Kalita, Arnab Ganguly and Hiranmoy Lahiri helped me find many books, stories and articles. I thank them heartily. I must also thank my parents Subir and Haimanti Banerjee for preserving old Bengali journals and books at my home in Santiniketan. Thanks also to Amit Rahul Baishya, Sami Ahmad Khan, Arvind Mishra, Srinarahari and Rob Tally for their reading and research-related suggestions. This book draws on many of my previously published articles and book chapters. The following are the principal ones among them, and I am thankful to the editors and publishers for their permission to reprint and reuse large portions from these chapters and articles: Liverpool University Press for ‘An Alien Nation: Postcoloniality and the Alienated Subject in Vandana Singh’s Science Fiction’, published in Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 53/3 (2012); University Press of Mississippi for ‘India, Geopolitics, and Future Wars’, published in Isiah Lavender  III’s edited anthology Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction (2017); and Brian Attebery for ‘Alternative Dystopia: Science, Power, and Fundamentalism in

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xii Acknowledgements

Rimi B. Chatterjee’s Signal Red’, published in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 20/1 (2009) and ‘Ruptured Bodies and Invaded Grains: Biotechnology as Bioviolence in Indian Science Fiction’, published in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 26/1 (2015). I want to thank my two mentors Carl Freedman and Pallavi Rastogi for helping me form the germs of this project when I was still writing my dissertation at Louisiana State University. I should also acknowledge my colleagues in the field of science fiction studies, especially those working with Indian science fiction, for creating the critical mass on which I depend for formulating my ideas. You continue to inspire me. And last but not the least, I thank my wife Debangana and daughter Irabati for not ostracising me outright for all the time I ignore them in favour of SF. Nothing I do would be possible without their unconditional support.

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A Brief Chronology of Indian Science Fiction

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1835

Kylas Chunder Dutt’s ‘A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945’, first Indian future history fiction and one of the earliest Indian English fictions

1845

Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s ‘The Republic of Orissa: A Page From the Annals of Twentieth Century’, second future history fiction

1882

Hemlal Dutta’s ‘Rahasya’ (Bangla), first narrative of technology and automation

1884–8

Pandit Ambika Datta Vyasa’s ‘Ascharya Vrittant’ (Hindi), first adventure science fiction (SF)

1892

‘Shukra Bhraman’ (Bangla) written by Jagadananda Roy, first space travel story; published in 1914

1896

‘Niruddesher Kahini’ (Bangla) written by Jagadish Chandra Bose for a short-story competition, first narrative functioning on exploitation of a specific scientific principle; later published as ‘Palatak Tufan’ in 1921

1900

Keshav Prasad Singh’s ‘Chandralok Ki Yatra’ (Hindi), first lunar-journey story; Hindi magazine Saraswati starts publication

1905

Begum Rokeya Shakhawat Hossain’s ‘Sultana’s Dream’, first feminist utopia

1908

Nath Madhav’s ‘Srinivasa Rao’, possibly the first Marathi SF

1913

Start of publication of Bangla children’s magazine Sandesh

1915

Anadidhan Banerjee’s ‘Mangal Graha’ (Hindi), possibly the first Mars story

1922

Sukumar Ray’s ‘Heshoram Hushiyarer Diary’ (Bangla)

1924

Rahul Sankrityayan’s socialist utopia Baisvee Sadi (Hindi)

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xiv Chronology

1925

Hemendra Kumar Roy’s first SF, Meghduter Marte Agaman (Bangla)

1945

Premendra Mitra’s first Ghanada story ‘Mosha’ (Bangla)

1946

Kumudeswar Borthakur’s ‘Atom Boma’, possibly the first Assamese SF

1948

First publication of Hindi magazine Dharmayug

1952

William Berke’s Kaadu/The Jungle (Tamil/English), first partially Indian SF movie

1961

Satyajit Ray’s ‘Byom Jatrir Diary’, first Professor Shanku story

1963

First publication of Ascharya (Bangla) by Adrish Bardhan, the first SF magazine in India



A. Kasilingam’s Kalai Arasi (Tamil), first Indian SF film

1965

Rajshekhar Bhoosnurmath’s ‘Holiday Planet’, possibly first Kannada SF



First SF film club in India starts in Kolkata under the guidance of Satyajit Ray

1971

First publication of Pran’s Chacha Chaudhary comics (Hindi)

1974

Jayant Vishnu Narlikar’s first SF ‘Krishna Bibar’ (Marathi)



The Marathi Vidnyan Parishad launches SF writing competition to promote science education

1975

First publication of Bangla SF magazine Fantastic



Salman Rushdie’s Grimus

1976

Leela Majumdar’s ‘Akash Ghanti’ (Bangla)

1980 Sujatha’s En Iniya Iyanthira (Tamil) 1986

Space City Sigma, first Indian SF TV show

1987

Shekhar Kapur’s film Mr. India

1989 Narlikar’s Vaman Parat Na Ala (Marathi) 1993

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Bal Phondke edited It Happened Tomorrow, first collection of regional SF translated into English

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Chronology xv

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1995

Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome



Establishment of Indian Science Fiction Writers Association

1997

Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest wins Onassis International Cultural prize for theatrical plays



Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome wins Arthur C. Clarke Award

1998

Establishment of Indian Association for Science Fiction Studies



Launch of Indian Journal of Science Fiction Studies

2002

Vigyan Katha, Hindi SF magazine starts publication

2003

Abhijit Choudhury’s SF comedy film Patalghar (Bangla), National Film Award in two categories



Manish Jha’s dystopian film Matrubhoomi (Hindi), multiple international awards including FIPRESCI Award in the Parallel Section at the Venice Film Festival award



Rakesh Roshan’s Koi Mil Gaya (Hindi), multiple awards including Best Film Award in Filmfare Awards

2005

Vandana Singh’s ‘Delhi’ (2004) shortlisted for British SF Association Award in short fiction category

2009

Vandana Singh’s Distances (2008) wins Carl Brandon Parallax Award and on James Tiptree Jr Award Honour List

2010

S. Shankar’s Enthiran (Tamil), multiple awards including in National Film Awards and Filmfare Awards; highest-earning movie of the year

2011

Anubhav Sinha’s film Ra.One (Hindi), multiple awards including National Film Awards and Filmfare Awards; possibly most expensive Indian film ever

2012

Vandana Singh and Anil Menon edit Breaking the Bow, SF and other speculative fiction inspired by Ramayana (nominated for 2013 Locus Award)

2016

Kalpabishwa, Bangla SF webzine starts



Mithila Review, SF webzine starts

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xvi Chronology

2018

Vina Jie-Min Prasad’s ‘A Series of Steaks’ (2017, Best Novelette) and ‘Fandom for Robots’ (2017) nominated for Hugo Award (Short Story)



Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler (2017), edited by Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal nominated for Hugo Award (Best Related Work)



Gautam Bhatia (Strange Horizon editorial team) and S. B. Divya (Escape Pod editorial team) nominated for Hugo Award (Best Semiprozine)

2019

The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction edited by Tarun Saint



Vandana Singh’s Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (2018) finalist in Philip K. Dick Award

Kalpabishwa (Bangla) publishes special issue on SF by women

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Introduction: To Mark or Not to Mark Territories

In the last twenty years, science fiction (SF) scholarship in Europe and North America has started recognising the links between SF and colonialism and at the same time paying attention to non-western and postcolonial SF. This scholarly trend has produced a number of books and anthologies that expose inherent connections between SF studies and the study of colonial and postcolonial literature – Ralph Pordzik (2001), John Rieder (2008), Patricia Kerslake (2007), Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal (2010, anthology), Masood Raja, Jason Ellis and Swaralipi Nandi (2011, anthology), Eric Smith (2012) and Jessica Langer (2011) to name a few. Although SF found its dominant expression in western cultures, the above-mentioned works amply prove that SF is not only a western phenomenon. Many SF traditions thrive around the world and require extensive studies. In recent years, several scholars have taken on such tasks: for example Rachel Heywood Ferreira for Argentinian SF, Elizabeth Ginway for Brazilian SF and Anindita Banerjee for Russian SF. Indian SF, which probably has one of the oldest SF traditions outside Europe and North America, has yet to see such a broad book-length publication. Indian SF, though, has seen a rising critical interest in the last two decades, reflected notably in many scholarly articles by Suparno Banerjee, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Sami A. Khan, Jessica Langer, Anwesha Maiti, Uppinder Mehan and Debjani Sengupta among others, as well as a few dissertations (Banerjee, 2010; Chattopadhyay, 2013; Khan, 2015). In 2016, Science Fiction Studies dedicated a special issue to Indian SF. Although these scholarly voices provide some excellent analyses of Indian SF, a unifying and broad discussion of such trends from a ‘national tradition’ model is still lacking. Such a study will provide a coherent and sustained analysis, and a wider picture of Indian SF, tasks which are not possible within the confines of an article, the multiple voices of an anthology or a journal issue. This book hopes to perform such an undertaking – to delineate the historical

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2 INDI AN SCIENCE FICTION

development of the genre over the years and examine major thematic patterns across multiple languages. Any discussion of SF is accompanied by a dilemma of demarcation: what qualifies as SF and what does not. While too strict a definition of the genre stifles creative and critical vitality and renders a narrow vision of the field, an overly fluid and relativistic approach may lead to the loss of terminological specificity. Consequently, finding a fine balance among the various generic determinants and intergeneric and historically mutable relationships is crucial at the beginning of this project – demarcating a discursive territory that is clear enough for building a cohesive argument, but also fluid enough to indicate the contingent nature of such arguments. This dilemma of demarcation, though, is doubled in the examination of any national tradition. In addition to ‘SF’, the categories that justify a specific national adjective, ‘Indian’ in our case, must be examined. While this second definitional task can be performed by pointing at the geographic boundaries of the current Indian nation, geographic boundaries are known to be unstable over any extended period; even at any given point in time, boundaries can be hotly contested. Consequently, in both instances, Indian’ and ‘SF’, the definitions emerge out of dilemmas inherent in complex interactions of ideas and historical forces that expose their overdetermined nature. This introduction will work through these problematics to gain an understanding of both ‘Indian’ and ‘SF’ that will be useful for engaging with Indian SF.

Defining SF In his highly influential study Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (1979), Darko Suvin defines SF as a literature of ‘cognitive estrangement’. According to him, SF functions on a critical and dialectic interaction of two opposing forces: It [SF] should be defined as a fictional tale determined by the hegemonic literary device of a locus and/or dramatis personae that (1) are radically or at least significantly different from empirical times, places, and characters of ‘mimetic’ or ‘naturalist’ fiction, but (2) are nonetheless – to the extent that SF differs from other ‘fantastic’ genres, that is, ensembles of

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Introduction 3

fictional tales without empirical validation – simultaneously perceived as not impossible within the cognitive (cosmological and anthropological) norms of the author’s epoch.1 For Suvin, the ‘necessary and sufficient’ condition of SF is the interaction between estrangement and cognition, an ‘imaginative framework’ that is alternative to the author’s own reality and creation of a ‘novum’, something completely new, that radically differentiates the universe of the story from the continuation of the author’s real world. ‘Science’, in its generally accepted sense as originator of technology and coming out of the European Enlightenment tradition, is not necessarily essential to the creation of SF. For Suvin, the ‘hypothesis’ from which SF takes off is not a scientific but a fictional one; it is the estranging device, much like the ‘alienation effect’ (verfremdungs-effekt) in Brecht’s epic theatre or the Russian Formalist concept propagated by Victor Shklovsky to defamiliarise (ostranienie) an object in order to draw attention to it. From that point on the story is developed with a totalising rigour, which is the ‘scientific’ element. The estrangement acting as a formal framework allows the detached eye to focus on the tale’s cognitive aspect – where the critical gaze is always fixed on the fundamental realities lying underneath the estranged surface. This cognitive approach, according to Suvin, makes SF ‘analogous to that of modern science and philosophy’.2 While Suvin’s approach distinguishes SF from mimetic literature as well as separating SF from other speculative or non-mimetic works, a strict agreement with this definition, according to Carl Freedman, leads to certain problems.3 Freedman argues that adhering strictly to the meaning of ‘cognition’ and ‘estrangement’ would exclude much of the works in the popular pulp SF tradition while including many works that show less affinity with the accepted notion of SF. ‘Cognition’, used in the context of Suvin’s definition of SF, connotes the logical/rational thinking capacity related to acquiring knowledge (science in its broader sense); by extension, this concept indicates a proper logical development within a text that leads to the knowledge of some type of human condition: political, philosophical, scientific and so on. ‘Estrangement’, used in the same definitional context, suggests a distance produced because of the lack of knowledge, which may signify the mysteriousness of the process that defamiliarises the fictional scenario from our normal world. In his definition, Suvin takes the mystery out of

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estrangement and suggests that it is a result of the cognitive process desiring to explore the human condition. Freedman argues that, according to Suvin, many of the early twentieth-century SF stories in the US would not be considered literature of ‘cognitive estrangement’ as they lack rigorous development of plot, but rather are like fantasies wearing a mask of SF. Thus even modern classics like George Lucas’s Star Wars movies (1977 onwards) will fall into this category, while Brecht and Dante will be considered proper SF. To solve this dilemma, Freedman modifies the term ‘cognition’ to ‘cognition effect’ to include texts that present an appearance of a cognitive approach though without strictly being cognitive; thus he defines SF as the genre that posits ‘cognitive estrangement’ as its dominant tendency, and interacts with other minor tendencies often associated with other genres. However, in recent years this dialectical approach has been challenged by critics and authors such as Brian Attebery, John Rieder, China Miéville, Mark Bould, Sheryll Vint and Roger Luckhurst as too formalist and prescriptive. While Attebery uses the idea of ‘fuzzy sets’ (some shared qualities among varied modes of writings) in place of a dialectical definition,4 Rieder5 and Luckhurst6 prefer to examine SF in a historically mutable context rather than through any type of formalist approach; Miéville, in addition, criticises Suvin and Freedman’s emphasis on the notion of ‘cognition’ from an ideological point of view by asking whose cognition or cognition effect we should prioritise.7 According to Rieder, any overtly formal genre definition ignores the historical mutability of generic qualities and even the concept of genre itself. In ‘On Defining SF, Or Not’ (2010) Rieder proposes, that understanding the positions and values of SF within past and present economies of genre, or how the history of this shifting and slippery subject fits into the larger context of changes within the system of genres, is the frame in which to put the question, what difference does it make when ‘we’ point to a text and say that it is SF?8 He sees SF through the ‘communities of practice’ model and argues that at best only an evolving ad hoc definition of the genre can be provided, wherein the various differing practices can come together, not in a final unity but in a ‘broad horizon’ of affinities. In Rieder’s view, this type of definition refers to ‘a shared territory that is not a matter of giving up on

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Introduction 5

arriving at a definition of the genre, but rather is precisely the product of the interaction among different communities of practice using different definitions of SF’.9 Miéville’s critique differs from Rieder’s: he focuses on the ideology of ‘science’ and ‘rationality’ rather than on genre theory itself. He argues that Suvin (and also Freedman) prioritises a western understanding of these terms and that such understanding leads to the exclusivist attitude to any other fantastic literature displaying less ‘rational’ quality. Miéville proposes: Taking alterity as a starting point might allow us to trace structural relations between fantastic genres and the anti-realist avant-garde. It might also allow a revisiting with critical rigour of a traditional – and traditionally denigrated as woolly and anti-theoretical – notion of the ‘sense of wonder’, as intrinsic to the field.10 A similar definitional discourse brews in the Indian SF community. The terms or corresponding ideas in some of the Indian languages that stand for SF are roughly translated into English as ‘stories of imagined science’ (‘kalpabigyaner golpo’ or often just ‘kalpabigyan’ in Bangla), ‘science stories’ (‘bigyan-vittik golpo’ in Bangla, ‘vijnana katha’ in Hindi and Marathi, ‘ar-iviyal pun - aikatai’ in Tamil etc.), ‘weird’ (‘ajgubi’ in Bangla), ‘science fantasy’, ‘science fiction’ and the larger umbrella term ‘speculative fiction’. The main conflicting elements in this definitional debate are the allegiance to ‘vijnana’, the Sanskrit word that stands for ‘specialised’ knowledge, and translates into English as ‘science’ in its post-Enlightenment methodological and disciplinary sense, along with the corresponding words and derivatives of ‘vijnana’ in other Indian languages on the one hand, and the transcending/marginalising of actual ‘vijnana’ in favour of the more fantastic/sensational on the other. In one of the few serious works of scholarship on this definitional debate in an indigenous language (Bangla), Rabin Bal cites Satyajit Ray in describing the two camps along the lines of Vernians (those who prefer a stronger allegiance to science and logic) and the Wellsians (those who use science only as a device to break through contemporary reality to imagine alterities).11 While Jayant Vishnu Narlikar, an eminent astrophysicist and Marathi SF author, belongs to the first camp, Adrish Bardhan, an eminent Bengali SF author and founder of Ascharya, the first SF magazine in India, is part of the second. Narlikar

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calls for actual scientific elements in SF and dismisses what he calls ‘pseudo-science’ in these narratives.12 Bardhan on the other hand, refuses to be constrained by any such boundaries.13 For Bardhan SF and fantasy are rarely distinguishable, even though something akin to Freedman’s ‘cognitive effect’ is often present in Bardhan’s own SF writing. These two authors’ positions are symptomatic of the larger field. While such influential authors and editors as Bal Phondke, Premendra Mitra and Kshitindranaryan Roy have professed opinions like Narlikar’s, authors such as Leela Majumdar and Satyajit Ray take a more ambiguous stance. Majumdar tries to distinguish between SF and weird fiction by the presence of scientific elements for the sake of the primarily juvenile readership, but Ray takes a more liberal attitude.14 More recently Vandana Singh, an author and theoretical physicist, in her ‘Speculative Manifesto’ (2008), has called for the primacy of imagination without regard to fidelity to actual science in speculating about alternative possibilities. For her, the finer genre distinctions are of lesser importance than speculatively imagining alterities absent in our mundane reality.15 Central to this definitional debate in India are the varying connotative associations between ‘vijnana’ and ‘science’. Hans Harder explains that ‘vijnana’, the Sanskrit word used as an equivalent for ‘science’, makes the very idea of ‘science’ ‘less well-defined and at the same time more loaded with polarising connotations’ in India than it is in the West.16 He points out similar semantic dissonances existing in other word pairs as ‘dharma’/‘religion’ and ‘darsana’/‘philosophy’, and assigns the difficulties to intercultural transactions of meanings and conceptual associations. In the case of the ‘vijnana’/‘science’ pair, Harder assigns the problem to the proximity of modern techno-science to the industrialised West that invaded India, and the association of religion and philosophy to the pre-colonial native culture. Hence the word ‘science’ becomes integral to the conception of European colonisers and their technologies, while ‘vijnana’17 retains a looser association with a set of cognitive functions from older Hindu-Buddhist philosophical traditions.18 Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay also foregrounds the ‘jnana’ (knowledge)/‘vijnana’ (science) binary to formulate his idea of ‘kalpavigyan’. He highlights the specificity of ‘vijnana’ against the transcendental holism of ‘jnana’ and claims that in the Indian context ‘vijnana’ often provides a pathway to a greater transcendental knowledge of the world, and hence ‘science’ must be understood in

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Introduction 7

the context of the specific society in spite of its universalising tendencies while discussing SF.19 According to Chattopadhyay, the mythical associationism inherent in the ‘jnana’/‘vijnana’ binary lends this cultural specificity. I have made similar arguments elsewhere regarding the cultural specificity of ‘science’ and the diverging understanding between Indian and western concepts and the effect of such understanding on conceiving of SF.20 Thus the sense of wonder in Indian SF often arises from what Miéville calls the ‘traditionally denigrated as woolly and antitheoretical’ notion of science.21 However, Luckhurst argues that SF is a genre that evolves over time in the context of such culturally specific notions as ‘science’ and ‘modernity’, but always imagining alternative possibilities. He claims: ‘SF texts imagine futures or parallel worlds premised on the perpetual change associated with modernity, often by extending or extrapolating aspects of Mechanism from [the] contemporary world. In doing so, SF texts capture the fleeting fantasies thrown up in the swirl of modernity.’22 In the Indian context, that swirl is often caught up in the attempts to recontextualise ‘modernity’ not only within the Enlightenment tradition but also within a mythic rebirth of ancient Indian wisdom, or traditions that question modernity itself by imagining alternative ways of being. India’s colonial relationship to Europe, and hence to the very idea of European modernity and progress, thus places Indian SF at a unique and problematic position. Scholars such as Patricia Kerslake (2007) and John Rieder (2008) have extensively shown that SF and European imperialism are intrinsically connected, and that modernity and progress are inherently linked to fantasies of colonialism.23 Jessica Langer (2011) on the other hand has delineated the role that postcolonial SF, especially from developing nations, plays in responding to such politics of power.24 The history of Indian SF shows that from its very inception the genre has been resisting such fantasies of imperialism resulting from progress and modernity. Therefore, arguably, the imperial relationship between the culture of India and western modernity shaped Indian SF’s imagination of alterity. As I will show in the following chapters, almost every aspect of Indian SF is dependent on this relationship between Indian and western culture, making the genre a cultural hybrid par excellence. Evidently, an evolving relationship between Indian culture and modernity and science will inevitably alter the way that SF is conceived in India, as such changes will also affect how Indian SF stands

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8 INDI AN SCIENCE FICTION

in relationship with the larger economy of genres. Hence a community of practice and cultural history approach is effective in dealing with texts over a period of more than a century. Yet, in order to decipher such relationships, we must also look for certain characteristics, even if evolving, in these cultural productions that differentiate SF from what is not SF, that is texts that are not productively read as such. To serve such a purpose, I propose to use Freedman’s variation of Suvin’s definition of SF as literature of ‘cognitive estrangement’, wherein a text creates a radical break from the author’s empirical reality, and yet at least creates a ‘cognition effect’ through its attitude to the fictional universe – a universe which even though radically different from the author’s empirical world, at least pretends to function within the laws of nature (real or fictional), rather than from any supernatural volition. In this context, such natural laws and mythical and supernatural phenomena are treated as such within the author’s social and epistemological orientation. These social and epistemological orientations evolve over time and vary within specific socio-linguistic communities in India, and thus engender a differential and often overlapping relationship with other genres. I tread closer to ‘kalpabigyan’ (a term first coined by Adrish Bardhan) with its open-ended attitude than to the more rigid specificity of ‘vijnana katha’. I find Suvin’s taxonomic approach useful to the degree that it creates an identifiable pool of works looking at whose interrelationships and patterns seems to me more productive from historical, social and literary perspectives than to function within an unmanageable chaotic mass. Yet I also appreciate Rieder’s and Luckhurst’s cultural and historical approach because any taxonomic category must be examined within its own continually evolving socio-historical perspectives. In the above provisional definition of SF, I hope to benefit from both these approaches. I will consequently discuss works that exhibit the above qualities prominently although being aware that such qualities are contingent. I will not include in my analysis works that are obviously mimetic – that is, functioning within the assumed extension of the author’s empirical reality and engaging in sincere verisimilitude, or works that are intentionally fantastic and marvellous without any pretension to ‘cognition’ or ‘cognition effect’ as explained above. Although both these categories are related to SF as literature of ‘cognitive estrangement’ at its two poles, they are more productively read within a different context than the works that I will consider under this project.

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Introduction 9

Defining ‘Indian’ As is the case with SF, the national category of ‘India’, when applied to cultural productions, poses a few problems. ‘Indian’ in its simplest sense can refer to the adjective of India, the modern nation-state, pertaining to its citizens, without regard to their actual residence within the country’s territorial borders. Such a definition, however, will exclude any cultural product originating before the inauguration of the current Indian nation-state in 1947 or created by any individual who has surrendered his/her Indian citizenship or by people born of Indian migrants in other parts of the world. Such exclusions will lead to major problems: on the one hand, SF has existed in the space we now know as India before its independence from the British colonisers, and on the other, many non-citizens of Indian descent write SF that prominently foregrounds an Indian cultural milieu.25 Furthermore, much that was part of British India is no longer in India after 1947, but is now in Pakistan and Bangladesh, although still sharing languages and cultures with what is now India. Thus, even language or culture-based definitions pose certain problems. Benedict Anderson in his influential Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983) argues that all nations are imagined as limited and sovereign, and as communities of people, even though they be pluralistic in every sense.26 More recently (2016) Neil Davidson has highlighted the oscillating relationship between the collective identity of the citizens and the political structure of the nation-state.27 Both Anderson and Davidson highlight political imagination and its practical implementation, and the gaps existing between the former and the latter. While Davidson focuses on political inequalities as a catalyst of nationalism,28 Anderson proposes that imagination of national consciousness is often languagedependent; that is, nations are often bound by linguistic communities, as in most of Europe or, by ‘print’ national languages that are often vestiges of colonial power relations and have only a small currency in the living culture, as is the case with most postcolonial African nations.29 Such linguistic formulation of nationalism, though, is problematic in the case of India. On the one hand India, which designates twenty-two languages (including English) as official modes of communication, and in addition has further 101 major languages and 1,513 minor ones, as a nation never existed along a linguistic line.30 Language-based kingdoms

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and states existed all along, but by nature empires, from the Maurya (322 BCE–185 BCE) to the British (c.1757–1947 CE), encompass a linguistic plurality. So does the modern Indian nation. India does not have a national language, although Hindi and English generally work as lingua franca. In addition, at least six major languages of India such as Hindi, Bangla, Urdu, Tamil, Punjabi and Kashmiri are also regularly used in neighbouring countries of Pakistan (Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi and Kashmiri), Bangladesh (Bangla), Nepal (Hindi and Urdu) and Sri Lanka (Tamil) and share strong historical-cultural transactions across the borders. In this regard, Alfred Stepan, Juan J. Linz and Yogendra Yadav (2011) pose a counter-model, ‘state-nation’, that may also prove useful in defining India.31 Stepan, Linz and Yadav argue that ‘robustly multinational’ democracies often contain groups that think of themselves as a nation in every sense of the word and hence see the nation-state model as oppressive, leading to claims of further newer nations. The ‘statenation’ model, the authors claim, provides a better way of imagining and crafting collective identities that are also diverse and intersecting on multiple aspects of polity and socio-cultural identities. Even then, the authors concede that India proves to be a most difficult proposition: India would seem to present one of the most difficult tests for our argument that multiple but complementary identities and democratic state-nation loyalties are possible even in a polity with robustly multinational dimensions and a plethora of intense linguistic and religious differences … [T]hat such diversity could not have been molded into a nation-state peacefully and democratically.32 Stepan, Linz and Yadav argue that the creative and inclusionary discourse of the creators of modern Indian democracy such as Gandhi and Nehru found a political model that is very close to the ‘state-nation’ model. Evidently, the ‘state-nation’ model is ideologically more diverse and inherently more democratic than the ‘nation-state’ model, and while it is still an ‘imagined community’, the ‘imagination’ of ‘community’ is more complex and overdetermined than Anderson originally assumed. However, this ‘state-nation’ model leads us to another already existing model that often dominates Indian nationalist discourses: the idea of a civilisational collective. Political theorist Bhikhu Parekh claims that India first faced the struggle of self-definition as a nation during

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the struggle for independence.33 Although such identitarian discourses varied widely among the thinkers such as Raja Rammohan Roy, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Rabindranath Tagore, M. G. Renade, G. K. Gokhale, Gandhi and Nehru, the overall agreement that India is a civilisation based on plurality – moral, philosophical, political, ethnic and spiritual – existed across the board. Despite intolerance and internal strife, these multiple cultural streams have over the centuries challenged, intersected and borrowed from each other. This perspective can be seen in independent India’s motto of ‘unity in diversity’. Thus Stepan, Linz and Yadav’s discourse of a current political model refers to something that has been inherent in the South Asian space for a long time: social, cultural, ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity that constantly interact yet maintain their distinctions. Such discourses as deliberated above illustrate the difficulties of defining ‘Indian’ on a geopolitical basis. However, the same problem also exists on a transnational and diasporic base. The Ministry of External Affairs estimates that more than thirty-one million people of Indian origin (Non-Resident Indians and Persons of Indian Origin) are living outside the country, 34 and according to the United Nations, India is the country with the largest diasporic population in the world.35 Although residing outside the country, this diasporic population has a strong economic and cultural influence within India on the one hand, and on the other, prominently displays cultural affiliations to India within host societies. Consequently, this population cannot be overlooked in the category of ‘Indian’. In the context of the Caribbean diaspora in Britain, Stuart Hall writes that cultural identity is often assumed to be fixed at birth, yet in diaspora this identity is fragmented and multiplied through external socio-historical forces, although the nostalgia or cultural connection with ‘home’ never diminishes in importance.36 However, invoking Heidegger’s idea of ‘unheimlich’ or ‘not at home’, Hall also exposes this diasporic population’s uneasy connection with ‘home’: ‘They are happy to be home. But history has somehow irrevocably intervened.’37 Hall’s comments are applicable to the Indian diaspora as well. The fluid and transnational qualities of cultural identity refuse to be bound by geographical boundaries. In this context, Parvati Raghuram and Ajaya Kumar Sahoo claim that in recent years both the concepts of ‘culture’ and of ‘nation’ have come under increased scrutiny from sociologists, anthropologists, cultural critics and historians.38 Raghuram and Sahoo explain, ‘Contemporary

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ethnography, to give but one example, has rejected reductive notions of culture as dwelling in favour of a wider definition of culture as multilocale. The concept of nation as an unalterable homogeneous entity has been seriously questioned.’39 Hence, the ‘imagined community’ that we discussed above is formed not only within the established borders of a country but also outside it through psychological, political, ethnic and historical forces, while also intersecting with other types of imaginations of identity. Raghuram and Sahoo cite Paul Gilroy in highlighting the diasporic experience as a disjunction between ‘locations of residence and locations of belonging’, leading to complex questions of identity and belonging.40 Such disjunctions foster a continual cultural tension, in which the culture of origin plays as important a role as the host culture, which often leaves traces within multiple generations. Therefore, we must accept that the ‘Indian’ in Indian diaspora is as much ‘Indian’ in this sense of ‘imagining’ as the ‘Indian’ within the geographical boundaries of India. Using this notion of ‘culture as multi-locale’, I propose to examine Indian SF in both its geographical context as well as in its dispersed cultural sense. Accordingly, Indian SF in this study will not only refer to SF produced in the Republic of India, which gained its independence from the British on 15 August 1947, but also to the British Indian empire that spanned the Indian subcontinent and included the regions of present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh as well as to the same geographical region in South Asia before the advent of the British. In addition, Indian SF also describes the works created by the Indian diaspora without regard to any citizenship status. Understandably, the adjective ‘Indian’ does not apply to works coming out of modern-day Pakistan or Bangladesh and the diaspora self-identifying with these countries, even though they share many cultural similarities. This wide, yet reasonably specific idea of ‘Indian’ will hopefully provide us with the tools for constructing a ‘national tradition’ model for SF that will be at once cohesive and inclusive and show historical relationships between the older texts and the contemporary works.

The Trajectory As is evident, analysing SF from an Indian ‘national tradition’ perspective requires examining works in multiple languages. In this study, I

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primarily focus on four language traditions – Bangla, English, Hindi and Marathi – that have the longest history and have produced the bulk of Indian SF over the years. In addition, I also examine authors and works from other languages such as Assamese, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada whenever possible. Being fluent in only three of these languages, I had to rely on translations and often on secondary sources. Most of the works examined are popular and influential within their traditions and sometimes even at the national level. Some of the works chosen are of historical importance even though not as popular as others, and some relatively unknown works are analysed because of their specific qualities serving the purpose of the examination. The multiple cultural and conceptual dilemmas and overlaps that characterise Indian SF are best examined by a diachronic study of the genre’s historical development, supplemented by analyses of the major formal and contextual elements. I identify these components as time of action, space of action, characters that perform such action, and the epistemic base determining the nature of these narrative elements. My focus on these specific aspects (and not on others) has two lines of justification. First, partially influenced by the Aristotelian theory of drama,41 I consider texts primarily a body of coherent narrative actions (physical, psychological and/or symbolic) happening in a space (physical and/or theoretical) for a specific duration of time (linear and/or non-linear) and performed (externally and/or psychologically) by specific characters (human and/or non-human). All these elements are related to (adhering to or departing from) the author’s concept of reality (physical and/or metaphysical). Consequently, an analysis of these core components can provide us with important insights into the functioning of a genre. Secondly, these four elements provide the dominant tropes that set SF apart as a genre of alterity, especially in the Indian context: other times and other spaces, utopian discourses, the Other or alien as a central character and a constant interaction between Indian and western epistemic traditions that seriously considers possibilities of other kinds of knowledge. The chapters that follow, examine these components in depth. Chapter  1, ‘Genealogies: The Emergence and Development of Indian SF’, traces the evolution of Indian SF from 1835 (the year that K. C. Dutt’s ‘A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945’, the first futuristic work in India was published) to 2019 (the year of writing of this book), drawing an overarching historical trajectory. In this chapter,

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I break down the development of SF into four loosely conceived historical periods: 1835–1905, 1905–47, 1947–95 and 1995–2019. The first historical period (1835–1905) provides us with the first specimens of SF, primarily in the guise of revolutionary future histories in the utopian mode, adventure tales following western SF and stories with scientific and technological elements. I argue that early developments of SF in India resulted mainly from the establishment of a British education system starting in the 1820s, including the study of the English language and the physical and biological sciences. This assumption is supported by Indian SF’s close yet complicated relationship with western culture and science writing throughout its history, from K. C. Dutt’s ‘Journal’, which depicts a rebellion against the British and was a result of English education, to the scientist J. C. Bose’s Bangla story, ‘Niruddesher Kahini’ (Story of a Disappearance, 1896), which uses the principle of ‘surface tension’ to calm a cyclone, and such interaction proves to be Indian SF’s most important characteristic. The second period, 1905 (the year of publication of Begum Rokeya’s Sultana’s Dream, a landmark feminist utopia) to 1947 (the year of Indian independence), sees a slow consolidation of SF as a genre in popular culture. While in the first period SF is visible only in Bangla, English and Hindi, more languages, including Assamese, Marathi and Tamil, join in the second period. While this period continues the utopic and satirical nature of earlier SF, specimens that display influences of western SF increase on a large scale. A nascent magazine SF culture also develops from the 1920s through children’s and youth magazines (especially in Bangla), in which SF and science writing often cohabit the same sphere. A strong nationalistic element prominently challenging western hegemony emerges in the 1940s around the time of Indian independence. In the post-independence period (1947–95), this nationalistic element becomes even stronger. With the rise of Hindu nationalism in the political sphere and interaction with the other traditional forms of fantastic writing such as myths, fairy tales and ghost stories, SF mutates into a more malleable genre during this period. These influences further prove to be potent instruments of questioning global political hegemony in imaginary forms. However, on the other side of the spectrum, SF maintains its strong ties with science writing and science education. Arguably this period can be called ‘the golden age’ of indigenous language SF, as SF sharply rises in various indigenous

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languages during this time: in addition to those already mentioned, such languages as Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Telugu, Malayalam, Gujarati and Urdu start producing identifiably SF narratives. The first exclusively SF magazine in India, Ascharya, was established (Bangla, 1963) by Adrish Bardhan. During this time magazine culture in SF further develops all over India. With more and more domestic translations (as opposed to translations from non-Indian sources) and interactions across different language communities, towards the end of this period indigenous-language SF arguably appears at a national level. A completely new phenomenon, the advent of SF film, occurs in the 1960s. However, few films made during these early years show originality, most of them displaying strong influences of Hollywood, a trend that continues even in 2019. While post-independence SF is mostly found in indigenous languages, often displaying nationalistic concerns, since the 1990s English-language SF starts becoming prominent, frequently reflecting more global ambitions. The final period under consideration, 1995 (the year that Amitav Ghosh’s Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel The Calcutta Chromosome was published) to 2019 thus can legitimately be seen as the era of globalisation of Indian SF. While indigenouslanguage SF continues to flourish, English-language SF and increasing translation of indigenous-language SF into English are slowly recruiting a global readership. The same can be said about Indian SF films that reflect more sophisticated production strategies and the influx of capital in their global releases. And while most films still display their indebtedness to Hollywood, a few manage to break new ground in technical innovation and original ideas. A few notable developments of this period include a move from nationalistic sentiments towards a more critical self-reflection and a visible shift in the gender composition of the authors. While a strong nationalistic sentiment featuring mythical tropes and references to non-western epistemologies continues in indigenous-language SF, English-language SF embraces a more critical and theoretical version of hybridity and introspection. Consequently, since the late 1990s dystopian futures become a dominant mode in Indian SF, as does questioning of postcolonial identity politics. A shift in authorship is also visible. While Indian women have been writing SF at least since 1905 (Begum Rokeya), only a handful of authors, such as Leela Majumdar, Enakshi Chattyopadhyay and Bandita Phukan, established themselves in the field before the 1990s. However, in the last

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twenty-five years many major voices in SF, especially in English, have been those of women. I conclude this long chapter by highlighting the evolution of the generic qualities and emphasising the hybrid nature of Indian SF as well as its constant interaction with the West. In chapters 2–5 I examine four specific aspects of Indian SF. In chapter 2, titled ‘Cognitions and Estrangements: Epistemologies and World Building in Indian SF’, I claim that specific systems of knowledge define the relationship of a constructed textual universe to the author’s experiential world. In Indian SF, multiple competing systems of knowledge stake claims at this underlying role, and thus further emphasise the hybrid nature of this genre. Drawing on works of such scholars as Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the first section of this chapter examines these often battling epistemologies: western techno-science (associated with the European colonisers), Vedic science (associated with ancient Hindu philosophical tradition, the dominant Indian mainstream) and the nebulous realm of regional subaltern knowledge. I examine such works as J. C. Bose’s ‘Niruddesher Kahini’ (Bangla, 1896), Satyajit Ray’s Professor Shanku stories (Bangla, 1961–92), Narlikar’s The Return of Vaman (translated by author from Marathi, 1989), Dinesh Chandra Goswami’s collection of stories The Hair Timer (translated from Assamese, 2011) and Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome among others in discussing these epistemological conflicts, continuities and assemblages. The second section of chapter 2 offers a closer examination of the special relationship that myths have with Indian SF. Many Indian SF works retell mythical stories in futuristic contexts, or reinterpret myths within the physical laws of mainstream science (such as in Narlikar’s 1991 short stories ‘Vigyan Yug Me Naradji’ and ‘Yakshophar’, and Vandana Singh and Anil Menon’s edited 2012 collection Breaking the Bow containing stories inspired by Ramayana). Reasons for this phenomenon are manifold: nationalistic fervour and a desire to relate SF to the more prestigious genre of epic are prominent causes; but a regular invocation of myths is also a quality of Indian literary tradition. On the other side of the spectrum, reinterpretation of myths through SF tropes becomes a device of challenging the dominant Hindu patriarchal narrative. Thus, a major characteristic of Indian SF becomes a constant epistemological upheaval – between Indian and western modes of knowing. Chapter 3, ‘Other Times: Imagining the Future, Alternative Histories and Non-linear Temporalities’, examines the use of temporality in

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Indian SF. I argue that the coincidence of colonial rule and the rise of SF in India affects the deployment of temporalities in the genre. In the first section, I examine three trends of imagining the past: the glorious ancient past (such as in Adrish Bardhan’s Professor Natboltu Chakra stories, Bangla, 1963–2008), which I call an expression of Hindu nationalism; subversion of colonial authority, which often overlaps with the first category, but does not necessarily support a nationalistic narrative (e.g., Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome); and challenges to the monolithic narrative of a Hindu past (e.g., Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s Generation 14, 2008). Examining such works as K. C. Dutt’s ‘Journal’, Rahul Sankrityayan’s Basivee Sadi (Hindi, 1924) and Anil Menon’s The Beast with Nine Billion Feet (2009), in the second section I argue that the futures imagined in Indian SF reflect the desires, hopes, and fears of a people constantly dealing with a multiplicity of oppressions and yet experiencing techno-scientific advances and striving for geopolitical sovereignty. I argue that these futures are marked by a struggle between not only India and the West, but also between a ‘pure’ India and a ‘mongrelised’ postcolonial nation. The third section examines the depiction of the author’s contemporary world, in which a surprisingly high number of Indian SF stories take place. I argue that such works reflect a forking path in time by slightly altering contemporary realities. This is often reflected in an inverted power relationship between Indian and western characters (e.g. Premendra Mitra’s Ghanada stories, Bangla, 1945–88), or by a disruption of the mundane by some spectacular occurrence (e.g. Vandana Singh’s ‘Tetrahedron’, 2008). Thus, despite being set in the author’s own time, these texts represent an alternative reality. In chapter  4, titled ‘Other Spaces: Utopian Discourses and Non-expansionist Journeys’, I argue that, like time, representations of space (the location of the narrative action) in Indian SF indicate an interaction between Indian and foreign forces. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s theories of utopia, Tom Moylan’s theories of dystopia and Scott Bukatman’s theory of ‘paraspace’ among others, in the first section I examine the strong utopian/dystopian tradition in Indian SF, which I claim is an indication of the authors’ desire to reimagine India as a space on which forces of patriarchy, corruption, identity politics and imperialism have wreaked and are still wreaking havoc. Sometimes this imagination results in idealised spaces such as in Begum Rokeya’s Sultana’s Dream and Suniti Namjoshi’s Mothers of Maya Diip (1989),

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and at other times they become dark dystopias like Subodh Jawadekar’s ‘A Journey into Darkness’ (translated from Marathi, 1993) and Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet-Engine Laugh (2001). In the second section of the chapter, I explore movement in space or journey, an integral part of SF. Using works of Edward Said, Pramod K. Nayar and John Rieder, I argue that although imperialism, travel narratives and SF are joined at the hip, unlike Euro-American SF, Indian SF rarely presents an expansionist universe and colonising missions, probably because India was a destination of such colonising missions. In addition, travel outside India was severely constrained, other than as servants/subjects of the British crown, until towards the end of the twentieth century, since which time the Indian diaspora has rapidly grown in various parts of the world, but as immigrants not as conquerors. As works like Jagadananda Roy’s ‘Shukra Bhraman’ (Bangla, written 1892, published 1914) and Satyajit Ray’s ‘Byom Jatrir Diary’ (Bangla, 1963) show, although exploratory and dangerous, space travel in Indian SF is more like adventure tourism than colonialism. Chapter 5, ‘The Others: Aliens, Robots, Cyborgs and Other Others’, examines the characters (the agents of narrative action) that are often responsible for creating the ‘novum’ of SF – the aliens or the Others. India in western literature is already the estranged ‘Other’, and so are the human occupants of this space. Drawing on works of Stuart Hall, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Donna Haraway among others, in the first section, I argue that Indian SF often presents a view from this ‘other side’, i.e. through the eyes of the ‘aliens’ or other ‘Others’, such as clones, cyborgs, AIs, mutants and creatures. Examining works such as Satyajit Ray’s ‘Bankubabur Bandhu’ (Bangla, 1962), Vandana Singh’s Of Love and Other Monsters (2007) and Samit Basu’s Turbulence (2012), I show that many of these ‘Others’ are actually projections of alienations within the Indian population: the suppressed colonial subject, the subaltern subjects of the modern state, or immigrants of the Indian diaspora, who are aliens both at home and abroad. These ‘aliens’ or ‘Others’ disrupt the hegemonic identity politics established by imperial as well as post-industrial world systems. The second section of chapter 5 examines an opposite tendency. Using Edward Said’s idea of Orientalism, Alastair Bonnett’s discussion of Occidentalism and Vinayak Savarkar’s ideology of Hindutva, I argue that many indigenous-language SF stories present aliens and other Others as intruders, often as thinly veiled allusions to foreign

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invaders (e.g.  Laxman Londhe and Chintamani Deshmukh’s 1990 Marathi short story ‘Devamsi Jive Marile’ and Sami Ahmad Khan’s Aliens in Delhi, 2017). However, these Others are not always strictly evil; they are often benefactors who grant wishes through technological marvels (Rakesh Roshan’s Hindi film Koi Mil Gaya, 2003, is an excellent example). Others are, however, often not strictly foreigners either. As works like, Narlikar’s ‘Yakshophar’ (Marathi, 1990) and Debabrata Dash’s ‘An Encounter with God’ (translated from Oriya,1993) show, they can very well be the invisible subalterns and minorities that threaten the dominant social order. The ‘aliens’ explored in this section, threaten the dominant Indian identity, and do so mostly through their associations with civilisational Others. Indian SF thrives on the confluence of many cultural interactions, which is visible not only in its historical development, but also in the ways the genre uses its formal and thematic elements. Predominantly, this interaction is between Indian and western cultures, but sometimes it is between the dominant and the marginalised cultures within the country. Although many Indian literary works exhibit such relationships, SF is probably the only formally identifiable genre whose existence depends on these close encounters between strangers. The conclusion, titled ‘Close Encounters’, re-emphasises this interstitial existence of SF in the Indian cultural context. The conclusion also highlights the role of translation in these cultural transactions and the prevailing publication politics among ‘bhasha’ literature (literature in Indian languages) and literature in English. Although the scope of this study cannot be exhaustive, and although it is impossible to encompass the whole of the Indian national tradition within the boundaries of this discussion, an exploration like this makes sense of the larger national tradition of Indian SF and its overarching patterns and evolution. Language-specific studies within the Indian context such as by myself (2010)42 and Sami Ahmad Khan (2016)43 on Indian English SF, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay (2013)44 on Bangla SF and Ajay Singh (2002)45 on Hindi SF are often more comprehensive in nature. However, while such studies are important, they isolate each language tradition in its socio-historical context and often overlook, perhaps out of necessity, larger patterns and cultural cross-pollination at the national level. This study claims that such larger patterns exist and are worth examining. The aim of the current project is to start that process in the hope of stimulating more studies of this nature.

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Genealogies: A Brief History of Indian SF

In a blog discussion with the eminent SF author Vandana Singh, Anil Menon (another prominent SF author) claims, ‘“Indian” SF seems to have come out of the native experience with the inscrutable British. (The Portuguese and French dominated areas don’t show a similar evolution.) Perhaps it’s satisfying to think that Indian SF originated in a true alien-contact story.’1 Indeed, such a take on the emergence of the genre is not at all far-fetched when we look at the early works displaying major SF qualities – narrative of the future, technological marvels, alien encounters, space travel, application of scientific principles to manipulate nature, utopian politics and so on – during the nineteenth century. Most of these early texts show a clear connection to the British either through direct references or through indirect ideological discourses. The fact that such qualities emerge in Indian literature at the height of British colonial rule lends further credibility to Menon’s opinion. This development is even more noticeable because of its coincidence with similar literary trends in the industrialised nations of Europe and America. Kylas Chunder Dutt’s ‘A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945’, the first text that display SF-like qualities by setting its actions in the future, was published in 1835, only seventeen years after Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818, England), eleven years after Faddei Bulgarin’s Plausible Fantasies or a Journey in the 29th Century (1824, Russia), the same year as Edgar Alan Poe’s Hans Pfaall – a Tale (1835, USA), and almost thirty years before Jules Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863, France). Indian SF thus responded to the sociohistorical developments of the nineteenth century somewhat similarly (although ideologically very differently) to the industrialised West. However, as I have elaborated in the Introduction, Indian SF is a product of both the traditional imaginative literature of India and that of European colonial education and scientific ideas. It is influenced by the ‘cognitive’ mode of Euro-American SF, development in science and technology as well as by the ancient traditions of myths, legends, ghost

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stories and folk tales of India. Although this mythical/Indian tradition has been highly influential in the development of Indian SF along with all other Indian cultural productions, seeing SF as a direct progeny of these works does a disservice both to SF and to the epics and Puranas. While SF primarily seeks to ground its speculation and extrapolation in a zero-world based on rational and materialist explanation of the author’s natural universe, the epics and the Puranas ground their worldview primarily in religious faith – in a relationship between the natural world and a divine supernatural order. If we accept this thesis, then it is only in the nineteenth century that we first notice works displaying SF qualities. SF in India, especially since independence, when the genre developed rapidly, is the creation of a society at once driven by a rapidly growing materialistic industrial economy and by the metaphysical and pastoral traditions that have existed for millennia. Many of these works challenge the normativity of occidental literary forms and ideas, yet never fully reject what we established as SF’s primary generic tendencies: a ‘cognitive estrangement’ from the author’s empirical world that leads to the creation of something radically new. As I argued in the introduction, this is a process wherein a text creates a radical break from the author’s empirical reality, and yet at least creates a ‘cognition effect’ through its attitude to the fictional universe – a universe which even though radically different from the author’s empirical world, at least pretends to function within the laws of nature (real or fictional), rather than from any supernatural volition. In this context, such natural laws and mythical and supernatural phenomena are seen as such within the author’s social and epistemological orientation. These SF texts, especially in their early forms, are highly influenced by the English language and British colonial education, but often subvert the primacy of colonial and neocolonial authorities signified by such language and culture. While many writers incorporate hard science to give their tales ‘scientific merit’, many others consider such merit unnecessary; they even undermine the monolithic and totalising propensities of science itself. While the first tendency is strong in Hindi and Marathi SF, Bangla and English SF often lean towards the latter, paying more attention to social trends and utopian ideas. The corresponding terms for the genre in different Indian languages often indicate this difference in tendencies: for example ‘vijnana katha’ (stories of science), the term used in Hindi and Marathi, essentially calls for

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direct scientific elements, while the Bangla term ‘kalpabigyaner golpo’ (stories of imagined science), casts a much wider net. Although some of the earliest works of Indian SF were written in English, until the late 1990s the genre primarily developed in various Indian languages such as Bangla, Marathi, Hindi etc. According to the Encyclopedia of Indian Literature, at least seven languages – Assamese, Gujarati, Kannada, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu – in addition to the ones mentioned above, show works identifiable as SF.2 While tracing a diachronic arc of SF’s (as defined above) development in India, this chapter will primarily concentrate on Bangla, English, Hindi and Marathi, only occasionally mentioning other language traditions, not only for the sake of space, but also because these four languages have historically possessed the longest and richest SF traditions and have accorded the genre a more mainstream presence than most other language traditions.

1835–1905: Revolutionary Futures, Scientific Education and Influence of Western SF Indian SF in the nineteenth century takes three different forms: revolutionary future histories, adventure tales following western SF, and stories with scientific and technological elements. Early developments of SF in India resulted mainly from the establishment of a British education system starting in the 1820s, including the study of the English language and the physical and biological sciences. Kylas Chunder Dutt’s ‘A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945’ (1835, published in the Calcutta Literary Gazette), a short English prose piece depicting a future rebellion against the British, is possibly the earliest futuristic fiction as well as one of the earliest English-language fictions written in India. ‘Journal’ is not only significant in its prophetically close prediction of the year of Indian independence (1947), but also because the publication in the same year as Thomas Babington Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Indian Education’ is highly ironic. In the ‘Minute’, Macaulay lays down the principle of English language education in colonial India: We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a

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class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.3 Evidently the British educational apparatus in India grew out of the necessity to cultivate a medium through which the ruling Europeans were to conduct their affairs with the native subjects. However, that ‘medium’, the English language, for the Indians soon became not only a symbol of power but a new instrument for expression – a mode that is communicable to the colonial power. Consequently, English writing in India during the nineteenth century flourished among the indigenous educated elite, who had the most frequent interaction with the British. That Indian writing in English, with its connotation of power politics, in one way or other addresses issues of national identity does not come as a surprise. During the colonial period, English writing either whetted nationalist feelings and subversive ideology or appealed to the colonial power for more understanding. On the one hand, the indigenous bourgeoisie, like the Bengali social reformer Raja Rammohan Roy, argued for the introduction of English education with the aim of educating the Indian people in western sciences; on the other, they used the English language as an instrument of self-assertion against colonial discrimination.4 On the one hand, knowing English meant the prospect of getting favours from the British; on the other, knowing English also meant access to power and making one’s voice heard not only by the higher authorities but also across the nation and the barrier of languages. In a way, ‘Journal’ predicts the fate of the English language at the hands of Macaulay’s ‘mimic men’. Commenting on the ironic use of English in ‘Journal’, in which the rebels are English-educated urban elites, the class Macaulay had intended as his ‘interpreter’ between the ruling British and the native subjects, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra says a text like ‘Journal’, ‘where the “language of command” is stood on its head and turned into the language of subversion, suggests itself as the imaginative beginning of a nation’.5 Narrated in a context of the prolonged injustice practised by the British colonisers, ‘Journal’ depicts a battle between an Indian army led by English-educated and charismatic Bhoobun Mohan and the British colonisers, whose leaders are named

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appropriately Governor Lord  Fell and Colonel John Blood-Thirsty. Although the Indian patriots are victorious in the earlier stages of the battle, they are defeated in their attempt to capture the British military stronghold of Fort William in Kolkata. Bhoobun Mohan is decapitated after urging his fellow soldiers to continue the struggle. Although the text is clearly radical in its intentions, the possibility exists that the writer’s position as a British subject kept him from pushing the revolutionary spirit too far. ‘Journal’ was followed in 1845 by a similar future history written in English, ‘The Republic of Orissa: A Page from the Annals of the 20th Century’ (published in Saturday Evening Harakuru) by Shoshee Chunder Dutt. This text describes a future (1916) battle for independence in the state of Orissa. While in ‘Journal’ the rebellion is ultimately defeated, ‘Orissa’ presents an optimistic result. S. C. Dutt’s radical narrative shows the doubly oppressed tribes, not the elite, as potential revolutionaries. The story starts against the backdrop of a fictitious Slavery Act passed by the British in 1916 that leads to a violent rebellion against the British by forces from Bangla, Bihar and Orissa. This battle is led by the chief of the Kingery tribe, Bheekoo Barik. The Indian forces defeat a large army of Irish soldiers, capture the fictitious fort of Radhanaugger and compel the British to come to a truce. A second battle is incited by the non-execution of the treaty by the British, which ultimately leads to the independence of the state of Orissa and the slow decline of the British empire. ‘Orissa’ and ‘Journal’ are not SF in the traditional sense. They do not use any scientific assumptions to weave their tales; neither do these texts deal with advanced technology. These stories are rather utopian ‘future-histories’ in their political motivation and portrayal of coming events through extrapolation of contemporary socio-political developments. The element of ‘estrangement’ in these texts is temporal. Both stories present events many years in the future. Those events, that have not yet taken place in the authors’ empirical world, though, are very real possibilities in their contemporary Indian milieu. Furthermore, the actions that follow the temporal displacement are its logical consequences, which engender the ‘novum’ of future independence into the world of colonised India. These qualities are prominent markers of SF. However, in these texts SF does not only work as a mode of commentary on the current plight of the Indian population, but also creates a nascent futuristic discourse about nationalism.

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Both ‘Journal’ and ‘Orissa’ speculate about reactions to British political oppression during East India Company rule. While ‘Journal’ is set prophetically close to the actual year of Indian independence (1947), the warfare and technology depicted are similar to those of the author’s own time. ‘Journal’, in fact, can be considered a prophecy for the first war of Indian independence (also known as the Sepoy Mutiny) in 1857, which was started by Indian soldiers in the British army but, as in the story, was guided by Indian feudal elites and finally failed in the face of a superior British army.6 Similarly, the Santhal Rebellion of 1855, which saw the uprising of the twice oppressed Santhal tribe in the eastern part of India (not far from Orissa), was only ten years down the line from the publication of ‘Orissa’.7 Thus the speculations in these works had more immediate resonances than the future dates suggest. As such, these works can be justifiably identified as ‘soft’ or ‘social SF’, wherein the temporal estrangement helps create a radically new social order. That is, the ‘cognitive estrangement’ here does not relate to any ‘hard’ or techno-science, but rather to ‘social’ science (or knowledge of social dynamics). These two works, that mark the beginnings of future-oriented fiction as well as Indian English fiction, are also part of a larger body of literature of dissent. ‘Journal’ and ‘Orissa’ thus established the intrinsic relationship between Indian SF and the West from its very inception. Colonial education in India, though, was not limited to the dissemination of the English language, but also the key to the establishment of ‘modern’ scientific learning in India. This introduction of western science to Indian life had two effects: at one level science became the challenger of pre-colonial epistemology based primarily on religion and philosophy, and thus resulted in a polarisation among Indian intellectuals; on another level, science acted as a tool for progressive Indian nationalists to root out social evils and create a ‘modern’ India. The founding of Hindu College in Calcutta (1817), which catalysed the Bengal Renaissance, led to the establishment of English education and, with it, western science – the formal disciplines of physics, chemistry etc. While a section of orthodox Hindu Brahmins rejected this western mode of education as foreign, social reformers and intellectuals such as Raja Rammohan Roy, Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, Ashutosh Mukherjee, Mahendralal Sircar and Akshay Kumar Datta embraced this change to cultivate modernity among the new generation of Bengalis. The founding of the major colonial universities in Bombay (Mumbai),

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Madras (Chennai) and Calcutta (Kolkata) in 1857, and the establishment of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1861 further added to this impetus of scientific modernisation. However, the accommodation of European ‘science’ in Indian social discourse of the nineteenth century led to further reinforcement of an East/West binary. Hans Harder suggests that everything Indian was associated with spiritualism, mainly Hindu, and everything European connected to science.8 Even the famous Bengali spiritualist Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) juxtaposed the ‘spiritual East’ and the ‘materialistic West’ in his social and religious discussions, which impacted the popular imagination to a great extent. This type of polarisation contributed considerably not only to the Orientalist slant of the European view of India, but also to the world view of a section of the native intellectual class. While evidence of the first is plentyiful in European discourses about India, epitomised by Rudyard Kipling’s (1865–1936) lines ‘Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’ (‘The Ballad of East and West’, 1889),9 the reflection of the latter can be seen in Bankim Chandra Chattyopadhyay’s (1838– 1894) construction of the East and West along similar lines in many of his novels.10 Hindu nationalists often exploited this divide by extending the religion/science binary as an Indian/European binary. However, other nineteenth-century social movements such as Young Bengal, led by Henry Louis Vivien Derozio (1809–31), and the Brahmo Samaj (characterised by reformation of Hinduism and rejection of polytheism), led by Rammohan Roy (1772–1831) and Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905), created a counter-current to such polarisation. These movements advocated rationalist thinking and liberal acceptance of western knowledge. This rationalist trend of the nineteenth century again had a curious offshoot which would exert a huge influence on future Indian scientific thinking. According to Harder, this offshoot ensues from Vivekananda’s opinion that India can become superior to her European colonisers as soon as she masters science (unlike M. K. Gandhi’s rejection of the mechanisation of society and his call to return to simple village life). Although Vivekananda’s call inspired rationalist thinking among the Indian populace, it also found a curious echo in Swami Dayanand Saraswati’s (1824–83) connection of Vedic knowledge with modern science. For Saraswati, ‘science’ became associated with a Hindu Golden Age of the Indian past in a strange backward projection, in

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which mythical elements such as vimanas were anachronistically endowed with qualities of modern technology, providing a ground for India’s claim to precedence in all things scientific.11 In her essay ‘Sadhanbabu’s Friends: Science Fiction in Bengal from 1882–1961’, Debjani Sengupta draws a direct link between this increased scientific consciousness and scientific writing – both fictional and non-fictional.12 She mentions Mahendralal Sircar (1833–1904), one of the founders of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in 1876, and Ashutosh Mukherjee (1864–1924) as two figures responsible for encouraging scientific thinking in Bengal. Akshay Kumar Datta (1820–86), a graduate of Hindu College and a declared rationalist, was also one of the earliest practitioners of scientific writing in Bangla. But the best examples can be seen in Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937) and Jagadananda Roy (1869–1933), both of whom wrote in Bangla. Bose, who was a professor of physics in Presidency College (the former Hindu College) and one of the world’s leading scientists on electromagnetic waves, was also one of India’s earliest writers of SF. Bose’s 1896 story ‘Niruddesher Kahini’ (Story of a Disappearance, later published as ‘Palatak Tufan’ or The Runaway Storm in 1921) used the scientific theory of surface tension to control atmospheric elements and pacify a dangerous storm over the Bay of Bengal. Jagadananda Roy, a schoolteacher, was highly interested in science and astronomy. His short story ‘Shukra Bhraman’ (Travel to Venus, written 1892, published 1914) describes an adventure on Venus and encounters with alien creatures. The first science fiction in India dealing with technology was also written in Bangla – Hemlal Dutta’s ‘Rahasya’ (‘Mystery’, 1882) – which centred on a completely automated house and included innovations such as automatic doorbells, burglar alarms and self-operating coat brushes. All three stories are results of a new scientific temperament created by the new colonial education system. Dutta’s narrative occurs directly within such a context. The narrator of ‘Rahasya’ studies in London and experiences the technological marvels at the house of an engineer friend. In ‘Shukra Bhraman’, although the adventures in Venus apparently take place within the narrator’s dream, the dream is a result of his close observation of Venus through a modern telescope and his reading of scientific journals. Finally, in ‘Niruddesher Kahini’ the principle of surface tension is applied to calm an approaching super-cyclone, which western scientific journals discuss at length.

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Furthermore, the publication venues of the stories are also notable. ‘Rahasya’ was published in Bigyan Darpan, a scientific journal, primarily focused on non-fiction science writing; ‘Shukra Bhraman’ came out as a chapter in Roy’s Prakritiki (1914), a primarily non-fiction science book discussing various aspects of nature, from the weather to plant life; and ‘Niruddesher Kahini’ was written as an entry in a short story contest promoting a hair oil. Evidently, these works show the integral connection between science writing and SF in India from a very early stage.13 Thus the speculations or estrangements in these narratives are a direct result of the colonial education system mentioned above. However, unlike ‘Journal’ and ‘Orissa’, these works remain politically ambivalent, concerning themselves more with the ‘science’ promoted by the colonial government than with the ideological underpinnings of such educational policies. Colonial education in the nineteenth century also opened another dimension to the Indian reading public – English literature, and along with it other European literatures in translation. Starting with Bengali author Bankim Chandra Chattyopadhyay’s Rajmohan’s Wife (1864), the tradition of Indian novel writing was highly influenced by Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels as well as other English writers such as Shakespeare and Edward Bulwer Lytton. This effect is seen not only on Bankim Chandra’s historical novels such as Durgeshnandini (1865), Kapalkundala (1866) and Anandamath (1882) but also on the ‘tilism’ and ‘aiyari’ novels of Hindi author Devaki Nandan Khatri (1861–1913), such as Chandrakanta (1888) and Narendramohini (1893). Although in both Khatri and Bankim Chandra we also see major non-European influences, especially in Khatri’s adoption of Persian supernatural elements and the presence of nationalist elements in both authors, the Indian novel and short story remained affected by their European counterparts during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The SF scenario was no different. References to translations of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells can be found in Bangla, Hindi, Marathi and Tamil around the turn of the century.14 In fact, western writers such as Verne, Wells, Henry Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle continued to have profound influences on early twentieth-century indigenous SF and adventure literature such as Bibhutibhushan’s Chander Pahar (The Mountain of the Moon, Bangla, 1937) and numerous works by the popular Bengali writer Hemendra Kumar Roy. Shukdev Prasad, in his Bharatiya Vijnana Kathayen I (Indian Science Fiction I, Hindi, 2010),

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in fact places the rise of Indian SF in the context not only of popular mystery and fantasy narratives but also of detective fiction in the vein of Conan Doyle.15 Unsurprisingly, some of the SF written during this period are derivative in nature. Two Hindi SF works published during this early period partially exhibit such derivative qualities. Pandit Ambika Datta Vyasa’s (1858– 1900), ‘Ascharya Vrittant’ (A Strange Tale, 1884–8) published in the popular magazine Peeyush Pravah, is considered to be the first SF in Hindi. However, most scholars of Hindi SF agree that Vyasa’s story, which operates on the hollow-earth paradigm and describes a journey to an underground world, is based on Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864).16 Although similarities between the two works are many, Vyasa also includes Indian historical and Hindu mythical references in his story, creating one of the earliest Hindu nationalist discourses in Indian SF. Keshav Prasad Singh’s ‘Chandralok Ki Yatra’ (1900), which appeared in the respected literary journal Saraswati, was also possibly based on another Verne story, From the Earth to the Moon (1865).17 However, the fact that the protagonist in this story attempts a flight to the moon by a hot air balloon, suggests the influence of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Hans Pfaall’ (1835), in which the protagonist undertakes exactly such an adventure. In a way, thus, these two works mark the beginning of a certain tendency in Indian SF seen in both written works and in films: to be inspired by and reinvent existing western narratives. The fact that both these works were published in popular literary magazines, as opposed to scientific or political ones, also suggests an emerging intersection of Indian and western popular cultures, and the entrance of SF into that popular cultural space along with other western imported genres like detective and adventure fiction. Although the presence of SF remained thin in this domain for the next few decades, the genre received much-needed sustenance through translations and imitations of western works.

1905–47: Utopias, Popular Culture and Experimentations The years between 1905 (the year of publication of Begum Rokeya’s Sultana’s Dream, a landmark feminist utopia) and 1947 (the year of Indian independence) witness a slow consolidation of SF in

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popular culture in many indigenous languages, including Bangla, Hindi, Assamese, Marathi and Tamil. While the utopian and satirical qualities of earlier SF are still visible during this period, influences of western SF become more prominent. A nascent magazine SF culture develops in the 1920s through children’s and youth magazines (especially in Bangla), in which SF and science writing often cohabit the same sphere, and thus extend the association of science education and SF found in Hemlal Dutta, Jagadananda Roy and J. C. Bose. In other words, the same dialectic between Indian and western cultures that gave rise to SF in the nineteenth century continues to operate in this period as well. This period saw the publication of two remarkable utopian tales, one in English and one in Hindi, which possibly remain two of the best works in that vein in India to this date: Begum Rokeya Shakhawat Hossain’s (1880–1932) feminist utopia Sultana’s Dream (1905) and Rahul Sankrityayan’s (1893–1963) socialist utopia Baisvee Sadi (The Twenty-second Century, Hindi, 1924). Although both these works have fantastical frame narratives, they display remarkable similarities with the utopian SF of the age in their main actions. These texts are products of the interactions between the modern Indian mind and European modernity, and continue the tradition of utopianism started by the Dutt cousins. The case of Sultana’s Dream, a story written in English by an aristocratic Muslim woman, is fairly straightforward, while Baisvee Sadi presents a more complex instance. Sultana’s Dream reverses gender roles through the creation of a feminist utopia, where Rokeya embraces the scientific and rationalist ideologies of the West to depict female emancipation from an orthodox Muslim society. Written in the form of a dream vision, this text can be placed alongside Swiftian satires like Gulliver’s Travels (1726) as well as in the tradition of early utopian SF along the lines of Edward Bellamy and William Morris. In her dream, the narrator, Sultana, visits Ladyland, where men are kept under purdah and women rule society. The emphasis in the story is firmly placed on women’s education as not only a means to the emancipation of women, but also for the creation of a more cultivated and less violent society. According to the book, the men, whose utter defeat at the hands of a foreign enemy led to the women’s rule, wasted their time inventing weapons. After the takeover by the women, science became a tool for transforming society into a beautiful garden. This novella, which predates modern western feminist utopias such as Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s Herland (1915)

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and its sequels, however, rejects the oppressive elements inherent in any imperial discourse: the queen of Ladyland clearly says they do not covet other people’s land. While focusing on the power dynamics of gender, Sultana’s Dream fits neatly into the anti-establishment and ironic tendency of Indian English SF in general. Like ‘Journal’ and ‘Orissa’ this text has an ironic twist in its composition history. Encouraged to learn and write in English by her husband Khan Bahadur Syed Sakhawat Hossain, who was a champion of women’s education and emancipation in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India, Rokeya ended up writing a tale that puts men behind the purdah. Khan Bahadur described the story as a ‘terrible revenge’. Despite its subversive aims, though, Sultana’s Dream engages in essentialisms: women as more peaceful, men as warlike, the essential goodness of science and rationality etc. However, such sentiments are not unexpected in an early twentieth-century woman in India trying to resist oppressive and entrenched social customs and seeing an ally, however dubious, in the European rulers. Baisvee Sadi is a more complex case. Written by a Mahapandit (meaning ‘great sage’ in Sanskrit), a high-born Brahmin, who had legendary status not only as a writer but also as a seeker of knowledge, this utopia is an experiment in the political thought of his time. Alaka Atreya Chudal claims that at various stages of his life, Sankrityayan lived as ‘a sadhu, an Arya Samajist, a Buddhist monk, a lay Buddhist, a secularist, a wanderer, a progressive writer, and a scholar who eventually embraced Marxist socialism’.18 Sankrityayan was also a nationalist, participated in peasant unrests and was imprisoned by the British on many occasions. Baisvee Sadi reflects a curious conglomeration of many of these aspects of his philosophy. The book tells the story of Vishvabandhu’s travels in twenty-second-century India and describes the political, social and educational aspects of this utopian world. Sankrityayan imagines an India free of caste and communal discord, where everything is organised in a rational manner and for the benefit of society at large, which in its turn leads to the enrichment of the individual. His future society is clearly a socialist utopia where social relationships are formed in a planned manner and all the means of production are owned by the state (which also resonates with Rokeya in addressing and countering social inequalities). No wonder that Sankrityayan started conceiving this story in 1918, straight after he became aware of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia (1917). However,

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the book came to proper fruition during his imprisonment in Hazaribag jail (1923–4) by the British. According to Chudal, while his first conception of this story was in Sanskrit verses, Hindi prose became the vehicle in the final product because he wanted the book to reach a wider audience, which an elite language like Sanskrit cannot do. We should also note that when Sankrityayan published his travelogue Soviyet Bhumi (The Soviet Land, 1938), after visiting the Soviet Union in 1935, he wanted Baisvee Sadi to be considered the travelogue’s fictional prequel. Several unique aspects are notable in Baisvee Sadi. Although it may have been influenced by earlier English-language socialist utopias such as William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888), Sankrityayan’s book is a definite utopian response, and possibly one of the first, to the Russian revolution outside the USSR. Secondly, this is also a major non-British influence in Indian SF. Although Ascharya Vrittant and Chandralok Ki Yatra are clearly influenced by Verne, both authors most probably read the original novels in English translations, rather than in French. However, Baisvee Sadi is also a response to the British colonial system and the endemic degeneration of social relationships within the colonial structure. As Begum Rokeya’s utopia was an imagined alterity for gender emancipation, Sankrityayan’s utopia is an alterity for class, caste, religious and political emancipation. Although many components in this story show his Hindi (not Hindu) nationalism, Baisvee Sadi presents a fourth, communist, alternative to British colonialism, Gandhian ‘swaraj’ and religious nationalism. In any case, both these utopian works display prominent interactions with western ideas (colonial and communist) and culture, and for the first time since 1845 use SF, or literature of cognitive estrangement, as a serious and viable mode of socio-political critique. During these same decades SF, both in its serious political and more popular forms, became a relatively common occurrence.19 Many of the works of the time display influences of techno-scientific themes, also seen in their contemporary western counterparts, such as the invention of gadgets, mad scientists, lost worlds, fantastic travels and adventures etc. Like other popular genres such as detective fiction and adventure stories, many of these works were influenced by western SF (influences and translations of Verne, Wells, Conan Doyle, R. L. Stevenson and Rider Haggard are numerous). However, some

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works of this period (like Troilokyonath Mukhopadhyay’s) display a mixing of Hindu epistemic traditions with ironic treatments of western SF themes, which later, in the post-independence period, becomes a major trend. During these formative years of popular SF, the Bengali author Hemendra Kumar Roy (1888–1963) deserves a special mention, as he is possibly the only author to consistently write genre SF from the mid-1920s. While his Adrishya Manush (The Invisible Man, 1935) was a direct retelling of Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897), such works as Meghduter Martye Agaman (Arrival of the Messengers from the Sky, 1925, which will be discussed in detail in chapter  5), Maynamatir Mayakanan (Enchanted Garden of Maynamati, 1930), Asambhaber Deshe (In the Land of the Impossible, 1936), Amanushik Manush (Inhuman Man, 1935) and Nabajuger Mahadanab (Giant of the New Age, 1952) are stories that display influences of western SF, yet often undercut them. Hemendra Kumar’s stories, which cut across the field of popular narrative genres – detective, adventure, fantasy, horror, SF, translation – were immensely popular with the youth of the time. Siddhartha Ghosh mentions that Hemendra Kumar’s two adventurer duos Bimal-Kumar and Jayanta-Manik kept youth glued to the magazines of that time.20 Much of his SF shows cross-generic tendencies wherein horror and SF, adventure and SF or detective fiction and SF overlap. Many of these stories as well as his other works are often tagged as ‘Rahasya Romancha Series’ (Mystery and Thriller Series), which further shows the intermingling of popular literary genres and Hemendra Kumar’s importance in popularising such works. This, along with the fact that he wrote over eighty popular novels and stories, perhaps makes him one of the most versatile early pop-literary icons. Even the immensely popular fantasy author Devaki Nandan Khatri, his son Durga Prasad Khatri who wrote fantasy, detective fiction and SF in Hindi, and possibly the most original artist, poet and author Sukumar Ray could not match Hemendra Kumar’s quantity and versatility in the arena of popular literature. However, the work that best represents the intersection of popular cultural interpretation of western narratives, while at the same time undermining and parodying such traditions, is Sukumar Ray’s (1887–1923) ‘Heshoram Hushiyarer Diary’ (The Diary of Heshoram Hushiyar, Bangla, 1922). Ray, who experimented with western literary forms such as nonsense verse, fantasy and SF, in this work not

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only comically parodies such forms but also scientific methods and rationales. His speciality was in adapting western literary forms to the Indian context and completely transforming them into something uniquely Bengali. In ‘Heshoram’, which shows strong influences of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), he parodies SF and adventure tales and scientific nomenclature. Although apparently a story of exploration, in ‘Heshoram’ the process of naming animals plays with the arbitrariness of language: Ray toys with the idea that names should be linked to something inherent in the object. He names creatures in the story accordingly: ‘Hanglatherium’ (hangla=greedy), ‘Gomratherium’ (gomra=grumpy), ‘Chillanosaurus’ (chillano=shriek) etc. This work further questions the rationale of scientific exploration by portraying the characters as rather self-seeking and acquisitive, albeit in a comical manner. A total dismantling of SF as a genre as seen in ‘Heshoram’, though, is rare in Indian SF literature. Both Hemendra Kumar Roy and Sukumar Ray were highly active in their contemporary literary magazine scene. In the first half of the twentieth century, magazine culture took strong root in Indian society, fostering a fledgling popular literature. Although no exclusively SF magazine came out during this time, children’s and youth magazines, science journals as well as general literary magazines often published SF. Sukumar Ray and his father Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury were instrumental in publishing a hugely successful children’s magazine Sandesh (first published in 1913), while Hemendra Kumar was involved with many Bangla children’s and other popular magazines from the 1920s, even editing a number of them (such as Rangmashal). These magazines helped SF develop into its present form along with many other popular genres of the time. Besides the previously mentioned science and literary journals, most of the authors mentioned in the earlier section published their works in various literary magazines. Rokeya’s Sultana’s Dream was published in the Chennai-based Indian Ladies’ Magazine. Vyasa’s ‘Ascharya Vrittant’ was serialised in Peeyush Pravah (first published in 1884), a magazine he himself edited. According to the Hindi SF author Dr Zakir Ali Rajnish, the magazines Saraswati (first published in 1900) and Dharmayug (first published in 1948) often played a nurturing role for Hindi SF.21 A similar role was played by such Bangla magazines as Sandesh, Mouchak (first published in 1920), Ramdhanu (first published in 1927) and Rangmashal (first published in 1936) from the 1920s onwards. Marathi magazines also helped propel the SF genre

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forward (the magazine Kerala Kokil published one of the first translated SF stories in Marathi in 1900), although not until the second half of the twentieth century.22 These magazines differed from their western pulp counterparts in significant ways. Debjani Sengupta claims that Bangla magazines (and Indian literary magazines of the early twentieth century in general) eschewed the suggestive and provocative titles and images of their contemporary American and British counterparts, possibly out of respect for western science and audience concerns: most early SF belonged to the category of children’s and young adult literature.23 At this stage, SF also often intersected with science writing and performed the task of science popularising, and hence stayed away from the more titillating elements of the other popular genres such as mystery, horror and detective fiction – an approach that continued in magazine SF for a long time to come. Thus SF took firmer root in the Indian literary scene through utopian political discourses, literary experimentations, translations and genre fiction in popular magazines, and in its role as science populariser during the first half of the twentieth century. It was not a meteoric rise, but a journey through sporadic publications and symbiosis with other generic cousins; yet it was a definite journey towards acceptance into mainstream popular culture in the second half of the twentieth century.

1947–95: The Golden Age of SF in Indigenous Languages, Rebirth of Indian English SF and SF on Screen The post-independence period witnessed a sudden rise in SF in many Indian languages. Arguably this period can be called the ‘golden age’ of indigenous-language SF: in addition to the already established SF culture of Bangla and Hindi, such languages as Assamese, Marathi, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Gujarati and Urdu started consolidating SF traditions. The first exclusively SF magazine in India, Ascharya, was established (Bangla, 1963) by Adrish Bardhan during this time, and magazine culture in SF further developed all over India. With more and more domestic translations (as opposed to translations from non-Indian sources) and interactions across different language communities, towards the end of this period indigenous-language SF arguably emerged at a national level. During

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this period the nationalistic element in SF became even stronger. With the rise of Hindu nationalism in the political sphere and through interaction with other traditional forms of fantastic writing such as myths, fairy tales and ghost stories, SF mutated into a more malleable genre. These influences further proved to be potent instruments of questioning global political hegemony in imaginary forms, and thus displayed a more subversive interaction between western and Indian cultures. On the other side of the spectrum, though, SF maintained its strong ties with science writing and science education, speculating about the results of techno-scientific progress. A completely new phenomenon, the emergence of SF film, also occurred in the 1960s. However, few films made during these early years showed originality, most of them displaying strong influences of Hollywood, a trend that continues even in 2019. Consequently, Indian SF continued its problematic relationship with western culture during this period, although through newer forms and manifestations. The three strongest streams of SF emerged in Bangla, Hindi and Marathi. In Bangla, the 1940s and 1950s saw a steady rise of SF publication that culminated in the 1960s and 1970s. While previously established authors such as Premendra Mitra and Hemendra Kumar Roy continued to publish, new masters such as Satyajit Ray, Adrish Bardhan, Leela Majumdar and Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay joined in.24 A unique characteristic of the Bangla SF scene has been the involvement of major literary authors since the beginning. Authors such as Rajshekhar Basu, Sukumar Ray, Leela Majumdar and Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay are all respected names in the Bangla literary scene even outside SF, and although Premendra Mitra and Satyajit Ray are primarily known for their genre fiction, they also contributed outside it. Although the same can be said of early Hindi SF, that has not remained the case in later years. Mishra and Gore as well as Prasad consider the period between 1950 and 1970 as the time of slow growth of Hindi SF with authors such as Jamuna Dutt Vaishnav Ashok and Dr Sampurnanand as regular contributors. During this period Dr Naval Bihari Mishra played a major nurturing role through his efforts as a writer, editor and translator, similar to that of Bardhan for Bangla SF. He edited the magazines Vijnana Jagat, Vijnana Loka and Niharika in the 1960s, where he regularly published SF stories. The genre flourished in the 1970s with a host of new writers contributing regularly in magazines, anthologies and

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longer narratives.25 Hindi comic book SF also emerged around this time. Chacha Chaudhary (first published in 1971) by Pran is an extremely popular example. Although this series did not explicitly focus on any SF theme, one of the central characters of the series, Sabu, was a giant from Jupiter, who has settled peacefully on earth and befriended the series’s main character Chacha Chaudhary. Other prominent examples were mostly inspired by American superheroes.26 SF in Marathi possibly took the largest leap in the postindependence era. Although SF first appeared in Marathi in 1908, it was only in the 1950s that the genre saw any meaningful development. According to Bal Phondke, B. R. Bhagwat brought the genre back through translations of Verne and Wells for children in the 1950s.27 However, this also led to SF being marked as a genre for children, which affected such authors as Narayan Dharap, D. P. Khambete, and D. B. Mokashi who followed Bhagwat in the 1950s and 1960s. From the mid-1970s, though, Marathi SF became an established tradition. Jayant Vishnu Narlikar, one of the most respected names in Indian SF and a major astrophysicist, started writing SF (‘Krishna Bibar’ or Black Hole, 1974) around this time. Following Narlikar, other major SF authors appeared such as Bal Phondke, Laxman Londhe, Niranjan Ghate, Subodh Jawadekar and Subadha Gogate. SF has flourished in Marathi ever since, especially because of the involvement of a strong magazine culture. Many of the newer authors, such as Nandini Thatte, Meghashree Dalvi and Saroj Joshi among others, as well as more established authors as Phondke, Londhe and Jawadekar, all came out of this magazine culture. The Marathi Vidnyan Parishad (an institution for propagating science in society) played a major role in the development of Marathi SF as a mode of science popularisation. This connection possibly also explains the more ‘hard SF’ quality of the genre in Marathi.28 In addition to these three major traditions, several other languages saw increased publication of SF from the middle of the twentieth century. Although works with SF qualities have existed in Assamese since 1914 (Ambikagiri Raichoudhury’s ‘The Ultimate Ideal of Mankind and the Path to World Peace’), Kumudeswar Borthakur’s ‘Atom Boma’ (Atom Bomb, 1946) and Saurav Kumar Chaliha’s ‘Awaz’ (Sound, written 1950, published 1966) are considered the first two genuine SF works in the language.29 Similarly, in Tamil, although some attempts at SF existed before, it was between the 1960s and the 1980s with the prolific writing

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of Sujatha Rangarajan (Sorga Theevu, 1973, En Iniya Iyanthira, serialised in the 1970s in Anandha Vikatan, and Meendum Jeano, 1987 are perhaps the most famous) that SF became a proper genre in Tamil.30 In Oriya, SF began with Gokulananda Mohaptra in the 1950s.31 In Kannada, SF came into prominence with Rajshekhar Bhoosnurmath (‘Holiday Planet’, 1965) in the 1960s.32 In Gujarati (Kalidas Jadav, 1950s), Telugu (Ravuri Bharadwaja, 1960s) and Urdu (Izhar Asar, 1950s) SF also emerged from the middle of the twentieth century.33 This unprecedented rise of SF during the second half of the twentieth century owed much to the popular magazines. As discussed earlier, Bangla and Hindi magazines, especially children’s magazines, have been publishing SF since the 1910s. The number and variety of such magazines increased from the 1950s. In Hindi, Dharmayug, Saptahik Hindustan, Sarika, Vigyan Pragati, Parag and Vigyan Katha are worth mentioning.34 In Bangla, various young adult magazines such as Sandesh, Ramdhanu, Mouchak, Kishore Bharati, Kishore Gyan Bigyan, Gyan Bigyan, Anandamela and Shuktara as well as the premier Bangla literary magazine Desh often carried SF stories. Kishore Bharati deserves a special mention for its commitment to publishing SF throughout the year. But most importantly, Adrish Bardhan established Ascharya, the first exclusively SF, fantasy and horror magazine in India, in 1963. This however lasted only six years. The two short-lived efforts that followed Ascharya were Bishmay Science Fiction and Fantastic (also edited by Adrish Bardhan). Vigyan Katha in Hindi later arrived as another SF-only publication. Similarly, Bal Phondke mentions Naval, edited by Anant Antarkar, which came out in the 1960s and 1970s as one of the most important periodicals to support SF publication in the Marathi language. Other important Marathi magazines that published SF in its early stages are Balmitra and Rahasya Ranjan. Phondke however mentions that various magazines such as Kirloskar, Maharashtra Times Annual and Dhrmabhaskar regularly encouraged SF publication around the festival of Diwali.35 Magazine culture is also seen in Tamil, notably in Anandha Vikatan’s regular publication of SF.36 Both these phenomena – the rise of SF and the rise of a national magazine culture – indicate a larger and perhaps scientifically educated reading public and its demand for easily accessible art and entertainment. In other words, the above tendencies indicate a steady rise of popular culture, which is perhaps also helped by the increasing ease of printing and disseminating the works among the masses.

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The establishment of SF-only magazines in indigenous languages also suggests a stronger readership of SF, which was enjoyed by other such genre fiction as detective stories, and perhaps also popular SF’s progress beyond the realm of children’s literature. A completely new occurrence in the 1950s, which also buttresses my claim about popular culture, is the first exploration of SF in the visual medium. Although neither of the same quality as its literary counterpart nor commercially as successful as its fantasy, supernatural and social cousins, Indian SF cinema experienced its tortuous birth through mimicry and modification of western SF films over the last four decades of the century. The first SF film in India was an Indian-American joint venture, Kaadu/The Jungle (1952; Tamil/English) by William Berke, which, in the style of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, portrays a white man’s adventure through Indian jungles (aided by the natives), that ends in the discovery of woolly mammoths. However, there is nothing much Indian about this film, produced and directed by an American, other than the setting. From the 1960s, though, Indian film makers started paying attention to the genre. Oscar-winning director Satyajit Ray’s cancelled project, The Alien, which allegedly influenced Steven Spielberg’s E.T. (1982), is probably the best known yet failed early attempt in the Bangla film industry. Kalai Arasi (Queen of Arts, 1963) by A. Kasilingam in Tamil and Karutha Rathrikal (Dark Night, 1967) by Mahesh in Malayalam were two early SF films completed in India. While Kalai Arasi is not much different from the 1950s alien-contact fantasies in Hollywood, Karutha Rathrikal retells the story of R. L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (possibly under the influence of its numerous film versions). Three films also appeared in Hindi: Shantilal Soni’s Mr X. in Bombay (1964) (influenced by many incarnations of Wells’s The Invisible Man), T. R. Sundaram’s Chand Par Chadayee (Trip to the Moon, 1967) and N. A. Ansari’s Wahan Ke Log (People from There, 1967). The last, although a pseudo-SF, since its invading Martians turn out to be Chinese villains in space suits, definitely reflects the ‘Red Scare’ in the Indian context – especially in the aftermath of the debacle in the 1962 war with China. All three films were influenced by Hollywood SF in various degrees.37 The same trend continued till the 1990s. The late 1980s saw the arrival of Indian SF on TV, which like the big screen displays an indebtedness to Hollywood. Two mentionable TV series of the period were Indradhanush (The Rainbow, Hindi,

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1989), which was highly influenced by the Back to the Future movies (1985–90), and Space City Sigma (1986), which displayed prominent influences of a number of western SF shows, namely the Star Trek franchise (1966 onwards), the Star Wars movies (1978 onwards), Alien (1979, Ridley Scott) and Flash Gordon comics (1934–2003). Both series enjoyed better success compared to most of the feature-length ventures. These occasional forays into the SF genre, though, did not pay very well for the industry used to catering to a mainstream audience mostly familiar with tales of social interaction, formulaic dance sequences and love stories, although ready to accept mythological stories and out-and-out fantasies (the success of films like Nagin, 1976, and other snake woman movies proves that beyond doubt). One fact that becomes conspicuous, though, is that at least two-thirds of the movies were influenced by western sources, and probably their lack of proper integration of western images within the Indian value system and viewing codes led to commercial failures; the unavailability of appropriate special effect technology for creating techno-scientific images also cannot be ruled out as a cause. Consequently, except for Mr  India (Hindi, 1987) and to some extent Sabujdwiper Raja (Bangla, 1979), none of the SF ventures left any lasting impression. However, one element remained common between SF on the page and SF on screen: a constant interaction, mimicry and subversion of the West. While SF film of this period struggled to come to terms with its relationship to the West, written SF often displayed a more mature and skilful employment and exploitation of this relationship. In many SF texts published in Indian languages around the time of national independence, the subversion of the established world order is remarkable. These works question the authority of western values and political entities through imagining alternative power relations, indigenous technological progress or presenting a Hindu epistemic tradition as a viable alternative to science conceived as a European imperial project. Although some of Rajshekhar Basu’s (1880–1960) satirical stories in Bangla such as ‘Gagan Choti’ (The Sky Sandal, 1957) and ‘Mangalik’ (The Martian, 1955) provide excellent examples of this subversion, perhaps the most important examples are two series also written in Bangla – tales of Ghanada (1945–88) by Premendra Mitra (1904–88) and adventures of Professor Shanku (1961–92) by Satyajit Ray (1921– 92).38 Both these series are highly influenced by western science and

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SF, yet have unique ways of challenging the normativity of the West.39 These two series are hugely popular among the Bengali reading public even now, and have even transcended barriers of language (through translation) by finding readership in non-Bengali linguistic communities (a rare occurrence in popular Indian literature). Mitra, who came into literary prominence through mainstream fiction in the 1920s, started writing SF in 1931 with Piprey Puran (Annals of the Ants) and produced at least eighteen other standalone SF stories and novels, such as ‘Kalapanir Atale’ (1957), Manu Dwadosh (1964), Moydanaber Dwip (Island of Moydanab, 1974) and Shurjo Jekhane Neel (Where the Sun is Blue, 1988) over the next fifty years, along with his immensely popular Mamababu and Ghanada series. Beginning with ‘Mosha’ (Mosquito, 1945), most of the adventures of Ghanada (a nickname for Ghanashyam Das) are hard SF based on some clearly formulated scientific principles. These range from theories of black holes and a multidimensional universe to genetics and biological mutation. Many of these stories have an international setting and involve European characters (such as Nazi leaders or British intelligence agents), but Ghanada’s brainpower ultimately wins the day. The reversal of binaries is apparent at this level: the imperial power bows to the solitary colonial subject. But the subversion at a subtler level resides in the framework of the stories. In Mitra’s own words these stories are written in the form of ‘tall tales’.40 Ghanada, who is a typical urban Bengali character, resides in a bachelors’ hostel in Kolkata, seldom goes outside his den and lives off other residents. He is portrayed as a glutton and apathetic to the smallest action. He narrates the stories of his ‘adventure’ to a group of young hostel dwellers who enjoy them through their willing suspension of disbelief. The narrative structure of these stories works as a metafictional device that indicates the fictionality of all discourses: every story begins in the common room of the hostel in mid-century Kolkata as a tall tale told by Ghanada. The estrangement, however, becomes radical once we enter the universe of Ghanada’s tale. This metafictional device, though, in no way takes Ghanada’s adventures away from SF. These stories clearly show the presence of the Suvinian norms in the estranging principle, the internal consistency of the plots and the creation of a ‘novum’ or radical alterity in the process of narration. This ploy puts the stories on a fine balance between cognitive, if they are true, and wholly fantastic, if they are lies. Mitra thus bends the genre in a subtle

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yet definite manner. Mitra explicitly commented that he created a hero for his SF who is completely antithetical to the western hero – someone who apparently is more efficient with his tongue than his body.41 This ploy also undercuts the heroic quality of SF by rendering it as only the product of a fertile imagination. However, in Mitra’s other SF stories this metafictional device is mostly absent. Even in those works, though, the ‘Third World’ often gets the better of the ‘First World’, or people from the underdeveloped nations take centre stage. Satyajit Ray’s Professor Shanku (first published in 1961; ‘Byom Jatrir Diary’ or ‘Diary of a Space Traveller’) stories, written in a diary form, are structurally much simpler. However, here too the power relations between Orient and Occident are reversed. The genius Professor Shanku invents strange gadgets like an element disintegrator and an all-curing tablet from inexpensive ingredients, and solves mysteries that range from UFOs to the artificial creation of life. The scientists of the West look to him for advice and call for his help. However, unlike the Ghanada stories, these tales consciously draw on the indigenous spiritual and magical traditions of India and present a hybrid of science and pseudo-science. Rather than depending totally on rational justifications, Shanku stories often end on an unexplained note that leaves the reader with a sense of wonder and inexplicability. There is no doubt about the estrangement part of these stories, and if they lack the cognitive aspect in the strict sense of the word, they surely have the ‘cognition effect’ advocated by Freedman. The anthropological background also would not allow us to dismiss the claim to cognition so easily; many of the magical components of the stories such as hypnosis and the power of yoga were part of an alternative mode of knowledge thought by many as empirically possible in the place and during the time that Ray worked. Thus Ray at once foregrounded and disrupted and often reversed the West/India binary by playing on the science/ magic and material/spiritual dichotomies. Satyajit Ray and Mitra’s stories foreground two aspects of postindependence Indian nationalism that were also evident in many other authors. The first, seen in Mitra, is a deconstruction of colonial power relations through techno-scientific tropes, and also employing ironic narrative methods; and the second, as seen in Satyajit Ray, is challenging the primacy of imperial science and, through it, western hegemony, by employing Indian, mostly Hindu, epistemic traditions. These aspects became two major defining characteristics of later

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Indian SF. Arguably, the second trend arose from a desire to foreground traditional Indian knowledge as ‘scientific’, or to legitimise Hinduism through the discourse of Vedic science. As previously mentioned, Dayanand Saraswati’s reinterpretation of the Vedas led to the claim of India’s precedence in everything scientific the world has seen. A section of SF writers used these ideas to legitimise or reread the ancient myths and Hindu philosophy through the lens of science. In addition to Ray’s use of the Indian epistemic tradition as ‘alternative’ science, such authors as Adrish Bardhan and Narayan Sanyal in Bangla, Laxman Londhe, Chintamani Deshmukh and Narlikar in Marathi, Acharya Chatursen Shastri, Rajiv Ranjan Upadhyay and Arvind Mishra in Hindi, and Lakshmi Nandan Bora in Assamese sometimes employed such ideas in their works. These works are examples of the nativist trend in Indian SF not only for the blending of myth and SF, but because of a serious contemplation of Vedic knowledge as a repository of scientific truths. The engagement of a scientific figure of international renown like Narlikar (b. 1938) with this process further strengthens this notion. Narlikar is a world-renowned astrophysicist, a Padma Vibhushan award-winner and a Sahitya Akademi Prize winner. His publications on astrophysics and other scientific matters are numerous. His SF, written in both Marathi and English, consequently, tends to be hard SF, with a scientific problem constituting the heart of the story. From this perspective his works are similar to the works of Fred Hoyle, Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov. Starting in 1974 with ‘Krishna Bibar’, such stories and novels as ‘Dhumketu’ (The Comet, 1976), ‘The Adventure’ (1986), Vaman Parat Na Ala (published as The Return of Vaman in English, 1989), and The Cosmic Explosion (1992) all have very specific scientific problems at the centre of the narratives. Yet, almost all these works give a nod towards Vedic science through oblique references to lost civilisations and ancient Indian astronomy. For example, his Vaman, although taking place in our present India, refers to an ancient super-civilisation that left directions for making a robot in a time capsule located in India, a clear nod to India’s ‘scientific heritage’. Similarly, in The Cosmic Explosion, a Buddhist astronomer in the sixth century CE discovers a supernova and predicts catastrophe in the future, which comes to pass because future society does not take the warning seriously. Along with a collection of stories like Yakshanchi Denagi (The Gift of the Yakshas, 1979), the previously mentioned works create an uneasy relationship

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between progressive technological and reactionary mythical epistemological orientations. Yet Narlikar’s later fiction depicts a shift from this ambiguous stance. The stories collected in the 2005 book Tales of the Future repeatedly present a self-critical postcolonial posture, as does his novel Virus (2000). The best of this shift is perhaps seen in the short story ‘The Death of a Megapolis’ (in Tales of the Future), which predicts a fiery destruction of Mumbai from a complete breakdown of socio-political ethics, disregard for environment and an inept government. An author that undercuts both these technological and nativist traditions of SF is Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay (b. 1935). His works in Bangla play with generic boundaries. He regularly employs ghosts and other supernatural elements in his SF to create a universe where the line between the rational and the irrational becomes blurred. Mukhopadhyay exploits folklores and traditions of supernatural beliefs in suburban and rural Bengal to suggest that, to the uninitiated, advanced science and magic are not much different. In works such as Bhuture Ghori (The Spooky Watch, 1984), Patashgarher Jangale (In the Forest of Patashgarh, 1989), Bonny (1990), and Patalghar (The Underground Chamber, 1996) he seamlessly blends superstitions, ghost stories and SF to create a unique style that at once undercuts generic conventions and gives the impression of following them. In most of his stories the supernatural elements are not explained; but a sense prevails that those aspects are actually natural rather than supernatural. Science just has not progressed far enough to grasp them yet.42 Towards the end of the period under consideration, Englishlanguage SF reappeared after a prolonged lull. Salman Rushdie’s first novel Grimus (1975), Boman Desai’s The Memory of Elephants (1988) and Suniti Namjoshi’s feminist utopia The Mothers of Maya Diip (1989) all belong to the category of ‘literary SF’ and use the conventions of the genre with subtlety. However, in addition to Narlikar’s self-translations and original works in English, authors such as Mathew Panamkat (Lusooma, 1992) and R. N. Sharma (The Embroidered Newspaper, 1994) published genre SF in English. The most important English-language work of this period, though, was a work of translation – an anthology of regional-language SF in English translation, It Happened Tomorrow (1993), edited by Bal Phondke and published by the National Book Trust in its Popular Science series. This was a

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landmark not only for Indian English SF, but for Indian SF in general; this was the first effort of this nature to bring the different strands of SF together at the national level. This work perhaps indicates not only the peak of activity in indigenous-language SF but also the interest of the Indian reading public in the usually marginalised genre across the country. Translation into English possibly signifies this national interest, because English is the only language that cuts across the linguistic barrier. Published by the state-controlled National Book Trust, this collection further demonstrated the development of a certain organisational structure in the writing and studying of SF in India, which emerges in a more formal guise as the Indian Science Fiction Writers Association (ISFWA), established in 1995, and the Indian Association for Science Fiction Studies (IASFS), established a few years later in 1998. Both these organisations have played important roles in promoting SF in India, especially in indigenous languages, from this time onwards by holding regular workshops, conventions and conferences.43 However, problems of translation mar many of the stories included in It Happened Tomorrow, which also contained some original English-language SF. Scholars such as Amiya Dev and Aijaz Ahmad suggest that translating texts from Indian languages to English always presents certain constraints.44 Ahmad considers English an unsuitable vehicle for the production of the knowledge of Indian literature. But he does so neither because of English’s colonial pedigree nor because English implies political and cultural hegemony. He deems the English language unsuitable because it is ‘among all the Indian languages, the most removed, in its structure and ambiance, from all the other Indian languages, hence least able to bridge the cultural gap between the original and the translated text’.45 This assessment seems applicable to some extent to this anthology. The translations in this volume are often literal and dry, and hinder the natural flow of the stories. At certain points English fails to convey the vernacular speech patterns and cultural contexts, and thus remains unsuccessful in rendering the literary quality of the original works. Following Phondke’s claim in his introduction that this anthology has selected works that have ‘scientific merits’ in them, not works that engage in ‘pseudo-science’, the volume includes mostly works that have some scientific ideas in the narrower sense and not necessarily the qualities (with certain exceptions) that can lay claim to good literature.46 In other words, the stories included focus mostly on hardcore

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scientific problems such as ecology (‘The Ice Age Cometh’ by Narlikar), nuclear warfare (‘A Journey into Darkness’ by Subodh Jawadekar), time travel (‘Time’ by Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay), genetics (‘An Encounter with God’ by Debabrata Dash), artificial intelligence (‘Ruby’ by Arun Mande), and the social dilemmas such issues spawn. Narlikar’s The Return of Vaman, Panamkat’s Lusooma and R. N. Sharma’s stories in The Embroidered Newspaper also show a similar focus. These works are in a sense similar to the American SF of the 1950s and 1960s. Most of the stories in It Happened Tomorrow, however, do not go beyond the obvious, to the subtler issues of race, class, caste and gender – problems pertinent to the postcolonial nation – which were at the heart of Rushdie, Desai and Namjoshi’s novels. Nevertheless, this book served its purpose: it provided the impetus that led to anthologies in other languages such as those produced by Indian Publishing House (1998) and Ananda Publisher (2006) in Bangla that included translated works from other Indian languages. It Happened Tomorrow also foregrounded the possibilities of Indian SF in English that subsequently found full expression in works of authors with superior skill like Manjula Padmanabhan, Vandana Singh and Rimi B. Chatterjee in the next decade. Phondke’s initial call for ‘scientific’ SF, however, has subsequently transformed into Vandana Singh’s ‘A Speculative Manifesto’ (2008) over the next fifteen years; and as Indian English SF found more international exposure, it slowly shifted away from Phondke’s mould.47 SF produced in the second half of the twentieth century reflects a postcolonial society’s struggle to establish a foothold in the new world order. These works present a vision of the national consciousness that is irrevocably influenced by the Occident yet is proud of its own traditions: a hybrid identity that emerges at the intersections of cultures. Such intersections, Homi Bhabha remarks, accompany moments of great transformations.48 In the case of India, this was the moment of transition from a long-suppressed ‘exotic’ land to a structured modern nation – the moment of rapid industrialisation and scientific developments following the Nehruvian ideas of modernity. This process still lingers at various spheres of Indian society. Standing at this historic juncture, these works displace the colonial relationship without completely rejecting the influence of the West. Much like the colonial subject, on whom the historical forces etch their signatures, these stories open up a space where different literary conventions and cultures overlap.

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1995–2019: The Rise of Indian English SF, Globalisation, SF Films and Web Mags While post-independence SF is mostly found in indigenous languages, often displaying nationalistic concerns, since the 1990s English-language SF started becoming prominent, frequently reflecting more global ambitions. While indigenous-language SF continues to flourish, English-language SF and increasing numbers of translations of indigenous-language SF into English are slowly recruiting a global readership. The same can be said about Indian SF films that reflect more sophisticated production strategies and an influx of capital in their global releases; and while most films are still indebted to Hollywood, a few manage to break new ground in technical innovation and original ideas. Some notable developments of this period include a move from nationalistic sentiments towards a more critical self-reflection and a visible shift in the gender composition of the authors. While a strong nationalistic trend employing mythical tropes and references to alternative sciences continues primarily in indigenous-language SF, English-language SF embraces a more critical version of hybridity and introspection. Consequently, since the late 1990s dystopian writing becomes a dominant mode in Indian SF, as does questioning of identity politics. A shift in authorship is also visible. While Indian women have written SF at least since 1905, only a handful of authors, such as Leela Majumdar, Enakshi Chattyopadhyay and Bandita Phukan, established themselves in the field before the 1990s. However, in the last twentyfive years many major writers of SF have been women, especially those writing in English. Therefore, as in the previous periods, contemporary Indian SF presents another intersection between India and the West, between tradition and progress, and an indelible mark of cultural, philosophical and economic hybridity. Just as It Happened Tomorrow marked a key moment for SF in the domestic sphere, Amitav Ghosh’s Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning 1995 novel The Calcutta Chromosome marked another such key moment in the history of Indian SF. It not only rejuvenated English-language SF in India, but also placed Indian SF on the global stage for the first time. Even though Rushdie and Namjoshi’s works had garnered some attention previously, they were overshadowed either by the accomplishment of their successors, as was the case with Rushdie,49 or was mostly read as a feminist work remotely connected with speculative fiction, as was

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the case with Namjoshi. In other words, they did not have much immediate effect on SF in general. The Calcutta Chromosome changed all that. It attracted both popular and critical attention, and in its wake arrived an array of highly sophisticated SF works such as Manjula Padmanabhan’s play Harvest (1997; won the Onassis International Cultural Prize for theatrical plays in 1997), Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet-Engine Laugh (2001), Vandana Singh’s ‘Delhi’ (2004) and Rimi B. Chatterjee’s Signal Red (2005), soon to be followed by many others. Just as It Happened Tomorrow unlocked a national dimension for SF through translation, The Calcutta Chromosome initiated an international dimension for SF by using the English language and global publishing strategies. Although Ghosh did not write another SF work, many new authors established the genre as an important part of Indian English literature of the twenty-first century. Vandana Singh (Of Love and Other Monsters, 2007, Distances, 2008, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet, 2008 and Ambiguity Machines, 2018), Manjula Padmanabhan (Harvest, Escape, 2008 and Island of Lost Girls, 2015), Samit Basu (Turbulence, 2012 and Resistance, 2014) and Anil Menon (The Beast with Nine Billion Feet, 2009 and Breaking the Bow, 2012, co-edited with Singh) contributed significantly in this development.50 The Indian English SF scene of the twenty-first century shows three interesting characteristics. First, as already mentioned, this genre has travelled well outside the borders of the country. Ghosh, Padmanabhan and Vandana Singh earned international awards along with multiple nominations and honourable mentions, and in 2018, Mimi Mondal, Gautam Bhatia and S. B. Divya were nominated for the Hugo Award for their editorial work in the field, while Singaporean-Chinese-Indian Vina Jie-Min Prasad has been nominated for Hugo, Nebula and other awards for her short stories.51 As Mondal aptly explains in her recent internet discussion on South Asian speculative fiction, this globalisation is a result of immigration.52 Many of the authors, including Singh, Basu and Ghosh, are part of the Indian diaspora in Europe and North America that started swelling from the 1980s. They publish not only in India but in North American and European markets directly, making their works more visible internationally. Yet because some of the authors such as Divya are primarily US-based, they are still less read in India. Generally speaking, though, with a few exceptions (such as Divya’s Runtime, 2017, but not all her stories), most works produced by the Indian diaspora retain a cultural trace that is distinctly Indian.

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Second, Indian English SF of the new century often deliberately blurs the boundaries between SF and its cousin genres of fantasy, horror and magic realism. This is seen as early as the late 1970s in Rushdie’s mixing of SF conventions with that of fantasy in Grimus and later in Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990). The Calcutta Chromosome brings this tendency to the forefront, and later Vandana Singh formulates this tendency in her ‘Speculative Manifesto’ (in The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet, 2008). Singh establishes a common lineage for Indian SF and fantasy in myths and fairy tales by assigning ‘speculative fiction’ as a broad marker for non-mimetic imaginative literature. If the manifesto lacks in theoretical and critical structure, it compensates in its very effective appeal against genre labelling of literary productions and for more attention to the literature of estrangement – cognitive or otherwise. This is a definite departure from Phondke’s ‘fiction with scientific elements’. Although such connections between SF and myths have been drawn in many accounts of SF before, and almost every discussion of SF invariably includes discussions of fantasy and horror, the fact that many indigenous-language SF works have done such genre blurring before (especially since Bardhan in the 1960s), does not diminish the importance of Singh’s conscious move towards deconstructing genre boundaries. This attitude is reflected not only in the fact that the same authors engage in writing works that primarily belong to the realm of SF as well as the more explicitly fantastic, but also in their indiscriminate merging in the publishing, marketing and even discursive practices. Thus works such as Samit Basu’s Gameworld trilogy (2004–7: The Simoqin Prophecies, The Manticore’s Secret and The Unwaba Revelations), Ashok Banker’s retelling of the tales of Ramayana (2003–12), Kalpana Swaminathan’s Ambrosia for After (2003), Payal Dhar’s A Shadow in Eternity (2006), Indra Das’s Devourers (2015), which self-consciously identify with fantasies and retelling of myths, are often put in the same category as Singh’s Distances, Padmanabhan’s Escape and Chabria’s Generation 14, works that are clearly SF. Although such merging shows a fluidity of genre practices, it is not necessarily very helpful in understanding the relationship of these works with the fiction produced in indigenous languages. This is not to say that the fantasies and other non-cognitively estranged works are in any way inferior to SF; rather, the SF works function differently from these ‘other estranged fictions’ in building their worlds

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and establishing relationships between that fictional world and that of the authors’ empirical one. Although a large section of SF writers in India readily associates the origin of SF with ancient myths and the epics, linking these new fantastic fictions to such myths and legends would perhaps be more appropriate. In fact, rather than trying to relate the above-mentioned Indian English works with Indian SF in English, associating them with indigenous fantastic literature in similar vein (of which there is plenty) would be more fruitful. In the final analysis, Hindi works such as Devaki Nandan Khatri’s Chandrakanta, Raj Comics’ Shakti series (1980s) or Mukesh Khanna’s 1990s television and comic book series Shaktiman are not much different from English-language works such as Kalpana Swaminathan’s Ambrosia for Afters, Virgin Comics’ series Devi (created by Shekhar Kapur, and having among its writers Samit Basu, 2006–8) or Ramayana 3392 AD (Shamik Dasgupta and Abhishek Singh, since 2006). Although belonging to different periods and linguistic traditions, all these works overflow with estrangements of various kinds that do not originate from any cognitive source, and do not try to create a cognition effect. Works like Banker’s Ramayana tales wonderfully reinvent the ancient epic for modern times, and Basu’s Gameworld trilogy brilliantly creates new myths for the present. Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories and The Satanic Verses (1988) do the same thing with myths and folk tales of Islamic and Persian cultures. These works can be broadly defined as magic realism, fantastic fiction, or, as Basu and Singh call it, ‘speculative fiction’, but are functionally distinct from what we have identified in our introduction as SF. This hybridisation of genre characteristics leads to the third aspect of Indian English SF – a very clear nod towards cultural hybridity that Homi Bhabha identifies as a major quality of postcolonial societies. Like the indigenous-language texts, these works participate in the purity/ hybridity debate, which corresponds to the dialectical tendency that marks Indian SF as a whole. All the major texts published since the mid-1990s participate in this debate. Rimi Chatterjee’s Signal Red criticises the discourse of purity that an exclusively indigenist philosophy leads to. This book, rather, underpins the hybrid nature of the nation and knowledge, and tries to find a mitigating factor,which may help India avoid a dystopic future under a totalitarian Hindu government. The responses to purity/hybridity and indigenous/foreign debates in Indian English SF are however not limited to pro or contra stances. The

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issues involved are often beyond any for/against dualism. The Calcutta Chromosome creates a scenario in which the importance and the success of indigenous knowledge and tradition are intertwined inseparably with foreign interventions and vice versa. In fact, Ghosh’s novel deals with subaltern knowledge – knowledge possessed by social outcasts and practised in secret, knowledge that is never acknowledged as such – not with the great ancient tradition. Joshi’s The Last Jet-Engine Laugh does not even explicitly raise the debate. The tension between hybridity and indigenism is seen as a fact, not an issue for debate. In its dystopian future, hybridity in all aspects of national life is such a common occurrence that the efforts of purity-mongers are depicted only as skin-deep. Joshi’s use of Rushdie-like ‘chutney’ English – effortlessly incorporating Bangla, Hindi, Gujarati, French and German words – makes this novel a product of global culture and, by extension, a globalised economy. Both Vandana Singh’s Of Love and Other Monsters and Distances function on the premises of a multifaceted quality of individual identity and of diverse social interactions possible only through mixing of multiple cultures. Similar trends are seen in many of the works that follow. In a sense, this hybridity walks almost in the opposite direction to the ironic hybridity of twentieth-century indigenous-language SF. While hybridity in mid-twentieth-century SF worked as a method of challenging western supremacy and sometime to promote a Hindu nationalist position, hybridity in fin-de-siècle Indian English SF questions and subverts the nationalist and indigenist positions along with dismantling the hegemony of the West. From the 1990s to the 2010s, the development in Indian English SF is visible not only in qualitative and thematic aspects but also in the writers themselves. SF is becoming increasingly common among writers of the Indian diaspora and mainstream authors. The shift in gender composition is noticeable as well. While It Happened Tomorrow does not include a single work by women (although some of the translators were women), in The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction (2019) almost half the authors are women. Some of the most accomplished practitioners of contemporary Indian English SF in fact are women. Along with Singh, Padmanabhan, Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Sukanya Datta and Rimi B. Chatterjee are some of the most sophisticated authors the genre has seen. Gender issues are also emerging as central to Indian English SF and fantasy. While It Happened Tomorrow contains works in which gender issues are minimal, The Woman Who

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Thought She Was a Planet includes stories that deal mostly with issues of women and the roles that they are supposed to play in Indian society. In the same way, Sarukkai Chabria’s Generation 14, Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome, Chatterjee’s Signal Red all take up issues pertinent to gender roles in Indian society. There has not been a dearth of women writers in Indian English literature with Nayantara Sahgal, Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, Arundhuti Roy and Jhumpa Lahiri gracing the field. But barring Rokeya Shakhawat Hossain in the early twentieth century, only recently have women come into prominence as SF writers. The situation in the indigenous languages is not much different either. Except for Leela Majumdar in the 1960s and 1970s, hardly any woman writer came up as a major figure in the SF arena before the 1980s.53 Although authors such as Mandakini Goagte (Marathi), Bandita Phukan (Assamese), Kalpana Kulshreshtha (Hindi), Enakshi Chattyopadhyay (Bangla) have written in the genre for a long time, SF has been primarily a domain of men. In recent years along with Kulshreshtha and Phukan, Ajanta Das (Assamese), Subhashini (Kannada), Nandini Thatte (Marathi), Meghashree Dalvi (Marathi), Archana Mirajkar (Marathi and English), Sagarika Roy (Bangla) and Ankita (Bangla) are some notable authors that indicate a change in this scenario. The best expression of this change is perhaps seen in the special issue of SF by women that the Bangla SF webzine Kalpabishwa brought out in April 2019, which not only contains original Bangla SF by women, but also translations of SF by women from other languages. Although Indian SF never expressed the macho misogynistic attitude associated with early western SF, it was still a male realm until recently. One reason behind this pattern may be the model of education prevalent in Indian society. Men are usually encouraged to study science and engineering, while women are expected to get into fields requiring less ‘rational’ skills. Consequently, the composition of stories related to ‘scientific’ concepts and ideas was mostly the domain of men. However, with more and more women turning their attention to scientific studies, it was only a matter of time for the gender composition in SF writing to change. Two prominent examples of this shift in educational pattern and its effects in SF writing are Vandana Singh, who is a theoretical physicist besides being an author, and Sukanya Datta, a zoologist who also writes SF. Furthermore, SF is slowly becoming a medium for highlighting gender issues in speculative form and subverting a dominant

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patriarchal order, while building alternative worlds, as is evidenced in works by Singh, Padmanabhan, Sarukkai Chabria and Divya. Major changes can also be observed in the SF magazine scene since the early 2000s. Although many of the previously mentioned magazines, such as Anandamela, Kishore Bharati and Anandha Vikatan kept publishing SF stories, some dedicated SF magazines too emerged in India, which further developed the indigenous SF scene along with anthologies and stand-alone publications. Authors such as Rajiv Ranjan Upadhyay, Kulshreshtha, Phondke, Antarkar, Zaidi, Goyal, Deb and Bardhan, along with doing book, anthology and/or web publications, continued to contribute to these magazines regularly. ISFWA and ISFS also keep playing crucial roles in the development of SF. The Indian Journal of Science Fiction Studies (English, published by ISFS) has carried both scholarly and creative work since 1998,54 and Vigyan Katha (Hindi, associated with ISFWA since 2002) started at the turn of the century. These were soon followed by such web magazines and blog publications as Hindi Science Fiction (Hindi, published by Zaidi), Indian Science Fiction and Fantasy (English, 2000; now defunct), Kalpabishwa (Bangla, since 2016) and Mithila Review (English, since 2016). These online platforms along with such general literary web magazines as Rachnakar (Hindi), which has a dedicated SF section, and MuseIndia (English) play a major role in amplifying the impact of SF. US-based Strange Horizons (founded in 2000 by Mary Anne Mohanraj), which counts among its editors Gautam Bhatia of Indian origin, has also played an important role in highlighting non-western SF, including SF from India. Among Indian publications, Kolkata-based Kalpabishwa and Delhi-based Mithila Review are possibly the most sophisticated. Edited by a group of young SF enthusiasts (Anku, Santu Bag, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Sandipan Gangopadhyay, Prasenjit Dasgupta, Bishwadip Dey, Dip Ghosh, Supriyo Das and Soumen Chatterjee) and guided by such veterans of the field as Ranen Ghosh and Adrish Bardhan, Kalpabishwa publishes both original stories in Bangla and translations from all over the world as well as discursive articles. Many major contemporary Bengali SF authors such as Anish Deb, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, Avigyan Roychoudhury, Bardhan and others, as well as newer voices, regularly use this web magazine as their platform. Like most other SF publications, this magazine too includes fantasy and horror along with SF. Since 2018 Kalpabishwa has also started publishing

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anthologies of new SF along with reprinting stories from the SF magazines of the 1960s and 1970s. In 2019 Kalpabishwa in collaboration with Jadavpur University held a national symposium on SF. Mithila Review, starting in the same year as Kalpabishwa and edited by Salik Shah, Ajapa Sharma and Isha Karki, on the other hand, publishes highquality English-language speculative fiction. According to its mission statement, ‘Mithila Review features speculative arts and culture that encompass literary and artistic works in the broad genre with supernatural, fantastical or futuristic elements i.e. science fiction, fantasy, science fantasy, horror, alternative history, magic realism, uncanny and weird.’55 Although it wants to play a nurturing role for rising authors in India, in a 2017 interview Shah said, ‘Since we’re only accepting the best writers from the field, we find that we rarely publish Indians who don’t live abroad or are part of the diaspora.’56 Mithila Review, perhaps rightly, projects itself as an Asia-oriented international journal of SF and fantasy, which may further aid in the globalisation of Indian SF. Finally, film, the medium that works as the strongest catalyst in popularising a narrative genre, takes off in India in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Just as written SF has a strong tradition in Bangla, Marathi, Hindi and English, SF in the visual domain has shown more prominence (almost a film a year since 2000) in Tamil and Hindi than in any other Indian languages. Almost double the number of films dealing with SF themes or images of techno-science came out in India since 2000 compared with the previous fifty years, among which Patalghar (The Underground Chamber, Bangla, 2003, Abhijit Choudhury), Matrubhoomi (Motherland, Hindi, 2003, Manish Jha), Koi Mil Gaya (I Found Someone, Hindi, 2003, Rakesh Roshan), Enthiran (Robot, Tamil, 2010, S. Shankar), Ra.One (Hindi, 2011, Anubhav Sinha) and PK (2014, Hindi, Rajkumar Hirani) are notable.57 During the same time, Indian television also aired several SF-themed series such as Captain Vyom (Hindi, 1998–9, DD National) and Bahu Hamari Rajni Kanth (Our Daughter-in-law is Rajni Kanth, Hindi, 2016–17, Life OK). Although few of these films and TV series can be given credit for originality of plot and ideas, many broke new ground with special effects and huge budgets. Koi Mil Gaya, Enthiran and Ra.One are some of the movies with the biggest budgets ever in India. In addition to these, Antariksham 9000 KMPH (Space 9000 KMPH, Telugu, 2018, Sankalp Reddy), 2.0 (Tamil, 2018, S. Shankar) and Tik Tik Tik (Tamil, 2018, Shakti Soundar Rajan) show wonderful use of special effects. Some

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of these movies found blockbuster status through huge box office revenue and awards. The multiple award-winning and widely popular Koi Mil Gaya (KMG), and Enthiran and hugely grossing Krrish (2006; sequel of KMG) and PK require special mention in this context. Films such as Patalghar (multiple awards), Dashavatharam (The Ten Avatars, Tamil, 2008, K. S. Ravikumar) and Ra.One also found considerable commercial success. Furthermore, many of these movies featured big-name stars of the industry (e.g. Hrithik Roshan and Preity Zinta in KMG, Rajnikanth and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan in Enthiran, Shah Rukh Khan and Kareena Kapoor in Ra.One, Amir Khan in PK, Kamal Haasan in Dashavatharam, Akshay Kumar in 2.0 etc.). The scenario above indicates that the Indian film industry is slowly opening to big-budget Hollywood-style SF, complete with a superstar cast, state of the art technology and computer graphics. The success of these movies shows the economic viability of SF films, and thus the changing taste of audiences in India. Such award-winning movies as Patalghar, Matrubhoomi and PK also demonstrate original plotlines and sophisticated treatment of topics. While big-budget PK uses an SF framework for its satire on superstitions and religious fanaticism, Patalghar (based on Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s novel) uses its small resources in imaginatively and humorously foregrounding a discourse between western and Indian epistemic traditions – between aliens, ghosts, superstitions, ancient knowledge, colonialism and modern arms dealers. Both films show mature and sophisticated treatment of technical and thematic elements. Matrubhoomi on the other hand uses its tight budget to create a future rural dystopia focusing on female infanticide and gender discrimination. Through its stark realism Matrubhoomi creates a visceral experience not suited for the faint of heart. However, most Indian SF films betray a continuing impact of Hollywood, not only in style but also in content. Like the movies from the last century, many of these movies are inspired by well-known Hollywood blockbusters either in their plots or in their visual representation. For example, KMG and Achena Bandhu (Unknown Friend, Bangla, 2011, Sanjay Nayak) remade Steven Spielberg’s E.T. in the Indian context; Enthiran closely resembles Alex Proyas’s I, Robot; Ra.One is a strange mixture of Joseph Kosinski’s Tron: Legacy and James Cameron’s Terminator  2: Judgment Day; and Antariksham 9000 KMPH shows undeniable similarities with Apollo 13 (1995, Ron Howard) and Gravity (2013, Alfonso Cuarón).

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Nevertheless, when adapted to the Indian context, such influences no longer remain a simple matter of pilfering, but rather become a conversion of the western plots and images into the Indian milieu. Such transformations, I have argued elsewhere, happen not only out of the prevalent melodramatic Indian movie conventions but also because of the schism between tradition and modernity in the popular consciousness.58 As mentioned before, the association of techno-science with European colonialism, and the term’s polar opposition to the concepts of religion and philosophy that became inherently associated with the Indian tradition, play a major role in popular consciousness, which these SF films exploit. According to Anustup Basu, this polemic is emphasised through a man–machine oppositionality in postcolonial Indian films that lamented the loss of an agrarian society and the rise of industrial urbanisation. Such movies place techno-science alongside the profane West, unless somehow blessed by a divine grace, to be defeated by a moral and righteous ‘son of the land’.59 Although smudged at the edges, the supplementary usages of such oppositional values as science and religion or technology and mythology in the same narrative structure often create confusing images and weird social vistas. Furthermore, the melodramatic formula, entrenched in the nostalgic/backward-bending tradition of Indian cinema, clashes with the projected futurity of Hollywood SF, from which Indian SF films borrow, producing a unique visual discourse of popular postcoloniality. Excellent examples of this process can be seen in Enthiran’s discomfort and fascination with advanced technology and such technology’s interaction with the traditional social values of India, and Ra.One’s mixing of the elemental battle between good and evil with cyberpunk images through references to Ramayana in the context of a story about cyberspace technology. Such instances can justifiably be considered examples of Homi Bhabha’s mimicry that mocks and distorts and in the final analysis gives birth to a menacing double that subverts the expectations of the original production.60

Conclusion The journey of Indian SF from 1835 to the present has been an eventful and complex one. The genre first started in the coloniser’s language and as a response to colonial politics, but later found expression in

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various Indian languages. However, SF’s development in the indigenous languages in the twentieth century creates a scenario possibly unique to India, which designates twenty-two languages (including English) as official modes of communication, and in addition has a further 101 major languages and 1,513 minor ones.61 Although SF did not appear in all of these, the mere possibility is staggering. Even though a paltry ten or so languages show records of works that can be treated as SF in any medium, the scope of discussing a genre at the national scale is not only immense quantitatively, but also a matter or intrinsic cultural complexity. Furthermore, considering that English is only a secondary language for the Indian population, works produced in English must also come from specific language cultures, which vary greatly from state to state, and even within a state from one place to another. Hence, although working in different languages, Amitav Ghosh (English) and Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay (Bangla) possibly have more in common culturally because of their Bengali background than Ghosh and Vandana Singh (a Hindi-speaker from Delhi who migrated to the USA), even though both write in English. The same can possibly be said of Singh and Kulshreshtha by virtue of having a primarily Hindi-speaking background. Yet, Singh and Ghosh have a similar diasporic present that they do not share with the authors writing within India. These complex mechanisms of culture and identity determine the way SF develops in India and in the diaspora to a great extent. In spite of these deeply intricate complexities, Indian SF demonstrates some recognisable qualities over the 185  years of its development that allow it to be seen as an identifiable genre –but also a genre mutating not only along the arrow of time, but in multiple directions simultaneously. As should be evident from the preceding discussion of the genre’s historical development, this chapter only scratches the surface of the enormous intricacy that lies underneath each SF tradition associated with India. Nevertheless, the relationship of Indian SF and western culture remains a central intrigue of this story from its very inception. At different times, SF has been a tool to counter European hegemony, a device of utopian imagination, a space of simplistic imitation and more menacing mimicry of western cultural products, as well as a highlighter of the hybridity (of Indian and western values) of the postcolonial nation. Such characteristics are prominently present across all the SF traditions. However, to understand the functioning of these qualities in Indian SF, we must engage in

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a structural and somewhat synchronic analysis of specific components of the SF genre conceived in the Indian context. I propose to perform such an analysis in the following chapters by discussing four aspects that I consider essential to the functioning of SF – the epistemic base on which a narrative is built, the time in which it unfolds, the space of action and the identity of the characters enacting it.

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Cognitions and Estrangements: Epistemes and World Building in Indian SF

In Darko Suvin’s definition of SF as a literature marked by ‘cognitive estrangement’, ‘cognition’ (logical understanding/acquiring of knowledge) differentiates the genre from other kinds of non-mimetic works, such as fantasy and horror.1 In his discussion, Suvin relates ‘cognition’ with the concept of ‘science’ or acquiring of systematic knowledge and rational mental processes, while ‘estrangement’ for him is related to ‘fiction’ or the process through which something is defamiliarised or made different from our mundane existence. Whereas the first tendency shares much with realism, the second one has affinities with fantasy, horror and other supernatural tales. SF functions on the axis of these two tendencies: that is, the defamiliarisation performed through a logical manner gives SF its unique flavour. Although Suvin’s definition of SF is constrictive, the connection that he establishes between cognition and knowledge systems is important: specific systems of knowledge underlie the created worlds of SF, and these underlying knowledge systems define the relationship of the constructed textual universe to the author’s own experiential world. In other words, the designation of logical and fantastic in an SF text is often contingent upon the epistemic orientation of the author in his or her real experiential world. In Indian SF, multiple systems of knowledge stake a claim to this underlying epistemic role. The role that is generally reserved for ‘science’ in western SF fractures into competing systems when put into the Indian scenario, as it does in many indigenous futurist contexts. Such competing epistemologies highlight China Miéville’s questioning of Suvin’s association of cognition with the western understanding of ‘science’ following the Enlightenment tradition.2 Although Miéville primarily examines the paradigm of cognition itself, his questioning unlocks new dimensions about the nature of science as it pertains to SF. In this chapter I propose to study the major epistemic systems, or

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‘sciences’ that underlie Indian SF, and examine their effects on the ‘cognitions’ and ‘estrangements’ performed in the texts. The first section of this chapter examines the conflicting epistemes of modern western techno-science, the dominant Indian mainstream of Hindu/Vedic science and the nebulous realm of regional folk and subaltern knowledge. I examine how each tradition influences the production of Indian SF and the interrelationships of these traditions. Continuing the discussion on epistemology, the second section examines a dominant tendency in Indian SF: invocation of (predominantly Hindu) myths. Indian SF often tends to retell older myths (such as stories from the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata and the Puranas) in a futuristic context or reinterpret myths within the physical laws of mainstream science. Such use of myths is often exploited to legitimise Hindu nationalism or as a subversive device against the imposition of a western worldview. However, in certain cases myths are also used to challenge the patriarchal structure of Indian society. Although fewer in number, non-Hindu myths and legends, such as those found in Buddhist and Islamic traditions are sometimes used in Indian SF. In both these sections, though, a strong interaction of Indian and western worldviews becomes prominent. From both formal and philosophical perspectives such interactions delineate the unique hybrid nature of the epistemic base from which the ‘cognitions’ and ‘estrangements’ are performed in Indian SF.

Knowledge, Science and Science Fiction Any cultural product works from a specific society’s understanding of the world and its truths, structure and functionality. Every narrative establishes a certain relationship between the fictional world and the author’s real world. By ‘real’, I signify the social, psychological and physical realities of the author. An author’s self-awareness, sense perceptions, social and spiritual relationships with his or her environment and any such elements that establish a conscious physical and mental existence vis-à-vis the universe are the elements that create this reality. Consequently, when an author creates a fictional universe, a relationship between the fictional universe and the universe in which he or she exists is automatically formed. Fredric Jameson calls this an ‘ideological relationship’ between the author, the representation

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and the ‘raw material’.3 This relationship can be mimetic (e.g. realistic fiction), speculative (e.g. SF and fantasy), emotive (e.g. lyric poetry) or abstract (e.g. nonsense poems and puzzles). Establishment of this relationship is a fundamental act of literary/artistic composition. On the one hand, this relationship arises out of the collective understanding and knowledge of the world in the author’s society, and on the other, this relationship connects the reader (who functions within a relatable if not similar understanding of the world) with the literary work. Consequently, the author’s knowledge and understanding of the world is a fundamental element in literary world building, and especially so in a genre like SF which explicitly deals with knowledge, understanding and the building of alternative worlds. Therefore, if we are to gain a proper perspective on Indian SF and its world building, we need to examine the concepts of knowledge and science as they pertain to Indian society. Without going into a detailed epistemological debate, it can be asserted that we know our environment primarily through factive knowledge, although false knowledge and psychological conditions also play major roles in human perception. Factive knowledge that creates our sense of reality is based on both ‘a priori’ (purely rational or intuitive knowledge) and ‘a posteriori’ (knowledge gained through empirical methods) types.4 To put it differently, our sense of reality is based on both our sense perceptions that lead to empirical evidences and a rational or intuitive model, which those evidences verify. This system or model with which we verify our sense perceptions can be purely rational, purely intuitive or a mix of the two, leading to the different paths of scientific, metaphysical and mythical understanding of the world. In a modern civilisation, scientific perception generally holds sway in the formal and practical spheres of our existence, while metaphysical and mythological ideas play more personal and social roles. This does not mean that religion has less importance in human life than science, but rather that established explanations of physical realities of the world are generally provided through scientific theories rather than religious and mythological ones. Thus in a way science and religion (which is related to metaphysics and mythology) stand on two poles of the modern perception of the world, which human psychology negotiates. In this context, the British philosopher Karl Popper’s distinction between scientific knowledge on one side and metaphysical and

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mythological knowledge on the other is important.5 Popper argues that every scientific theory function under the principle of ‘falsification’. That is, every theory may be falsified by some future contradictory evidence which may lead to the revision of the current theory, revision of some auxiliary theory or a complete rejection in favour of a rival theory. He further argues that any such new theory also works under the principle of ‘falsification’, and that unavailability of a better hypothesis often leads to the maintenance of a falsified theory. Brendan Shea explains that according to Popper, scientific practice is characterised by its continual effort to test theories against experience and make revisions based on the outcomes of these tests. By contrast, theories that are permanently immunised from falsification by the introduction of untestable ad hoc hypotheses can no longer be classified as scientific.’6 In other words, scientific theories are a specific kind of human cognitive activity that are different from other kinds of human cognitive activities and should be treated as such. Although human history has prioritised different kinds of knowledge and cognitive activities at different stages of its development (e.g. basic survivalist knowledge gathering, religious and spiritual-ideological projections of the universe etc.), science is the basic operating episteme of modern human civilisation. Suvin argues that this basic epistemic approach connects science and SF, not any specific technological component.7 SF generally situates its fictional world within the possibilities (real or imaginary) of the physical laws of the universe as understood by the science of the author’s time and deals with elements that usually have at least the appearance of a rational explanation. Indian society, however, is still a battleground of multiple epistemes, in which scientific theories struggle constantly with pseudo-scientific and non-scientific theories to construct people’s ‘reality’. These competing theories, though, are not always polarised, but synthetic and syncretic. We can divide these competing models primarily into three categories: science (as understood in the general use of the word), the ‘Hindu’ tradition of knowledge often known as ‘Vedic science’ and folk or subaltern knowledge. In this section, I will examine each of these categories and their influences on SF world building.

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According to the UK’s Science Council, ‘Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence.’8 The Science Council adds that a practitioner of science ‘systematically gathers and uses research and evidence, making a hypothesis and testing it, to gain and share understanding and knowledge’.9 Specific methodologies, objectives and applications of knowledge further define the practices of science. The Science Council’s overall emphasis is on a ‘systematic approach’ to gain knowledge. This definition has its origin in the ‘scientific method’ of the European Enlightenment, which focuses strongly on empiricism. However, as Gabriele Gava shows, Immanuel Kant’s rationalist definition of science is not too different. She explains that in the ‘Architectonic’ chapter of his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Kant ‘defines science as an architectonic unity of cognitions (as opposed to an only technical unity) … where the relationships between the parts are not the result of an arbitrary assemblage, but are developed according to an end given a priori by reason’.10 Such architectonic unity, according to Kant, can only emerge from a reference to the ‘essential ends’ of reason, which are always practical in nature. Thus a scientist must work from a theory and seek objective evidence to support this theory. In both these cases, a strong emphasis is placed on a system of theorisation (either inductive or deductive) and evidence that allows for a universal understanding of natural phenomena. Evidently, the philosophy of science is highly complex and is beyond the scope of this book. Nevertheless, based on the above brief remarks, some crude demarcation is possible between the western concept of science and Indian modes of knowledge, especially in the context of the colonial relationship between India and Europe, the beginning of which roughly coincides with the later part of European Enlightenment. The distinction that I highlight here relates primarily to the systematic and empiricist aspect of science that Europe established between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, leading to technological, industrial and medical developments resulting in the consolidation of Europe’s various colonial empires and the less organised, more intuitive and community-based traditions of India. Indian epistemic traditions compete with ‘colonial science’. These traditions are often insufficiently theorised communal knowledge about the natural world, sometimes (but not always) associated with the supernatural.11 This alternative to imperial European science is,

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however, not a single tradition. On the one hand, localised folk knowledge such as agricultural and healing practices (for example, ‘Khanar Bachan’ or Khana’s formulae of weather prediction, dating from the ninth to the twelfth century CE),12 and on the other, ancient philosophical, mathematical, astronomical, medicinal and other formal treatises associated with the Vedic, Buddhist and Jain traditions (e.g. the medical knowledge of Charaka and Shusruta, the astronomy of Aryabhatta, ‘Shulva Sutra’, ‘Vedanga Jyotisha’ etc.)13 reflect these alternative epistemic cultures. None of these traditions, though, resembles what we may call ‘laboratory-based science’. In these traditions, most of the seekers and keepers of knowledge are ascetics, monks, textual scholars and diviners depending on a community knowledge base and intuitive methodology often akin to the mystical. This distinction, nevertheless, is not only a methodological and epistemological one. This difference is significant from socio-political perspectives: in the colonial hierarchy, these indigenous traditions were delegitimised, and their practitioners were often placed in oppositional relationship to colonial scientists. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, taking a Foucauldian stance, claims that this ‘epistemic violence’ legitimises the normative position of the imperial narrative: Perhaps it is no more than to ask that the subtext of the palimpsestic narrative of imperialism be recognized as ‘subjugated knowledge,’ ‘a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity.’14 The creation of colonial universities and colleges, which became centres of western scientific education, along with the adoption of English-language education (e.g. at Hindu College in Kolkata, 1817), played a huge role in establishing this division. The scientists thus became associated not only with the empirical tradition but also with colonial authority. Such authority was vested in the British as well as the local elites, some of whom were studying at these colonial establishments and later became instrumental in ushering in western-style modernity in India. Social reformers such as Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820–91) and Raja Rammohan Roy (1772– 1833) saw such scientific education as a remedy for contemporary

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superstitions. Colonial education further provided incidental benefits of this ‘epistemic violence’ to the local elites. Being in the vanguard of the colonial education and reform system, the educated Bengali elite produced several internationally renowned twentieth-century scientists such as Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937), Sattyendra Nath Bose (1894–1974), Meghnad Saha (1893–1956) and Prafulla Chandra Ray (1861–1944), and Kolkata as well as Chennai played major roles in the Nobel Prize-winning physicist C. V. Raman’s (1888–1970) career. The relationship between western science and Indian epistemic cultures became particularly complex towards the end of the nineteenth century. With a surge of nationalism, a polarisation between a spiritual East and a materialist West was propagated by another section of the educated elite such as Bankim Chandra Chattyopadhyay (1838–94), Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) and Dayanand Saraswati (1824–83). In the 1870s Bankim Chandra presented science as a material force of the West equivalent to ‘outer knowledge’, while ‘dharma’ or spirituality was intrinsic to Indian civilisation and equivalent to ‘inner knowledge’. However, in Vivekananda and Saraswati a strange rapprochement between Indian and western epistemes can be seen. Vivekananda, although maintaining the position initiated by Bankim Chandra, claimed the path to India’s superiority lay through the mastering of science. Saraswati went farther. By reinterpreting the Vedas and associating scientific terminologies with his interpretation, he appropriated modern science for India. He projected modern scientific concepts back onto the Indian past and claimed India as a fountainhead of all scientific knowledge. Such an ideological slant is also present in P. C. Ray’s effort at recovering suppressed knowledge in A History of Hindu Chemistry (1902). In this voluminous work, Ray starts his exploration of Hindu chemistry from the alchemic ideas found in the Rigveda and knowledge of plant-based medicine in the Atharvaveda, before going into Charaka and Shusruta’s medicinal knowledge and later metallurgical practices. In recent years, scholars such as Shiv Visvanathan, Vandana Shiva, Dipesh Chakraborty and J. V. Narlikar have highlighted these alternative traditions. However, I wish to emphasise not only a postcolonial effort at recovering lost knowledge, but also a historical revisionism that lets the educated elite use both colonial science and alternative knowledge for their own advantage. Consequently, although in the wake of independence in 1947, India witnessed a strong emphasis on

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techno-scientific development from Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, leading to rapid industrialisation, in literary and nationalistic discourses Vedic science also saw a resurgence, providing a boost for nationalism. Such nationalistic literary discourses further pit a nostalgia for the quickly vanishing beliefs and narratives against the techno-scientific ideas of urban civilisation. Literary works arising out of this situation, though, depend on an internal hierarchy of knowledge. As Spivak argues on various occasions, the internal social hierarchy implies a similar sort of epistemic ladder even within the postcolonial state: the western notion of science standing at the top and being increasingly and vocally challenged by proponents of an indigenous Vedic knowledge tradition (recent claims of ancient Indian flying machines at the 2014 Indian Science Congress and arguments for astrology to be considered as science are a few examples).15 However, beneath both these established traditions lie multiple local modes of knowledge practised and preserved through oral transmission, rumours and evolving ritualistic practices. These unstructured epistemologies (such as naturalistic medicine and knowledge about weather and crop cycles) often affect the daily lives of people as much as the other two traditions. As Ülo Valk in his discussion of ritualistic practices and folklores in eastern India says, ‘A narrative is [often] transformed into psychological and social reality.’16 In an increasingly modernised India, if western techno-science serves most of the material needs of society, and the Vedic tradition provides a philosophical and spiritual dimension for the dominant Hindu majority, often also working as a nationalist instrument, local traditions provide ‘practical’ spiritual and material guidance (like: avoid the unlucky face to have a trouble-free day, pray to the tree spirit for healing purposes, call the ‘ojha’ to exorcise an evil spirit or get relief from a snake bite, burn the witch for the prosperity of the community). Such oppositional yet intersecting epistemologies necessitate a discussion of Thomas Kuhn’s concept of ‘paradigm shift’ in science. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Kuhn proposes that the scientific community functions on a set of received paradigms that are accepted as already proved.17 However, periodically such paradigms shift, rendering the earlier scientific facts and theories non-scientific. Kuhn proposed that no observation is possible without a theory, as assumptions and belief systems always underlie any system of interpretation. Science, then, fails to derive knowledge of a reality that is

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mind-independent, making the ‘objects’ of scientific inquiry as much intentional as those of literature. To put it differently, ‘science’ may potentially be as ‘fictional’ as literature. In our case, different paradigms govern the different epistemes mentioned above. While apparently the western scientific tradition has displaced the other two in the mainstream of society, all three often work as parallel modes of knowledge, equally valid for the people concerned. Such post-structuralist scepticism abounds in the blending of different worldviews in Indian SF. These narratives exploit the gaps in the apparently immovable structures to indicate the impossibility of complete structuration, and to show that every such structure contains its own means of deconstruction. This process is not that of replacing one set of beliefs with another, as happens in scientific revolutions; rather, this is a denial of the hegemony of all such systems. The presence of aliens, high-tech gadgets, Vedic science and local ghosts within the same universe without any apparent epistemic rupture in Indian SF thus presents readers with such an intertwined space where the social flux and shifting paradigms of modern India can be freely explored and enjoyed. I will now closely examine a number of texts and analyse the influences of the above-mentioned epistemic traditions on the creation of their fictional universe.

Science and Fiction Many works of Indian SF fit into the ‘stories-with-something-likescience-in-it’ category. Because SF often worked as a populariser of science, SF and science writing have shared a close affinity since the late nineteenth century. This techno-scientific aspect distinguishes early SF from more fantastical narratives such as folklore, fairy tales, myths and ghost stories. Such early works as Hemlal Dutta’s ‘Rahasya’ (Mystery, Bangla,1882) and Keshav Prasad Singh’s ‘Chandralok Ki Yatra’ (Journey to the Moon, Hindi, 1900) both distinguish themselves against such fantastical narratives as those found in the Hindi ‘tilism’ and ‘ayari’ tradition of Devaki Nandan Khatri’s Chandrakanta (Hindi, 1888), local folk and fairy tales that were later collected by Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumder in Thakurmar Jhuli (Bangla, 1907) or the prevalent mythological narratives. Two excellent examples of such early SF are Jagadananda Roy’s (1869–1933) ‘Shukra Bhraman’ (Travel to Venus, Bangla, written 1892, published 1914) and Jagadish Chandra Bose’s

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‘Niruddesher Kahini’ (The Story of a Disappearance, Bangla, 1896; revised and published as ‘Palatak Tufan’, The Runaway Storm, in 1921), both of which perhaps present a more developed narrative structure as well as a more original contribution. Both stories are also written by practising scientists and science writers. Furthermore, these stories set up the dominant themes of later Indian SF – while Jagadananda Roy’s tale deals with exploration and journey, Bose’s narrative tries to solve a natural problem through the application of scientific knowledge. Roy, who published numerous books on scientific topics ranging from astronomy to plant life, was a science teacher and an amateur astronomer. His ‘Shukra Bhraman’ appears alongside essays on scientific topics in Prakritiki (1914). Like many early works of SF, his frame story hinges on a purported dream vision as a mode of travel across space. Yet the dream is not at all abrupt or arbitrary. Rather, it is a result of a rigorous scientific examination of Venus and of a scientific discussion about those observations with his friend. The adventures of our protagonists on Venus is similar to what we find in H. G. Wells’s First Men on the Moon (1901). They encounter two distinct races of humanoid beings on the planet that have never interacted with each other. They also explore the planet with the help of the first race, which is still at a lower stage of evolution, and encounter the more advanced race later in the story. The adventure, though, ends prematurely when the narrator-protagonist wakes up. Although on the face of it the story sounds fantastical, the attitudes of the author and the protagonists are completely scientific. No supernatural explanation is sought or given about any of the incidents in the narrative once we enter the dream, and the episodes on Venus are presented with the utmost objectivity of a scientific observer or an anthropologist. Thus even a fantastical device like a dream vision becomes secondary to the empirical and observational attitude of the work. Written a few years later for a short story competition, the prominent scientist J. C. Bose’s ‘Niruddesher Kahini’ is an even more interesting example of scientific method employed in a fantastic tale. The story deals with the sudden disappearance of an impending cyclone in the Bay of Bengal near Kolkata. Narrated in a comical and satirical tone, the narrator-protagonist describes the utter failure of the weather office to explain the vanishing of the storm and then himself elucidates the disappearance as a result of a bottle of hair oil thrown into the sea. Evidently the overall effect of the story is comically

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fantastic – a bottle of hair oil calming the stormy seas. Yet, the information is presented with a scientific approach – the vanishing of the storm is narrated as a scientific mystery (‘baigyanic rahasya’ in Bangla), complete with specific data, scientific debates about probable explanations and a logical solution at the end. The basic scientific premise of this solution is specific gravity: the lower specific gravity of oil than water’s brings the oil to the surface, stopping the water from evaporating, and therefore calming the water body. Thus, although the actual scientific ability of a bottle of hair oil to deter a cyclone is fantastic, the approach of the story in presenting this fantastic incident is completely ‘scientific’ in the mainstream use of the word. This preference for ‘scientific merit’ in SF is strongly prevalent among many later Indian authors. Works of such authors as Premendra Mitra, Leela Majumdar, Avigyan Roychoudhury (Bangla), Bal Phondke, J. V. Narlikar (Marathi), Sujatha (Tamil), Dinesh Chandra Goswami (Assamese), Sampurnanand, Harish Goyal, Kalpana Kulshreshtha (Hindi), R. N. Sharma and Sukanya Datta (English), along with a host of others, regularly contain some type of ‘scientific merit’ and thus perform their ‘estrangement’ ‘cognitively’. However, ‘science’ in this type of fiction is often equated with ‘technology’, and consequently many of these works fetishise machines or specific scientific processes instead of challenging the boundaries of science. Some of these works represent what Uppinder Mehan describes as stories in which ‘fiction … [is] merely a device for the discussion of scientific concept’.18 A good case in point is the National Book Trust’s collection of short stories It Happened Tomorrow (translated from regional languages, 1993) edited by Bal Phondke. The stories collected in this book predominantly focus on techno-science. In his preface, Phondke explains that Indian SF is closely related to science education and popular science writing (pp. xvi–xvii), and consequently the focus on scientific concepts is inevitable.19 Mehan argues that this fascination with techno-science is a result of a typical postcolonial situation, in which the narrative seeks a delicate balance between technological development and a neocolonial relationship with developed nations, and that Indian SF often ‘domesticates’ technology by ‘putting it at the service of [Indian] cultural beliefs and practices’.20 Although many of these stories such as Debabrata Dash’s ‘An Encounter with God’ (translated from Oriya), Arun Mande’s ‘Ruby’ (translated from Marathi) or Laxman Londhe’s ‘Einstein the Second’ (translated from Marathi) modify technology in the Indian

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context, their focus remains on technology itself, i.e. the technological aspect provides the ‘novum’ of the particular story. Dash’s story focuses on biotechnology and cloning while telling us the story of a scientist-father manufacturing a suitable wife for his son. Mande’s narrative centres on an Asimovian awakening of consciousness in a ‘female’ robot, but within the domestic context of a traditional Indian family, love and marriage. And Londhe tells us about the preservation of a brain, while discussing Indian social and educational themes. Similarly, Narlikar’s Virus (Marathi, 2000) and most of Arvind Mishra’s stories collected in Kumbh Ke Mele Me Mangalvasi (Hindi, 2013) are excellent examples of this kind of technological fiction. In Mishra’s ‘Antaryami’ (The One Who Knows Your Soul), in which a supercomputer, is presented as an almost divine entity, this focus on technology becomes machine fetishism. The clueless police take help from this machine to catch a serial murderer in a future India. Although there is nothing special about this narrative, the naïve attention to the exploits of a computer makes this a good representative of these science-based stories in which all the attention is given to a specific piece of technology without regard to the development of plot, structure and other literary qualities. Several other stories, such as ‘Alvida Professor’ (Goodbye Professor) and ‘Mohbhanga’ (Breaking of Spell) collected in this volume, also reflect this trend. Although more elaborate in its plot development and nuanced in the application of scientific principles, Narlikar’s Virus similarly foregrounds the problem of twentieth-century civilisation’s dependence on computers. Part international intrigue and part a discussion of information technology, Virus moves around a legitimate fear of modern technology, especially that of the interconnected web of information, the destabilisation of which can lead to chaos in international economic and political relationships. Arguably most stories collected in It Happened Tomorrow, as well as the works by Narlikar and Mishra discussed above, not only display an empirical attitude to fictional world building, but also a constant attention to machines and technology that are regularly associated with European colonial mechanism. However, in some cases modern science is not only important as a narrative attitude, and as the content of discussion, but also as a marker of a colonial and postcolonial institutionalism. This institutionalism is evident in the way Narlikar presents the politics of governmental research institutions in Virus. He shows the blatant political aspects while portraying the selection of

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an administrator at a centre for scientific research, in which more attention is paid to office bureaucracy and retaining control of the institution than to new scientific breakthroughs. Dinesh Chandra Goswami’s short stories collected in The Hair Timer (translated from Assamese by Amrit Jyoti Mahanta, 2011) provide intriguing examples of this type of institutionalism at work in various subtle ways in the scientific community. Such stories as ‘The Hair Timer’, ‘The Portable Smell Absorber’ and ‘Bedroom Energy’ build their fictional universe on the ideas of mainstream science while focusing the narratives on a specific technological advance – a technique of hair analysis that reveals a person’s entire biological activities, a box that catches smell and a device that draws energy from human sexual excitement. They then weave in the subtle social implications of scientific institutionalism. Most of these stories present (not always consciously) science as a field marked by gender hierarchy and strongly reflecting the traces of the colonial social pecking order. In these works, as in most of the works mentioned above, women are outliers to the scientific field. They either represent the domestic or sexual life of the male scientists or are given a comparatively minor scientific position. These associations are present even in stories in which women play major roles. For example, in ‘Bedroom Energy’, the inventor of the device that catches sexual energy is a female scientist. However, she has to seek ‘special favours’ from the anonymous narrator, a male official, to get approval for her research, which she achieves by sexual manipulation. Similarly, in ‘Indifferent’, a female scientist who controls the indifference-inducing machine, is not the primary inventor. In addition to that, she falls in love and marries the male inventor, and when he is incapacitated, cares for him. Thus she fulfils the purpose of the muse, the lover and the mother while trying to perform a scientific job. This masculinist bias, which is seen in the actual field of mainstream science, is strongly prevalent in most works of Indian SF. Goswami thus not only uses ‘science’ as a theme and a narrative device, but like Narlikar, addresses how this ‘science’ functions in the specifically Indian social, political and gender contexts. The most important conclusion that we can draw from the above discussion is that a prime characteristic of the narratives in the above-mentioned tradition is their allegiance to the idea of empirical science. These stories clearly originate in a world that can be explained by natural scientific laws (real or fictional). The speculations and

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extrapolations performed in these texts always work as a function of ‘scientific’ reality, which distinguishes them from any other kind of nonmimetic fiction. Even if fictional, the physics and biology of the universe of these stories keep the appearance of not being impossible within the norms of mainstream science. Consequently, the ‘estrangements’ performed in this type of work correspond well with the more restrictive and conventional understanding of ‘science’ in SF.

Vedic Science and Fiction This universal norm of mainstream science, though, is frequently destabilized in Indian SF. There are two main lines of this displacement. The first follows the established tradition of Hindu or Vedic science21 either to supplant mainstream science as a flawed representative of the West or to co-opt it within the holistic mode of Hindu thinking. The second line often uses non-hegemonic and folk traditions to destabilise any established structure of knowledge. This part of the chapter treats the first type of displacement. Many SF works that came out in the years that followed India’s independence and Prime Minster Nehru’s focus on scientific modernity in an independent India draw a connection between western science and ancient Indian tradition. In this tradition, the scientist, rather than being a product of the European Enlightenment, often assumes the garb of a Vedic yogi. Nowhere is this curious mixture more prominent and successful than in the Professor Shanku and Professor Natboltu Chakra stories in Bangla. Both series started in the early 1960s and are centred on older, unmarried ‘worshippers’ of science, who have no other occupation but to pursue knowledge and solve the mysteries of nature – the Brahmins/yogis of the modern age. A closer analysis of these two series will reveal the dominant imaginary of this mixed epistemic tradition. The names of the two scientists indicate the epistemological politics at play. The name ‘Professor Trilokeshwar Shanku’ is an excellent combination of science and religion, and colonial institutionalism and Hindu spiritualism: on the one hand, the title of professor places him in the colonial academic and scientific establishment; on the other, Trilokeshwar (lord of the three realms; a reference to lord Shiva) associates him with Hindu mythology; the last name, Shanku, which denotes

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the geometric shape of a cone, may provide the association of science and mathematics. The same naming principle is also at work with our other scientist. The significance of the ‘professor’ has already been discussed. The first name Natboltu is an obvious reference to ‘nuts’ and ‘bolts’, a mechanistic association with science and technology, and as the words are English, we can safely assume that this mechanistic science is also a reference to the western notion of science. The last name Chakra, which can mean multiple things (circle, disc, or power nodes in the body as understood by Hindu shastras), is a direct reference to the Hindu cultural heritage. A closer look at some of the stories will further reveal this unique epistemic hybridity. Satyajit Ray’s Professor Shanku stories (1961–92) deal with his inventions in medical and physical sciences (such as the miracle drug ‘miracurall’ and weapons such as the ‘snuff gun’ that makes the victim sneeze incessantly, and ‘annhilin’ pistol, a particle disintegrator), space exploration and the solving of scientific and fantastical mysteries (including UFOs and ancient mysteries from India, Tibet, Iraq and Egypt). These exploits, however, are a result of a methodology that easily combines the European legacy with a Vedic one. This merger is apparent from the very first story, ‘Byom Jatrir Diary’ (The Diary of a Space Traveller, 1961). In this story, Shanku builds a spaceship in his laboratory along with a robot, and then travels to Mars, is attacked by Martians and leaves in a hurry. After the lift-off, he loses control of the ship, which is mysteriously piloted to a new planet of superior ant-like beings, who keep Shanku as a curiosity. At first sight, this is a typical SF narrative involving techno-science and space travel, with a scientist at the centre of the adventure. Yet, references to a Mahabharata-influenced nightmare-inducing drug and the influence of Ramayana on Shanku’s robot indicate that this scientist is not only a product of British colonial science or of the Nehruvian science of postcolonial India, but also of a parallel epistemic tradition. This mixed heritage is even more prominent in other stories of Shanku, and especially in such episodes as the invention of the miracle drug miracurall that can cure any human ailment (‘Swarnaparni’, The Golden Leaf, 1992), and the reanimation of life with ancient Sanskrit mantras (‘Shanku O Harh’, Shanku and the Bone, 1963). ‘Swarnaparni’ foregrounds Shanku’s allegiance to both Vedic and European traditions. In this story, Shanku creates a medicine of universal cure from the leaf of a rare Himalayan plant. The Vedic/Indian

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tradition is prominently visible from multiple angles. The origin of the plant is in the Himalayas, where ancient sages meditated and which are also frequented by Hindu deities. Shanku learns of the plant from a sadhu or ascetic by word of mouth, which clearly makes the knowledge native and collective, rather than patentable intellectual property. His refusal to convert this medicine into a patented product underscores his non-capitalist mentality during his visit to Europe. Shanku further refers to Charaka (fourth to second century BCE), an authority on Ayurveda or ancient Hindu medical science, while discussing the medicinal properties of the plant. On the other hand, as a person trained under the colonial scientific establishment and working as a professor under the same system, he wants to make this medicine into a western-style tablet for ease of use; in addition, he starts cultivating the plant for a moderate level of production. Both these activities are performed under controlled laboratory conditions. His ‘scientific methodology’ and temperament are also revealed in his regular communication with European scientists, and in doing the chemical analysis of the plant in England. However, modern science fails to identify one of the chemical properties of the plant, making synthetic mass production of miracurall impossible. This is a final nod to the indigenous system, in the sense that this incident exposes the inability of western science and, by extension, of European imperial power, to codify and comprehend Indian wisdom. Adrish Bardhan’s (1932–2019) Professor Natboltu Chakra (1963– 2008) presents a similar amalgam of an Enlightenment scientist and a Vedic yogi. Like Shanku, he is an old, unmarried, balding, and whitebearded man. However, unlike Shanku he has an assistant-cum-friend, who accompanies and narrates their adventures that often take place in a parallel universe, the history of which is not always coterminous with our own. Chakra, like Shanku, merges experiment-based western science and an intuitive alternative tradition, frequently associated with a fictional Vedic epistemology. Most of the time, though, his experimental science sounds technical because of English and Latinate terminology, not because of any clearly mentioned methodology. Similarly, his alternative tradition sounds Vedic because Vedic tradition is explicitly invoked by name, not because of association with any actual ancient scientific theory. An excellent story elucidating these qualities is ‘Kalochayar Karal Kahini’ (Terrible Tale of the Dark Shadow, 2003). Written in a serio-comic

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tone and often playing with fantastic metanarratives, this story presents earth under a matriarchal alien race, which has been ruling for four thousand years and plans to implement a one-to-five male–female ratio on the human population. Chakra, appears as the elected representative of humanity, opposes this proposed carnage of men, and ultimately makes the aliens flee the earth, thus saving the human race. While many generic and narrative conventions operate in this story, I will focus only on the scientist and his methodology. The aliens represent a technologically advanced civilisation (atomic energy is mentioned multiple times) that has subdued a comparatively less advanced human society marred by infighting and oblivious of its ancient heritage. Chakra uses what appears to be western techno-science (signal jammers and a mind-power amplifier), as well as more spiritual and magical devices, to fight these aliens. Bardhan repeatedly invokes ancient Vedic knowledge, especially the elemental unity of the universe – the Advaita Vedantic concept of the divine – which here appears as a powerful shadow giant. Furthermore, towards the end, our scientist employs ghosts to chase away the aliens and spends a part of the narrative discussing the scientific feasibility of ghosts, while mentioning European scholars such as the Ukrainian occultist Helena Blavatsky (1831–91) and English chemist, physicist and occultist William Crookes (1832–1919). This legitimisation of apparitions reaches a satirical height when the spirit of Thomas Edison appears alongside the spirit of the Bengali magician Bhutananda. Consequently, we can infer that Chakra is open to the mechanistic western tradition and the intuitive Vedic tradition, as well as something directly supernatural. The ‘scientist’ thus becomes a point at which all these different epistemic lines intersect, making him what we may call an epistemic bricoleur. Both Shanku and Chakra are educated elite Bengalis who have benefited from colonial scientific education and have been participating in colonial and postcolonial scientific projects through their continued associations with those education systems and their international collaborations. But they are equally open to possibilities that lie outside the purview of the ‘scientific method’, especially to those found in socalled ‘Vedic science’. The mixed methodological and epistemological heritage of both these scientists thus amply demonstrates a strange and uneasy relationship of the Bengali educated elite with western modernity: simultaneously necessary and oppressive. This heritage also shows the same strange association with indigenous traditions:

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at once liberating and insufficient, if not backward-looking. Scientist figures in Bangla SF, thus become an embodiment of this acute anxiety of popular scientific imagination. These two series are by no means anomalies. Many authors use a Vedic/Hindu epistemic framework to narrate their stories, including such prominent names as Narayan Sanyal, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, Laxman Londhe, Chintamani Deshmukh, Arvind Mishra, Rajiv Ranjan Upadhyay and Lakshmi Nandan Bora. Works like theirs at once challenge the hegemony of western science and establish a claim to an ancient indigenous tradition of knowledge – a tradition that has been superseded by the invading Islamic and European cultures. Consequently, the ‘estrangements’ performed in these works are reliant on understanding of ‘cognition’ that do not necessarily correspond with a restrictive and conventional use of it in scientific epistemology. However, this alternative epistemology often presents itself as a holistic and systematic replacement of what we conventionally term ‘science’. Occasionally Vedic science even co-opts ‘science’ as a partial representation of its transcendental truth. For Indian SF, though, such co-option opens an equally viable route to creating a ‘novum’, as such knowledge has been jostling for centrality in Indian life for hundreds of years.

Subaltern Science and Fiction While Vedic science-based SF attempts to create a continuity with ancient Hindu tradition, tales of another type often generate the ‘novum’ from localised subaltern knowledge. This tradition can also be considered a link between SF, fairy tales and horror/ghost stories – the genres that do not purportedly seek to place everything on a grand scale. The Hindi ‘ayari’ or fantasy tradition popularised by Devaki Nandan Khatri in Chandrakanta in the late nineteenth century is a closely connected genre, in which magic is intimately related with fantastic mechanisms. However, such relations are mostly superficial. There is no overt effort to connect such devices with any systematic or scientific ideas. In more recent texts, though, we find frequent use of such devices. Sukanya Datta’s stories ‘Severed Link’ (2008) and ‘Little Learning’ (2012) and Amitav Ghosh’s celebrated novel The Calcutta Chromosome (1995) provide excellent examples of such use.

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Both of Datta’s (who is a scientist) stories create discourses on folk knowledge, mainstream scientific knowledge and the limits of both systems. Both stories use a type of fairy/folk tale paradigm. The locales of both works are within unexplored nature – in the first story, the hills and forests of eastern India; and in the second, a sparsely inhabited island in the Indian Ocean. Both stories foreground the direct connection between man and nature and focus on the ‘adibasis’ or aboriginal tribes as gleaners and keepers of knowledge from nature. Although both stories associate fantastic lore with the locales that suggest certain scientific knowledge of the universe, none of these legends correspond to the systematic Hindu tradition discussed above. Rather they belong to the strata of subaltern knowledge suppressed both by colonial science and by mainstream Indian society. The knowledge of nature held by these tribes, though, is the object of modern scientific study. Thus both ‘Severed Link’ and ‘Little Learning’ create a metadiscourse about the limits and types of knowledge. ‘Severed Link’ displays the inability of modern-day Indian scientists to prise out the secret medicinal knowledges of the nomadic Ditinga tribe, who barely participate in the normative social discourse. This text draws a subtle connection between ancient Egyptian slaves and the Ditinga through their secret knowledge of plants, manifested in pottery design and their unique symbolic representation of grass, which is totally lost on the ‘scientific’ explorers of modern civilisation. Such discourses of subversion and nonconformity indicate the devious and indirect ways that the subaltern resists social hegemony. ‘A Little Learning’, however, creates a more direct interaction between modern science and folk knowledge. In this story Indian scientists visit the tsunami-ravaged island of Linu-livu off the Sri Lankan coast and interact with Bur-el, the priest/knowledge-keeper of the Livuans, a reclusive and diminishing tribe (somewhat like the Jaroas and Sentinilese of the Andaman Islands). Bur-el narrates the local legend about a god who became a serpent to vanquish a demon, making their snake-infested island habitable. The god merged with the demon to excise his evil qualities. After the ravages of a water dragon, the legend continues, foreigners will come, and if they separate the god from the demon, the demon will rise again. The scientists interpret this legend as a metaphoric representation of natural dangers – an island situated in a seismically active zone is prone to tsunamis (the water dragon). However, the ‘god’ and the ‘demon’ turn out to be

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two plants on the island: an invasive parasitic vine which neutralises a variety of the deadly but beautiful flower linia. When the exploring scientists try to meddle with this ecology through planned cultivation and separation of the plants, they turn the deadly linia onto themselves, thus fulfilling the prophecy of unleashing the demon on the island. These two stories consciously engage with the many epistemes that constitute the narrative universe. On the one hand, the narrative framework is based on modern-day science working through empirical evidence, experiments and rational theories; on the other, scientific methodology constantly interacts with another mode of knowledge based on the indigenous heritage, received by word of mouth and remembered through generations. Without any empirical evidence or specific rational theory, this functions on received beliefs and intuitive understanding of nature. ‘A Little Learning’ repeatedly mentions the Bur-el’s wealth of information about the island without much understanding of that information for lack of analysis. Yet, the conclusion of the story shows the same flaw in modern science that leads to the death of three scientists; hence, the title ‘A Little Learning’, followed by the proverbial ‘is a dangerous thing’, is amply justified. In other words, both traditions of knowledge here appear to be flawed, making the idea of knowledge itself a more complex and interdependent system beyond any easy hierarchisation. Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome provides an even more intriguing handling of epistemic traditions in SF world building. In this novel, Ghosh rewrites the history of Ronald Ross’s (1857–1932) discovery of the malaria parasite in colonial India by creating a dichotomy between the accepted ‘scientific’ process of acquiring and disseminating knowledge, and what he terms ‘counter-science’, which functions through ritualistic practices and resists hegemonic knowledge traditions. However, the story also implies that both hegemonic ‘science’ and the tradition of ‘counter-science’ are mutually dependent if they are to function successfully. In this case, the ‘counter-science’ is the subaltern knowledge associated with the lower strata of Indian society, not the prestigious tradition of Vedic science. Thus empowerment of a secret subaltern cult in The Calcutta Chromosome, indicating that this cult, not Ross, was the main driving force behind the discovery of the malaria parasite, suggests the undermining of both European hegemonic science and that of the indigenous elites.

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I have argued elsewhere that in this novel Ghosh deconstructs the ‘factual history’ told in Ross’s Memoirs (1923) and identifies Ross’s native assistant, Lutchman, as the subaltern who has been silenced in Ross’s account of the malaria discovery.22 Claire Chambers indicates that Ross barely mentions Lutchman in his memoir, and that no ‘evidence’ is found of his influence on Ross’s discovery.23 However, in the novel Murugan (one of the protagonists) points out that an epistemology functioning on secrecy will not leave any ‘evidence’ in the conventional sense: ‘secrecy is what this is all about: it figures there wouldn’t be any evidence or proof’ (The Calcutta Chromosome, p. 104). Consequently, the agency of the subaltern within the discourse of power, colonial science in this case, cannot be determined by any conventional methodology. As we trace down Lutchman’s story we find Mangala, a native sweeper woman at another English scientist D. D. Cunningham’s laboratory in Calcutta (Kolkata), who is later revealed to be the leader of a secret society searching for immortality. This cult uses the malaria parasite as a medium of transferring human personality traits from one body to another. Shifting of the plot-focus from the authority figures of Ross and other colonial scientists to subaltern subjects such as Mangala and Lutchman is glaring: the knowledge that is excluded from colonial history and science reclaims the centre in Ghosh’s postcolonial fiction, where a British colonial scientist’s research leads to a syphilitic native woman’s quest for immortality. In other words, here the western scientific methods of gaining and communicating knowledge are as real and effective as those that are not considered scientific – rituals, stories and rumours. Ghosh’s book, however, shows that such alternative epistemologies need not be associated with the dominant Indian discourse, namely that of ‘Vedic science’. Rather The Calcutta Chromosome explicitly disavows any such affiliation. This dissociation is evident in the fact that both Mangala and Lutchman, who run the entire show from behind the curtains, belong to the lowest caste in Hindu society. In addition, by placing a woman at the head of the cult in almost a divine, or at least a priestly role, the book moves away from the Brahminical patriarchy that lies at the heart of the Vedic tradition. The clay idol of Mangalabibi holding a scalpel and a microscope also tells of a non-traditional goddess. It is an entity that rises from peripheral folk culture rather than from the main body of Hinduism. The rituals and the treatments performed by Mangala, furthermore, resemble practices often seen among some

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tribal cultures and subaltern classes, but not amongst the elites. This not only indicates an undermining of traditional Hinduism and patriarchy but also an advocacy of hybridity. By combining the scientific and the supernatural in The Calcutta Chromosome, Ghosh challenges the very notion of science itself. Bridging the gaps between horror, folk tale, SF and historical fiction, Ghosh’s work provides an outstanding example of subaltern knowledge questioning the dominant modes of knowing. In the works of the Bengali author Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, though, we see a playful blending of all three strata of the epistemic hierarchy. Starting from the 1970s, Mukhopadhyay’s stories for children and young adults regularly exploit the fantastic, either through a direct use of supernatural tales involving ghosts, or through a mixture of the supernatural and SF. However, his use of the supernatural is mostly directed to the comical, not horror. In many of his SF stories, these diverse traditions exist in a separate yet complementary state. Set mostly in his contemporary rural and small-town India, novellas such as Bhuture Ghori (The Spooky Watch, 1984), Patashgarher Jangale (In the Jungle of Patashgarh, 1989) and Patalghar (The Underground Chamber, 1996) maintain an excellent balance between these various epistemologies. In discussing Mukhopadhyay, Tzvetan Todorov’s threefold definitional scheme of the ‘fantastic’ is useful. Todorov categorises the broad genre of fantasy into ‘the uncanny’, ‘the fantastic’, and ‘the marvellous’.24 ‘The uncanny’ stands for the illusion of the supernatural – a phenomenon appearing to be supernatural yet explicable by natural causes. ‘The marvellous’, on the other hand, is the real supernatural: it represents a reality that is not governed by laws familiar to us. ‘The fantastic’ resides in the dilemma in the middle, where the textual evidence by itself does not allow for a final verdict for one or the other: ‘The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.’25 While Todorov’s overly structuralist account of the fantastic has come under criticism from such scholars as Darko Suvin, Stanislaw Lem and Mark Bould, it does provide a helpful scheme in understanding the generic tendencies in this type of non-mimetic texts. From a formal point of view, most of Mukhopadhyay’s supernatural tales are apparently ‘marvellous’: his ghosts are ghosts, not strange occurrences perpetrated by humans. Mukhopadhyay, however, treats ghosts as another form of existence that could be explained by sufficiently advanced science.

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His approach is similar to Arthur C. Clarke’s famous principle: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’26 Ghosts and other paranormal activities that occur in his stories are just waiting for a proper scientific explanation. Hence in Todorov’s scheme, these occurrences should actually be deemed ‘uncanny’. Presently lacking any such explanation, however, these can very well be considered examples of the ‘fantastic’. Again, functioning within an agreed defamiliarisation developed logically, which is viable for many of his readers, Mukhopadhyay’s tales function as SF through the interaction of cognition and estrangement. Two stories, Bhuture Ghori (The Spooky Watch) and Patalghar (The Underground Chamber), are excellent cases in point. Both are set in semi-rural and small-town India and present intriguing interactions between techno-science and a nostalgic traditional Bengali lifestyle. The title of Bhuture Ghori itself – the supernatural and the mechanical (like the ghost in the machine) – excellently presents this juxtaposition. It presents a reality in which superstitions and beliefs in the supernatural coexist with techno-scientific progress. This tension is highlighted through dialogues between two friends – the atheist Haranchandra, who believes in the notion of empirically provable science, and his Tantric friend, Jatai, who not only practises religious rituals, but also delves into the world of the dead. The text, however, does not show any preference for one type of episteme over the other. To the common rural population both these are perfectly possible ways of seeing the universe, and thus not necessarily discontinuous. This continuity of paradigms is highlighted through the breaking down of sectarian and philosophical barriers in the face of true wonder – the arrival of the aliens. The eponymous spooky watch that makes other machines behave erratically and emit strange sounds turns out to be a highly powerful and coveted alien machine rather than an earthly device under spirit possession. The best example of this in the normal human world is the atheist Haranchandra’s rising belief in ghosts, the Tantric Jatai’s sudden reverence for Vaishnavism (another competing religious sect), the Vaishnava Nimai’s acceptance of Tantra and the British scientist Gordon’s loss of reason. These barriers are broken because of the contact with the alien machine. The technologically advanced aliens, who fight over this artefact in this small town, expose the lack of human understanding of the universe and its physical laws. Thus Bhuture Ghori seamlessly blends the different paradigms: faith

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in the supernatural (divine or ghostly), the empirical mode of modern science and a speculative belief in alien knowledge that supersedes our understanding of nature. Also set in a semi-rural/small town locale, Patalghar not only deals with a similar juxtaposition of ghosts and aliens as in Bhuture Ghori, but it also further highlights the coexistence of the scientific and the superstitious. The continuity between the epistemic traditions is even stronger in this story. Science in its modern understanding is presented here as an Indian tradition hybridised with western notions – Aghor Ghosh, a fictional nineteenth-century scientist, is at the centre of this tradition. He invented something akin to cryogenic sleep and practised his science in an underground chamber. His methods show influences of the Indian Vedic traditions as well as western notions of laboratory experimentations. Aghor is assisted in his efforts by alien technology from a planet in Saptarshi Mandal (Ursa Major). The book’s antagonist is also an alien, who returns after 150 earthly years to take back Aghor’s invention. This speculative and hybrid scientific episteme is, however, cleverly merged with local superstitions. While interaction with Aghor’s ghost falls in the same line as in the Bhuture Ghori, the use of a superstition related to ‘apaya’ or ‘bad-luck’ adds a further local dimension: anyone who sees ‘apaya’ Gobindo’s face in the morning has a miserable day. This power of adversely affecting people’s lives by only showing his face has made Gobindo into a local legend. The book adds on to this theme by introducing Gobindo’s ancestor Sanatan, who is a bestower of even greater ill luck, as the person put under cryo-sleep by Aghor 150 years ago. At the end of the story, a look at Sanatan’s face defeats the belligerent alien in search of Aghor’s machine. This superstition, which has no connection to the great Vedic tradition, is an example of another alternative epistemology. Unsanctioned by any great traditions, practices like these rule common people’s everyday lives in all corners of the country irrespective of their religious affiliations. The fact that the book gives them equal importance in the narrative universe attests to Mukhopadhyay’s aim of integrating the mutually exclusive traditions of knowledge and creating a continuity that can be often seen existing in the lower intellectual strata of Indian society. In these strata ghosts, magic, the divine and advanced science are often put at a similar level of wonder without any special sense of rupture, thus foregrounding the hybrid syncretic potential of Indian

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mass psychology and mass entertainment that arises out of a society at the eye of swirling epistemologies.27 Works such as these eschew any clear allegiance to the conventional understanding of science, but they do not either align with a dominant indigenous tradition such as Vedic science. These are patchworks arising out of local practices, yet when used in SF, appear as viable ways of knowing and understanding the world, based on which ‘estranged’ worlds can be built without appearing completely detached from the author’s experiential reality. The multiplicity and wide variety of such traditions engender ‘estranged’ worlds of widely varying ‘cognitive’ quality, yet almost always suggesting a ‘cognitive effect’.

SF and the Mythological Paradigm As is apparent from the discussion above, Indian SF functions on multiple epistemic traditions. The three influential epistemes mentioned above – modern techno-science, Hindu/Vedic science and folk/subaltern knowledge – often struggle against and interact with each other to establish primacy over the narrative universe. This claim to primacy in this context apparently corresponds to what Popper broadly categorised as ‘science’, that deals with the physical nature of the universe. Nevertheless, many works of Indian SF, primarily coming out of the Hindu/Vedic epistemic tradition, establish direct or indirect connections to myths and thus stridently merge two completely different modes of knowledge without any apology. This tendency, though, has a more complex origin than is visible on the surface. Finding allegories of and allusions to the great epics Ramayana and Mahabharata or symbolic invocation of a Hindu cosmology underlying a naturalistic physical universe are common in traditional Indian literature. These mythical references play the same role in Indian culture that Judaeo-Christian and Greco-Roman mythologies often play in creating the western cultural fabric. In recent times, though, this Hindu cosmic system has been regularly employed in a non-traditional manner in speculative fiction. Such works do not follow either the realistic/ mimetic trend that employs the religio-mythical elements as metaphors (in such popular Hindi movies as Prakash Jha’s Raajniti, 2010, and Mani Ratnam’s Raavan, 2010) or traditional devotional works (such as traditional Vaishnava poetry) and symbolic literature (e.g. Chitra Banerjee

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Divakaruni’s novel The Palace of Illusions, 2008) expounding the various facets of the Hindu pantheon. Rather these speculative texts either create a literal syncretism between Hindu cosmology and a naturalist universe explicable by modern science (such as in the Israeli author Lavie Tidhar’s ‘This, Other World’, 2012 or the American author Joan Roughgarden’s Ram 2050, 2015), or they present the reader with a fantastic supernatural realm inspired by and yet diverging from the Hindu myths in the form of fantasy narratives (such as Ashok Banker’s Prince of Ayodhya, 2003 or Amish Tripathi’s The Immortals of Meluha, 2010). While the first kind closely resembles SF, the second type often echoes Tolkien’s high fantasy. We will limit our discussion to the first type. Indian SF’s use of myths can be categorised under two broad headings: reinterpretations of Hindu myths and use of non-Hindu myths. This crude division is useful because of the preponderance of the first kind and the paucity of the second. We can further subdivide the use of Hindu myths as indigenist/nationalist and subversive depending on the attitude adopted towards the myths. The following section examines each of these categories and subcategories.

Reinterpreting Hindu Myths Reinterpretation of religion through SF is not unique to Indian literature. Many works of western SF have also gone that way, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet (1938) possibly being the two most recognisable examples. In several cases, Indian SF tends to retell older myths (such as stories from Ramayana, Mahabharata and the Puranas) in a futuristic context, or to reinterpret myths within the physical laws of mainstream science. Such use of myths is often exploited to legitimise Hindu nationalism or as a subversive device against the imposition of western values. However, in certain cases myths are also used in SF to challenge the patriarchal structure of Indian society. While the second kind of narratives have been growing in number recently, the first kind has held sway for a long time.

Myths, Hindu Nationalism and SF In his study of Marathi SF, Hans Harder highlights the tendency to legitimise Hindu nationalism by mythical association in SF.28 Although

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he concedes that his examination of Marathi SF is not exhaustive, he can discern a specific pattern regarding the use of myths. The titles of the works he examines directly associate themselves with myths: ‘Devamsi Jive Marile’ (They Killed the Gods Alive) by Laxman Londhe and Chintamani Deshmukh, Dattaprasad Dabholkar’s ‘Vijnanesvari’ (Goddess of Science; from Gyanneshva’s Marathi interpretation of the Bhagavad-Gita, Jnanesvari in 1290) and Narlikar’s ‘Yakshanchi Denagi’ (The Gift of the Yaksha; Yakshas are mythical beings). Harder claims that these texts consciously strive to connect SF actions to their mythical predecessors. More importantly, these stories exclusively place educated Hindus with connection to the great Vedic tradition as central characters. There is also an ever-present undertone in these works that the Indian (read Hindu) tradition should lead the world. These works, Harder argues, not only marginalise non-Hindus, but almost unconsciously posit them, especially Muslims, as the Other against whom this educated Hindu identity can be affirmed. This type of legitimisation of indigenous knowledge as science has come under fire from scholars such as Meera Nanda, who dismisses outright all claims to Vedic science as backward and a hindrance to progress as conceived by Enlightenment rationalism. In Prophets Facing Backwards (2003) Nanda fiercely criticises the proponents of Vedic science and the ideology of Hindutva, along with many others who subvert Enlightenment modernity.29 Nevertheless, according to many of her critics, Nanda’s attack on religious fundamentalism and the use of science to propound irrational doctrines become a critique of Hinduism itself and any other ideology that deviates from western rationalism.30 Because Indian SF is a genre often dealing with the futuristic aspects of a postcolonial nation, epistemological questions such as the indigenism/hybridity debate become even more crucial to the creation of its imaginative universe. The texts that Harder mentions are not anomalous. Similar approaches can be seen in many other works, such as in Narlikar’s The Return of Vaman, Rajiv Ranjan Upadhyay’s ‘Shiv ke Sannidhya Mein’ (In the Company of Lord Shiva, Hindi, 2016) and Sauresh Dey’s ‘Dr. Chattaraj o Ashwatthama’ (Dr. Chattaraj and Ashwatthama, Bangla, 1960s). We will take a closer look at these for a better understanding of the mythical associations. In Narlikar’s The Return of Vaman (1989; translated from Marathi Vaman Parat Na Ala by the author) we see an approach similar to

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the above-mentioned stories. Here the framing device is the myth of Vamana’s (the fifth avatar of Lord  Vishnu) deception of Asura King Bali, from Vagbata Purana (composed 600–1000 CE). The story is set in modern-day India and the action concerns the discovery of an artefact from a prehistoric high-tech yet extinct human civilisation, and the creation of a robot from the data retrieved from the time capsule. Although the book incorporates the Frankenstein myth (creator/ creature conflict), the myth of Vamana (deception through outward humility) drives the main action.31 Narlikar further introduces the question of Vedic science into the story through one of the scientists but does not directly endorse it. Still, the creation of a highly advanced prehistoric civilisation with a science superior to our own is a way of going back to the theme of ancient scientific knowledge, repeatedly echoed by Hindu nationalist ideologues through such claims as the existence of the internet, air travel and nuclear weapons in Vedic times.32 Moreover, despite the global nature of the ancient civilisation, the discovery of the artefact in India further reinforces India’s ancient lineage in science. The attempts to steal this technology by western technology pirates and Japanese corporate houses align this story with parallel claims of Hindu fundamentalists who decry the ‘thievery’ of knowledge by the West.33 Thus, while the actual story of Vaman functions on a ‘scientific’ basis, its framework repeatedly associates the narrative with a mythical mode of understanding. Rajiv Ranjan Upadhyay’s ‘Shiv Ke Sannidhya Mein’ (published in Rachnakar web magazine, 2016) presents another interesting case: the story of space exploration by a cyborg crew is set within a mythical framework endorsing a Hindu cosmological view. The title itself points towards this. Lord Shiva, the destroyer and recreator of the universe is invoked in a story describing an effort to understand the workings of a black hole and dark matter – the devourer and transformer of matter. One of the cyborg crews literally shows another one an idol of Shiva as Nataraja and explains the cycle of destruction and creation in mythical terms. Another character refers to Satapatha Brahmana (dated according to various scholars between 3000 and the sixth century BCE) to explain the Big Bang. In addition, the two ships probing the depths of space are named Garuda, after the avian god and vehicle of Lord Vishnu, and Trishanku, after a mythical king from Ramayana who was stuck between heaven and earth in his effort to enter heaven in his mortal body. These mythical symbolisms, while creating a vast

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mental framework, also endorse a Hindu view of the universe which, like the texts endorsing Vedic science, ultimately serves the agenda of Hindu nationalism. Consequently, Upadhyay creates a narrative space in which a mythical mode of understanding is constantly at play with empirical and scientific exploration, a ‘supplement’ in the Derridian sense of the word. Sauresh Dey’s ‘Dr.Chattaraj o Ashwatthama’ makes an even bolder connection with the myths. The mythical context here is that of the Brahmin warrior Ashwatthama from Mahabharata, who was cursed with immortality and an agonising pain in his head for his dastardly killing of sleeping Pandava princes. The story contains Bhusundi Kak, an immortal sage-turned-crow, from Ramayana. Dey depicts Ashwatthama’s immortality as a type of cryogenic sleep – his body is shrunk to a molecular level and left hibernating within a uranium capsule. Dr Chattaraj finds this capsule with the help of Bhusundi Kak during his research trip in the Himalayas. This story not only establishes a direct connection with ancient myths, but also advocates the concept of a highly advanced Hindu science (cryogenics, uranium capsule, reduction to molecular state etc.) like many other stories mentioned in the first part of this study. However, as it turns out, Dr Chattaraj and his friend had to contain a highly indignant Ashwatthama within the capsule again, which is snatched away by Bhusundi Kak. So, at the end of the story no empirical proof remains. Thus in a way this serio-comic story dismisses the very category of proof in the scheme of mythical beliefs. These above-discussed works endorse a Hindu view of the universe, although almost always using modern science and history as supplements to, and often as subsets of, such mythical knowledge, in the process conflating the mythical with the scientific. Such has also been the agenda of Hindu nationalists, whether in Saraswati in the mid-nineteenth century or in the Sangh Parivar parties since the mid-twentieth century. Thus such usage of myths in SF endorses a nationalist stance.

Mythology and Subversion Nonetheless, Indian SF does not use mythology only to cater to religious nationalism. Myths are often used to subvert hegemonic religious and patriarchal practices, especially challenging the status quo of caste and gender roles in the stratified Indian society. Like the

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texts discussed above, these works establish connections between the mythical and the scientific epistemes in building their worlds, and thus position themselves within the epistemic continuity discussed earlier. However, in these cases the authors destabilise the mythical structure that governs Hindu patriarchy and casteist social formations by introducing subtle twists to the original myths or by endowing the myths with new subversive associations. Sometimes the subversion is done through symbolic associations, sometimes through parallel plots, and sometimes by conflating the primary narrative with the governing myth. Such texts as Vandana Singh’s Distances (2008), Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet-Engine Laugh (2001), Ambai’s ‘Vamanan’ (Tamil, 1988) and Vandana Singh and Anil Menon’s edited anthology Breaking the Bow (2012) liberally use Hindu myths for their critical and creative purposes. I will take a closer look at Ambai’s ‘Vamanan’ and two stories from Singh and Menon’s collection, Singh’s ‘Oblivion: A Journey’ and Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s ‘Fragments from the Book of Beauty’, for a better understanding of this subversive trend. The Tamil author Ambai’s ‘Vamanan’ exploits mythical associations with Vishnu’s avatars (Vamana and Kalki) and refers to Mahabharata, ‘Kailasam’ (abode of Shiva) and ‘Vaikuntham’ (abode of Vishnu) to tell a story of artificial intelligence (AI) that destabilises the entrenched patriarchy of the scientific establishment. Ambai, a writer known for her feminist stance, here uses the mythical elements as a symbolic device. The protagonist, a female social scientist relegated to a minor project after her marriage, interacts regularly with two highly advanced AIs, Vamanan and Kalki. While Vamanan is a domestic lower-level AI, Kalki is an advanced administrative AI controlling the functions of the research institute. In the primary narrative line, Vanaja, the protagonist, reprogrammes Vamanan’s system to be more empathetic to human emotions than purely logical as it was originally created to be by a male scientist. Vamanan slowly infects Kalki, who starts modifying the male chauvinist language of the human–AI interactive routines. This modification, which attempts to undermine the established model, leads to conflict in the purely logical set-up of the AIs, resulting in their permanent dysfunction. This story about disrupting a patriarchal establishment with uncontrolled and emotive feminine forces cleverly uses both the avataric associations. Vamana’s association with deception, as discussed in Narlikar’s story, is again visible – this AI subtly and innocuously

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introduces the anomalies into the larger computer network. Kalki, the tenth avatar of Vishnu, who is supposed to usher in the end of the universe, initiates the end of the AIs at the research centre. In addition, the story uses multiple other allusions to draw out the importance of emotive responses and presenting such responses as primarily feminine. These allusions including the custom of sati, the jauhar vrata of Rajasthan (both are about the piety of women who immolate themselves to preserve a man’s honour) and Vima and Draupadi’s last conversation at Draupadi’s death from the Mahabharata, expose patriarchal despotism in Indian culture, which still pervades society through the sexist attitudes and jokes of the male researchers. These mythic and traditional allusions to death may also be seen to have influenced the AI’s death wish, the final subversive act of the story. Consequently, it can be argued that even if only symbolically, this mythical structure plays a key role in creating the universe of a story about advanced science and technology. In this context, Singh and Menon’s anthology deserves a special mention. Breaking the Bow collects stories that conspicuously move away from the hegemonic discourse of Hindu nationalism. The stories here reflect many genre affiliations – fantasy, myth, SF, realism – while maintaining a connection to Ramayana. Almost all the narratives are either subversive or at least sceptical, yet functioning in a universe originating from a Hindu worldview. Since this chapter is primarily concerned with narratives that overtly draw a connection between a naturalistic universe explicable through modern science and a mythical framework, I will discuss two stories that perform this task aptly without displaying any Hindu chauvinism. Vandana Singh’s ‘Oblivion: A Journey’ and Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s ‘Fragments from the Book of Beauty’ employ two different approaches in establishing this connection. Singh’s ‘Oblivion’ functions in a naturalistic far-future universe, where human communities are organised around specific originary narratives or ‘world-shells’. Although this idea of ‘world-shell’ resembles the concept of religion, the members are fully aware of these world-shells being narrative organisations rather than having any transcendental reality. The sex-shifting protagonist of the story grew up in the world-shell of the epic Ramayana, which was destroyed by a Ravana-like entity, Hirasor. After being tortured by battle robots, the protagonist resolves to destroy Hirasor. He obsessively searches for

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Hirasor through the universe, in the process losing his lover. Hirasor finally surrenders to him and is killed on the planet of Oblivion where people lose their memory. This story invokes Ramayana in its quest to destroy a powerful demonic figure, but only figuratively. Although such metaphors are pronounced, they are directly acknowledged as metaphors. Furthermore, the idea of a world-shell itself suggests a socio-religious ideology that sustains human society. Thus the connection between a naturalistic idea of science and an imaginary ideological universe is prominently foregrounded in Singh’s story. The story, inflected by Indian languages and references to Ramayana, still functions in a natural universe and is coloured by the protagonist’s prominently visible Ramayanic ideology. The protagonist repeatedly mourns the disappearance of her ‘world’ by the invasion of Hirasor’s corporation. This agony is akin to the nostalgia of a person’s loss of faith, jolting him or her into a universe of material reality, which foregrounds religion or social norms as ideological constructs albeit crucial ones. The subversion, however, does not end at the suggestion that myths are ideological. The protagonist, metaphorically representing Rama, is turned into a pan-sexual and sex-changing entity, an antithesis to the ideal of Rama as the preserver of the patriarchal structure of heterosexual domesticity. Furthermore, women are given crucial roles in resolving the protagonist’s search for Hirasor and are not objects to be rescued. Instead, Hirasor, the representative of patriarchal capitalist corporatism, becomes a mindless object before being killed. In ‘Oblivion’, Ramayana becomes a device of subversion, rather than of conformity. Sarukkai Chabria’s ‘Fragments’ shows a different approach, in which a specific episode in Ramayana is reconceived on a grander cosmic scale using an imagination informed by mainstream science. Here Hanuman’s search for the abducted Sita takes the form of a cosmic journey in an elemental form through twisting time and space. Dissociated from any earthly connection, Ravana’s Lanka becomes a planet hidden in warped space, and Rakshasas become shape-shifting alien entities. In its cosmic scale, this story merges myths and a scientific conception of the universe. ‘Fragments’ closely resembles the tradition of Vedic science in its conception of Ramayana as a naturally explicable universe with technological marvels. The best example of this trend in the story is Ravana’s flying chariot Pushpaka, which is conceived as a sentient spaceship echoing a recent paper on the topic in an Indian science

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journal explaining the workings of Maharishi Bharadwaj’s Vaimanik Shastra (science of airplanes).34 However, although Rama is still a king on earth, here the story is taken out of its literal and historical locales in ancient India and Sri Lanka to a cosmic scale, making the estrangement radical. The creation of this outright fantastic realm, though, undercuts any pretence at legitimisation of the myth in the author’s real world. Both ‘Oblivion’ and ‘Fragments’ expose a tendency in Indian SF which directly draws attention to the ever-present religion–science discourse, without directly buttressing Hindu nationalism. While these works are influenced by a turn to indigenism in their use of Ramayana as a framework, in their approach they indicate a distance from earlier efforts at legitimisation of established Hindu narratives. Texts such as these can thus be considered subversive of the dominant ideology. Rather than using SF to legitimise myths, they employ SF to destabilise them.

Indian SF and Non-Hindu Myths In the world building of Indian SF, non-Hindu myths only make rare appearances. A few texts were mentioned in the discussion of subaltern knowledge that partially evoke local legends. However, most of these legends are fabricated rather than extant. Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome, though, is one anomaly, which not only uses rural beliefs of Bengal but also Valentinian Gnosticism. Yet the references are oblique and obscure. In fact, the gnostic tradition serves more to create a link between the various subaltern groups spread across the world than to create any actual mythical association. Salman Rushdie’s Grimus (1975), which lies somewhere between SF and fantasy, also obliquely refers to some Native American myths and legends. Grimus, however, is more intent on creating a new myth than to draw connections with already existing ones. Some of Satyajit Ray’s Professor Shanku stories offer examples of non-Hindu myths or legends at work, although most of these stories also fall somewhere between adventure fiction, fantasy and SF. Such stories as ‘Ekshringo Abhijan’ (The Unicorn Expedition, dealing with the legends of unicorns and Shangrila), ‘Professor Shanku O Baghdader Bakso’ (The Box from Baghdad, based on the legend of the self-opening cave of Alibaba from One Thousand and One Nights), and ‘Professor Shanku O Egyptio Atanko’ (Professor Shanku and the Egyptian Horror, based on ancient

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Egyptian myths) use myths and legends from various foreign cultures to create an exotic flavour. Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s Generation  14 (2008) probably provides us with the most sustained use of non-Hindu myths in SF: she extensively uses Buddhist myths to bolster the central theme of her novel. Generation 14 attacks ideologies of domination. The novel discards the East/West dichotomy prevalent in many Indian SF stories, while suggesting that oppression has been a major human quality throughout history. At the same time, Generation 14 shows that subversion of such dominant ideologies is an equally primal human instinct. Following in the line of Gautama Buddha and Gandhi, the protagonist, Clone 14/54/G, locates a possibility of human salvation in human sympathy and in challenging all forms of social hegemony. In this effort, the author employs a Buddhist mythical and historical framework. The narrative of the novel moves through the genetic memories flashing in the mind of Clone. These mental visitations are strongly influenced by stories from the Buddhist tradition. In a sense, the whole novel can be seen as reinventing the form of Buddhist Jataka (c. fourth century BCE) stories, with the Clone 14/54/G being the final incarnation, the Buddha or the enlightened one, bringing the message of deliverance.35 According to the Tripitaka (c.550–100  BCE), each Bodhisattva (the heavenly soul with potential for achieving nirvana) goes through multiple cycles of rebirth before attaining the final status of Buddha or ‘the enlightened one’, after which the soul is set free from all earthly bonding.36 These incarnations can be human or non-human – supernatural beings as well as animals. The Jataka stories narrate these previous incarnations of the Buddha. Although according to the Buddhavamsa (c.200–100 BCE) and other Buddhist literature in Pali, this process is the same with all the Buddhas that appear in the world, the Jataka stories are associated primarily with Sakkamuni Gautama Buddha, the twenty-fifth Buddha according to Jataka Atthakatha (fourth century CE onwards).37 In Generation  14 the link with the Jataka stories and tales of Buddha are not overt; they are a rather muted presence throughout the structure of the book. The novel presents a fourteenth-generation clone to deliver a message of compassion to a world suffering from a stratified class society that is in essence similar to the caste-bound Hindu society of the fifth century BCE, when religious reformations like Buddhism and Jainism became necessary to address the evils of

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religious oppression. Like the Buddhist belief in cyclic rebirth to attain enlightenment the genetic profile of poet Aa-Aa goes through fourteen generations of cloning to achieve the status of a full human and to realise the full scope of humanity. Furthermore, the short visitation pieces of chapter VI are very similar to the concept of the Buddha’s recollections of incidents of his previous life. Here the Jataka tradition is even more prominent as each visitation contains a moral that ultimately indicates the inevitability of oppression in the world. The animal perspectives that the Clone experiences is another point that links the novel with the Buddhist tradition: like the Buddha, the Clone goes through metaphoric cycles of reincarnation many of which are animals. In fact, ‘The Watcher’, where Clone 14/54/G experiences the world through the eyes of a parrot kept in a golden cage in an aristocratic household of Islamic Lucknow, is quite similar to the Buddha’s incarnation as a parrot in a golden cage in the palace of a king in ‘Radha Jataka’. Again, Clone’s experience of the world as a fish in ‘Illusion’ is similar to the Buddha’s incarnation as a giant fish in ‘Matsya Jataka’. Clone also sees the world as a lizard in chapter I, which echoes the Buddha’s incarnation as an iguana in ‘Godha Jataka’. These associations with the history of Buddhism work as subtexts of the ideological resistance that the novel engages in: after all, Buddhism was a response to the ideological domination of Hinduism, and in its original context often provided hope to the oppressed. However, the use of a mythical framework also lends the story a historical and philosophical continuity similar to the type found in Hindu nationalist SF, but from a different and non-dominant perspective.

Conclusion Epistemological intersections inform world building in Indian SF. Modern science, Vedic science and subaltern knowledge constantly struggle and interact in creating the universe in which these narratives unfold. In many instances, such interactions extend into epistemological spheres that branch into the mythical instead of remaining within the ‘scientific’. As is evident from the above discussion, although such traditions often function independently, on many occasions these epistemological traditions create unique situations through intersections among themselves. While independent functioning is mostly visible in

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the works arising out of the modern scientific tradition, both Vedic science and subaltern traditions always work in conjunction with modern science, sometimes as a supplemental force, and on other occasions, as a subversive device. Despite the ideological ambiguity, however, the richness of Indian SF arises, at least partially, out of this vast array of competing claims to knowledge. Such interactions among multiple epistemologies are prevalent in various indigenous and non-western SF traditions, yet perhaps the uniqueness of Indian SF lies in the ways some of these traditions attempt to establish their hegemony, while others try to undercut such efforts. Indian SF thus displays a clear relationship to the authors’ zero worlds. All the other components – time, space and character creation – are contingent upon this epistemological alignment. In the following chapters I examine these components in the light of such epistemological orientation.

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3

Other Times: Alternative Histories, Imagining the Future and Non-linear Temporalities

In SF, time is not bound by ‘normal’ realistic representational principles. Time can literally expand, contract, jump ahead or run parallel to our lived temporality. Yet, SF also exists within the human notion of time, not outside it – i.e. it is not a-temporal like myth and religion. In SF’s spatio-temporal scheme, our lived experience, even if not coterminous, generally exists in a specific and determinant relationship with the one presented in the narrative. Consequently, exploring alternative historical possibilities and extrapolative exercises becomes a function of the temporal dimension of the genre. In Indian SF, temporality is bound by the country’s unique historicity. As I have argued in the Introduction and chapter 1, the colonial encounter between the Indian subcontinent and the British colonisers created Indian SF. This position on the other side of ‘history’, which marked India for nearly three centuries, also defines the temporal imaginations in the genre. On the one hand, the representation of past, present and future in Indian SF is at once dependent on and subversive of the hegemonic colonial or neocolonial forces. On the other hand, SF intervenes in the predominantly history-oriented and presentist discourse of colonial and postcolonial Indian literature, refocusing the reader’s attention on India’s future – the possibilities of an independent nation, its position in global politics, its shifting religious and social values, its rapid industrialisation and its dream of a society united in its diversity. However, to claim that SF only extrapolates and speculates about the future would be wrong. SF also recalibrates cultural memory and canonical history in presenting alternative and contrapuntal readings of the colonial and pre-colonial past as well as parallel possibilities of the present. These multiple temporalities in Indian SF, though, always brush up against the shadow of European colonialism. Whether reimagining the past or envisaging the future, these works regularly position themselves in an uneasy relationship

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with the hegemonic Euro-American world system and challenge the western lens through which Indian history has been ‘archived’. Indian SF, rather, sets into play the competing ‘histories’ of India – nationalist, elite, subaltern, regional and many others – that envision their own pasts, presents and futures. This chapter examines the dominant ways in which these various temporalities function.

Alternative Histories In drawing connections between postcolonial studies and memory studies, Michael Rothberg emphasises the various ways agents handle history: colonisers suppress pre-colonial history; anti-colonial movements reappropriate such history; and postcolonial authorities reconfigure the past to suit their present agendas.1 Furthermore, Rothberg mentions not only the influence of colonial past in postcolonial culture through educational structure and language use, but also in the writing of memoirs, autobiographies and ‘the rereading of the archives of imperial dominance by contemporary historians and critics’.2 Indian SF, like its more realistic counterparts, engages in the reappropriation and reconfiguration of the narratives of colonial and pre-colonial pasts as mentioned by Rothberg. Depending on the ideological orientation of the authors, such reappropriation works on a sliding scale between subaltern and dominant anti-colonial discourses, employing rereading of canonical history, sanctioned cultural memory and invocation of communicative memory. Employing theories of the German scholars Jan and Aleida Assman, Rothberg argues: ‘colonialism involves a break in the intergenerational communicative memory of a colonised group at the same time as it involves the imposition of a foreign canon of cultural memory’.3 The process of decolonisation struggles over the control of this canon of cultural memory, which according to Frantz Fanon, the coloniser ‘distorts, disfigures, and destroys’.4 Thus reclamation of such memory involves an act of reshaping the distortions. Ali Behdad, taking cues from Freud, observes that ‘belatedness’ (writing belatedly) implies a return of the ‘repressed’, that it involves the postcolonial project of the ‘retrieval’ of the past. In this sense, it is a creation of an archive from the postcolonial perspective. Of course, the retrieved past is also an imaginary act/a construction.5 Amilcar Cabral and Fanon emphasise the reclamation of collective memory in forming

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a national identity and culture, although without advocating any return to simple essentialism. However, cultural essentialism has also been an integral part of anti-colonial movements, especially in establishing civilisational heritages and pre-colonial utopias to which the nation must return. Anti-colonial efforts such as Pan-Arabism, Hindutva, Negritude and Pan-Africanism are ultimately based on some form of essential identity politics, although not all these movements advocate return to a pre-colonial golden age. Such ideologies often frame the reference points of much of the cultural productions of colonial and postcolonial nations, as do the more critical and democratic forms of anti-colonial discourses. All these tendencies of reclaiming history are at work in the way Indian SF presents the past.

The Golden Age Rooted in Hindu nationalism, a dominant attitude regarding the past in Indian SF is that of a lost golden age, a glorious ancient civilisation eroded by internal corruption, European colonial occupation and, in some instances, Islamic invasions. As has been discussed in chapter 2, the mythical paradigm of Indian SF often aligns the genre with Hindu nationalist tendencies by drawing direct links between the current narratives and their mythical predecessors. The ancient past and the narrative present are also often connected by an appeal to Hindu science. Both these tendencies result in works that refer to precolonial and pre-Islamic India in search of spiritual, political and scientific inspirations. Some excellent examples of this tendency include Ambika Datta Vyasa’s ‘Ascharya Vrittant’ (Hindi, 1884), Narlikar’s The Return of Vaman (1989, Vaman henceforth), Lakshmi Nandan Bora’s Kayakalpa: The Elixir of Life (translated from Assamese by Biman Arandhara, 2010) and many of Professor Natboltu Chakra stories (Bangla) by Adrish Bardhan. I will take a closer look at Vaman and Kayakalpa, two books fairly representative of this attitude. Although the actions of these two stories do not actually take place in the past, both works heavily rely on events in and information from the past to drive the narrative forward. As has been discussed in chapter 2, Vaman is set in modern-day India and the action concerns the discovery of an artefact from a prehistoric high-tech yet extinct human civilisation, and the creation of an AI-controlled robot from the data retrieved from this time capsule. This robot turns out to be a self-augmenting AI that starts collaborating with foreign forces and is destroyed at the end by the Indian scientist

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who built it. While discussing such advanced technology, one of the scientists mentions Vedic science to explain ancient wisdom, but is generally ignored by the others. Instead, Narlikar introduces a pre-Vedic (20,000-year-old) civilisation with evidential record of an advanced stage of scientific progress. However, the creation of an advanced prehistoric civilisation with a science superior to our own is a way of going back to the theme of ancient scientific knowledge; and despite the claim of global status for the civilisation, the discovery of the artefact in India further reinforces India’s ancient lineage in science. Such references to a ‘golden age’ serve specific ideological purposes. The Von Neumann machine or self-replicating robots made from the information gleaned from the artefact indicates two interesting areas of discourse – industrial technology and artificial intelligence. Both these areas of knowledge are important for an advanced civilisation. Vaman was written at a time when India was just beginning to establish its foothold in the modern industrial sector and international politics. In the 1980s, such industrial or technological developments were mostly derivative of western or Soviet innovations. Thus the discovery of a time capsule with neat instructions for technological production is a way of seeking inspiration from the past – creating an indigenous industrial heritage. Furthermore, in Vaman the ancients use the ‘octal’ system of mathematics, which can be easily converted into the binary system – the basis of modern computation. The binary system, however, not only connects the ancient and modern technologies, but as the binary system has its origin in ancient India, this mathematical reference also indirectly connects the ancient civilisation to Vedic times. Thus, although Narlikar does not champion Hindutva or an unqualified claim of ‘Vedic science’ in the story, Vaman strongly invokes the discourse of a glorious ancient past that rejects the superiority of the West in science. Yet, as is shown in the story, even such an advanced civilisation met its demise because of unchecked technological development: the ancient Mondaic civilisation became overdependent on AIs (known as Konads) and perished when the AIs revolted. Thus Vaman is also a cautionary tale against civilisational regression – a favourite theme of Indian nationalism. A similar nostalgic yet cautionary attitude to the past is also evident in Narlikar’s The Cosmic Explosion (1992) and, in a more complex manner, in ‘The Adventure’ (1986). SF as a genre fits this ideological urge to project a golden past. Mere statements referring to some spectacular

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pseudo-scientific discoveries may not cut much ice with present-day readers, who may not pursue their importance in imagination. By contrast, in SF the discoveries may not only be invoked, but can be graphically described, thereby creating an illusion of reality. Lakshmi Nandan Bora’s Kayakalpa, unlike Narlikar’s novel, does not have any qualms about invoking the Vedic past or Hindu nationalism. The story unfolds at a time unspecified but ostensibly like our own. The narrative, which focuses on creating the elixir of everlasting youth, follows the actions of Dr Anuj Kriplani who starts as an eminent scientist at a US-based pharmaceutical company but steadily moves towards a mystical and mythical practice based on ancient Hindu medical knowledge and the legend of ‘kayakalpa’, the elixir of eternal youth. Unlike Vaman, Kayakalpa does not offer any real break between the past and the present. Although the knowledge of eternal youth is lost to the world marred by corruption, the Hindu sadhus residing in the pristine Himalayas (also an Orientalist stereotype) still have access to this ancient wisdom. Thus there is at once a rupture and a continuity: this knowledge disappears from mainstream western-inflected history yet remains alive in an indigenous tradition. Anuj Kriplani,6 a modernday sage or seeker of wisdom, tries to recover this knowledge and thus bridge these two histories. In Kayakalpa, Bora uses a dominant anti-colonial stance and sanctioned cultural memory embedded in Hindu nationalist discourse to refer to an ancient utopian past of philosophical knowledge, desecrated by invaders and the corruption of people. However, the book does not stop there. The story introduces the semi-immortal sadhus Dharmananda Brahmachari and Amarendra Bhrahmachari, who have access to this elixir of eternal youth and have been alive for several centuries. The appearance of these sadhus not only works as a ‘proof’ of ancient Indian knowledge, but also creates a link between the past and the present. By transmitting and preserving ancient wisdom, they also become repositories of communicative memory. These sadhus are temporal anomalies – relics of the past existing in the present, and by their presence altering the future. They are like Narlikar’s artefact, but unlike the discontinuous temporality of Vaman, the sadhus come out of an unbroken yet suppressed history – a history that, according to Hindu nationalists, has been desecrated by Islam and suffered ‘epistemic’ violence at the hands of the Europeans. Kayakalpa attempts to recover this history. However, like Vaman, Bora’s narrative too highlights the

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dangers of conflating the past with the present. After various trials and errors, Anuj Kriplani decides that manufacturing the elixir of youth is not appropriate for the materialistic modern world – a world that has lost its purity of purpose – and a mongrelised people that has lost touch with its origin and become corrupted by foreign influences. Kayakalpa thus refers to an Indian history that was scientifically, ethically and spiritually superior to the materialist West and the continuity that can be achieved with this past by the right kind of person. Similar romanticising of the past is prevalent in many other authors. In many of Satyajit Ray’s Shanku stories, not only Indian but other ancient civilisations such as Egyptian, Persian, Tibetan and Chinese often provide marvellous artefacts creating a ‘golden age’ aura, but mostly lack an overtly ideological positioning; Padmakumar Muthuswamy’s Ancient Interstellar: An Intergalactic Odyssey (2015) links ancient art and artefacts to knowledge of space travel by older civilisations in the mode of Erich Von Daniken;7 the works of Adrish Bardhan repeatedly invoke the wisdom of the ancient Hindu sages, wisdom that has disappeared in the age of science and needs reclaiming. Such an attitude towards the past creates what Peter Heehs calls ‘Reactionary Orientalism’.8 The aim of this type of Orientalism is to revise (in our case imaginatively) the disfigurations of Indian history performed culturally and physically by Muslim and Christian invaders.9 This type of Orientalism has its origin in the nineteenth-century Hindu nationalism of Sister Nivedita and Aurobindo Ghosh, which supplanted the earlier Anglophilia of the Indian intellectual class with a nationalist discourse of judging India by Indian standards, not by imposed European ones. To find this standard of judgement, however, we must look to the past achievements of the nation. Consequently, this revisionary attitude to history is always and deliberately subversive of the hegemonic western narratives and establishes an alternative historical discourse by reconnecting with a particular national past and partially excising the colonial encounter.

Subaltern Discourses Not all anti-colonial reclamation of the past, though, engage in its glorification. Many works of Indian SF recreate the past to repair the violence done to Indian culture through colonial domination, but without resorting to cultural essentialism. Such works not only challenge colonial dominance, but also oppressions within Indian society, and

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thus de-romanticise the past through a type of Foucauldian ‘countermemory’, directed more towards a political and often disjunctive rereading of the past.10 Works such as Boman Desai’s The Memory of Elephants (1988), Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet-Engine Laugh (2001), Vandana Singh’s ‘Delhi’ (2004) and ‘With Fate Conspire’ (2018) are excellent examples of this type of narrative. These works refer to the past in a manner that undercuts the colonial power as well as other hierarchal structures. We will take a closer look at Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome and Singh’s ‘Delhi’ and ‘With Fate Conspire’, all of which provide actual glimpses into the past, to examine this trend further. As discussed in chapter 2, The Calcutta Chromosome is a narrative that subverts all hegemonic discourses – especially that of western science. This book’s narrative about counter-science, a major part of which transpires in late nineteenth-century British India, is a typical narrative of Foucauldian counter-memory, which, according to Rothberg, ‘strip[s] history and memory of their metaphysical trappings: their investment in a teleological notion of time and a sovereign notion of subjectivity’.11 The Calcutta Chromosome presents the colonial past not only through recorded British archives and a neatly contained anti-colonial cultural discourses but also through dispersed rumours, hints, localised rituals and other forms of communicative memory. In this story, Murugan’s inquiry into the history of Ronald Ross’s malaria research in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Kolkata leads to clues left in actions and accounts of the lower-class population of colonial India that deconstruct the notion of an all-powerful colonial machine subjugating a backward population. Rather, the story hints that Ross’s discovery of the malaria vector was a by-product of an indigenous cult’s attempts to perfect the method of transmigration of human personality from one body to another. Thus memory and history of India in The Calcutta Chromosome are not so much interrupted by the colonial mechanisms, but rather, depending on the positionality of the subject, such history is always discontinuous and disrupted and, in its turn, disruptive. In representing the past, The Calcutta Chromosome also uses older narrative forms such as folklore and ghost stories. These narratives are inherently linked to discontinuous local cultures and a constantly fluid subaltern population, instead of codified and continuous traditions as found in national myths and organised religion. The knowledge that is

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preserved and shared in these non-codified cultures is often chaotic and thus beyond the control of the British or even the indigenous elite. Any attempts to narrate this knowledge by the colonial or neocolonial authorities (such as Ross, Farley, Cunningham, or even Murugan and Antar) are met with mysterious forms of resistance, often ending in the disappearance of such characters or in induction into the group. In a sense, the story suggests that hegemonic-sanctioned history can only scratch the surface. The real stories and knowledge that make up a people are discontinuous and often lie buried. Consequently, the past that is presented in this book is subversive of colonial hegemony, without falling in line with the dominant forms of nationalism. Singh’s short stories ‘Delhi’ and ‘With Fate Conspire’ display similar sentiments. Both stories offer glimpses into multiple temporal nodes of India – some that are recognisable from known historical references and some that are not. Both these stories do not appeal to any nationalist discourse or even sanctioned cultural memory but offer snippets of life led by ordinary and poor people. In ‘Delhi’, Aseem, a semi-homeless yet educated man, roams the streets of Delhi, bumping into its temporal anomalies that provide him brief glimpses into the city’s past and future. In examining the references to the past, the narrative space of Delhi itself becomes very important. Delhi is not only the capital of current India; it has been the seat of power from time immemorial – including that of the British, the Islamic dynasties, the Rajputs and into the mythical times of Mahabharata. Thus Delhi provides an excellent space for examining the Indian past. Interestingly, though, even after making this connection to ancient India, Singh deliberately never depicts the supposedly glorious past. In fact, Aseem mostly encounters people of no consequence in his temporal forays into the city’s past and future. The only time he encounters a person of consequence (Muhammad Shah, ruler of Delhi in the eighteenth century), that person dismisses him as a wraith. However, Aseem wonders if his travels into the past are actually changing history itself, and by changing history, maybe he is also changing the future. ‘Delhi’ shows a strong interaction between dominant cultural memory and subaltern history. While Singh places the narrative within known official historical periods, Aseem’s temporal forays present history as a dialectical process of human action, not some type of transcendental narrative of great men. This is highlighted by Aseem’s actions: at one point in the story his directionless life is given a purpose by Pandit Vidyanath,

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an astrologer, when he is tasked with preventing the alienated youth from committing suicide. The mention of astrology, the traditional yet scientifically debunked method of predicting the future, also plays an interesting role. Aseem doubts the existence of Vidyanath, who is never seen in the story, and the random pictures given to him suggests only tenuous causal connections between events. Yet, through this apparently erroneous and random functioning of an alternative knowledge the story suggests that even a tiny action by people of no consequence in the past may have greater import in the future. In ‘Delhi’, history is a process in which no hegemony is absolute, and the subaltern population creates a discontinuous yet recognisable link across time. ‘With Fate Conspire’ creates a similar discourse about time travel, in which a woman from our future connects with Rassundari Debi (1809–99), one of the most prominent women authors of colonial India. This story takes the hypothesis that interacting with the past affects the future more seriously. In the larger action of the story, scientists try to brush up against various temporal points in the past by using temporally sensitive people to avoid ecological disasters in the future. The main action is located around a steadily drowning Kolkata, the former capital of British India. Gargi, a time-sensitive woman, is employed by elite scientists to focus (using advanced machines) on nineteenthcentury Kolkata for reasons unknown to her. In Gargi’s journeys into past, nineteenth-century India is shown as a place of gender oppression. Rassundari, who was an ordinary housewife, although from an upper caste, taught herself to read and write in secret as an adult and wrote the first autobiography in Bangla.12 Gargi, a semi-literate woman from a lower class, who can see into the past, feels a strange affinity with Rassundari (both are self-taught and have seer-like qualities that let them examine their gendered position in the social hierarchy), and this affinity somehow frees her from self-doubt at the end of the story, when she walks out of the scientific experiment and goes away with the fishermen. In a sense, thus, knowing/interacting with history does change the future, but in unexpected ways. Gargi does not follow the official dictates of the scientists (also mostly women) to focus only on the time and place of Wajid Ali Shah (1822–87), the last Nawab of Awadh (1847–56). Rather she sneaks away to see Rassundari. The difference between the two objects of observation is clear. Wajid Ali Shah represents public history – the fall of Indian kingdoms to the British colonisers. Rassundari, on

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the other hand, represents private history, women’s history – the slow awakening of women’s self-awareness and struggle for basic rights. Interestingly, the story does not present the personal life of Wajid Ali, who was a great patron of the arts, as too despondent even after his fall to the British. In addition to observing Rassundari, Gargi catches Wajid Ali only in his personal moments. She not only becomes influenced by his poetry but wonders if her own utterances (as a disembodied presence) influenced Wajid Ali’s poetic creation. Causality then is not necessarily unidirectional: past, present and future are constantly engaged in complex causal loops. The nebulous personal histories create some form of link across time through art and literature even when disrupted by larger historical movements. Specifically, Rassundari’s struggle enables Gargi to assert herself beyond her class and gender, and Wajid Ali’s calm and philosophical acceptance of his political disaster encourages Gargi to find positives in her apocalyptic world – an outlook if accepted by many may lead to a better future for all. Both ‘Delhi’ and ‘With Fate Conspire’ thus reclaim a past often unseen by traditional history. Such works as those discussed above eschew any romantic notion about a pre-colonial ‘golden age’; rather they subvert dominant historical discourses, whether colonial or indigenous. Similarly to what Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak call ‘subaltern historiography’, this type of SF creates alternative versions of the past that continuously resist codification within both western and Indian elite historiography. Commenting on the history of nationalism in colonial India, Guha mentions that development of this national consciousness is seen by the British as predominantly an achievement of the colonial rulers and establishments, while in the Indian discourses this consciousness is a product of elite Indian personalities – the bourgeoisie and the aristocrats.13 The contribution of the people independent of the elite is completely ignored in this historiography. The function of ‘subaltern historiography’ is to recover these lost voices. The SF texts we have discussed in this section, serve a similar purpose.

A Non-monolithic Antiquity While the second type of SF generally depicts the relatively recent (often the colonial) past, a third and rarer type of SF engages with antiquity, but not from a monolithic and glorified Hindu cultural perspective. Although works such as Satyajit Ray’s Professor Shanku

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stories (Bangla) – ‘Professor Shanku O Egyptio Atanko’ (Professor Shanku and the Egyptian Horror, 1963) and ‘Professor Shanku O Baghdader Bakso’ (Professor Shanku and the Box from Baghdad, 1969) – and Bardhan’s Natboltu Chakra stories (Bangla) – ‘Atlantic Lemuriar Rohoshyo’ (The Mystery of Atlantic Lemuria, 2004) and ‘Atlantiser Sandhane’ (In Search of Atlantis, 2006) – fit into this category, possibly the best example of this type is Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s Generation 14 (2008). This type of work is difficult to bring under a single ideological umbrella: while some works engage in exoticism, others perform critical meditations on history. Satyajit Ray’s Shanku stories have a global reach and regularly show international cooperation and rivalries. Some of these, though, embrace a spirit of exoticism akin to Orientalist adventure narratives set in foreign locations and histories. While Ray’s narratives refer to a non-Indian past, they concentrate on more fantastical elements than on sustained examination of actual history. For example, in ‘Egyptio Atanko’ Shanku visits Egypt as part of an international expedition to the pyramids and is haunted by an ancient curse accompanying a mummy; in ‘Baghdader Bakso’ Shanku finds a historic box that leads him to a cave near Baghdad similar to the legendary cave from the story of ‘Alibaba and Forty Thieves’, in which he discovers an ancient mechanism of movie projection that shows a scene from ancient Sumer or Iraq. In these stories, the past comes to life through references to cultural myths and fantasies, much as in nationalist Indian SF. As discussed in chapter 2, ancient Egyptian myths provide the ‘novum’ in ‘Egyptio Atanko’, although for Shanku, such a mythical reference is not a source of pride, but rather a threat to be conquered. In ‘Baghdader Bakso’, the reference is even murkier. Ancient Iraqi and Sumerian histories are mentioned, but the real impetus is provided by a story from One Thousand and One Nights, the roots of which connect only tenuously to Iraq. These glimpses into the past are similar to the European Orientalist writings of Rider Haggard or Conan Doyle, but only from a different angle.14 In these stories, Baghdad or Egypt’s present are still completely wrapped up in the past – as if time stands still in these exotic realms – exactly like European Orientalist discourses about India and the Orient. Such stories thus replace the European adventurer with an Indian one, but do not completely subvert their ideology. Bardhan’s stories go a step further into prehistoric antiquity or into the realm of legends without an established connection to any specific

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historical or cultural memory. In ‘Atlantic Lemuriar Rohoshyo’, Natboltu Chakra travels back in time to the legendary Atlantis, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Although there is almost no pretence of relating this legend to any established history, the story makes an off-hand connection between the Mesoamerican (900–1168 CE) Toltec civilisation and the Atlanteans. A closer historical connection is attempted in ‘Atlantiser Sandhane’, by linking ancient Greek and Egyptian civilisations as well as the biblical Near East to the legend of Atlantis. Although both Professor Shanku’s and Natboltu Chakra’s adventures try to establish links between India and other ancient civilisations and in a way contrast them with modern western civilisations, in their approach these are little different from European Orientalism except in having an Indian adventurer-scientist instead of a European one. Sarukkai Chabria’s Generation 14, unlike Ray and Bardhan’s work, examines the antiquity of the Indian subcontinent by making more direct references to recorded history. Although the primary stage of the book is set in the twenty-fourth century CE, Sarukkai Chabria’s infusion of Indian history through the protagonist’s visions places Generation 14 deeply within the context of Indian history (see chapter 2 for a more detailed plot summary). The novel exposes the problems of conformism through kaleidoscopic visions of history – visions that range from the earliest Aryan migrations into the Indus valley (c. third–second millennium BCE) to the far future ‘Global Community’ (c. twenty-fourth century CE). The book becomes at once a commentary on the India of the past and the world of the future. Although time here is linear, the history that we see is a conglomeration of cultural flows, not a specific nationalistic tradition. The past in Generation 14 is unique in at least two ways. The visions move back in time in a reverse evolution: opulence in eighteenthcentury Islamic Lucknow in northern India, a medieval southern Hindu Kingdom, a Hindu Varanasi in the eighth or ninth century CE, the Buddhist Ajanta caves in the second century BCE, the Maurya empire of the third century BCE on the point of turning to Buddhism, the migration of the Indo-Aryans into the Sapta Sindhu region and conflict with the indigenous population in the middle of the second millennium BCE. Although these glimpses follow the established historical narrative, they are shown from the perspectives of ordinary people and animals. Thus these visions create an intricate relationship between the great sweep of history and the private lives of insignificant actors. By

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referring to the cultural diversity of India, Generation 14 also debunks the essentialism associated with the ‘golden age’ SF mentioned above. On another level, and as discussed in chapter 2, the main action of the story, as well as many of the visions, creates a certain link with the Jataka stories describing the previous births of the Buddha. This overt link with a Buddhist past coupled with the evolutionary perspective on Indian history strongly challenge the monolithic Hindu and Brahminic view of ancient India so prominent in the nationalist narratives. Consequently this text attempts to deconstruct the dominant cultural narrative of the pure lineage of India championed by the reactionary Orientalists of the present day. Reclamation of the past is thus a major project of Indian SF. As is evident, such reclamation attempts take various forms – competing parallel histories, subaltern histories, linear histories, revised histories, cultural, religious and nationalistic histories. Yet all these attitudes ultimately trace a relationship to the colonial encounter with Europe and its concomitant ideologies of domination. Such treatments of the past dictate the type of present and future Indian SF can imagine.

Other Tomorrows In ‘Progress Versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future’, Jameson argues that the representational nature of SF future is not necessarily its most important quality. Rather a more complex and perhaps more important aspect of this futurity is its power of defamiliarisation and restructuring of the reader’s experiential present.15 Like Suvin, Jameson’s argument emphasises the device of indirection and jarring the reader out of complacency. This defamiliarisation also points to the extrapolative nature of SF futures, which according to Jameson turn the author’s own present into the past of something indeterminate. He then establishes a connection between SF futurity and utopian discourse in their attempts to formulate a radical otherness from the author’s own present. Jameson contends: ‘SF thus enacts and enables a structurally unique “method” for apprehending the present as history, and this is so irrespective of “pessimism” or “optimism” of the imaginary future world which is the pretext for that defamiliarization.’16 Thus, according to Jameson, SF does not keep the future alive but exposes our absolute limit of imagining the temporal other, i.e. an ‘other’ time that will

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emerge out of a contrast to our own, just as our own time emerges from our past. However, although the past as a temporal other already exists through traces and vestiges, to be revised and reimagined; the future exists only in imagination. Applied to Indian SF, Jameson’s ideas highlight several formal and ideological issues. Formally, SF intervenes in the history-oriented postcolonial discourse of India. By engaging readers with an imaginary future, these works restructure readers’ experience of their own present, which is different from an engagement, nostalgic or otherwise, with their past or the immediacy of their present. Uppinder Mehan comments, ‘If we do not imagine our futures, postcolonial peoples risk being condemned to be spoken about and for again.’17 Mehan’s assessment indicates this futuristic orientation of SF and the scope that the genre provides colonised and postcolonial authors in wresting the discourse away from the Euro-American culture machine, and creating visions of the future radically different from the dominant western imagination, exactly as revisionist history seeks to reconfigure the distortions of indigenous histories performed by colonial narratives. Defamiliarisation thus works both as a device for reorienting domestic readers towards their own evolving temporality and for challenging western readers’ monolithic vision of the future. Jameson’s assertion is equally important from an ideological point of view: the future visions in Indian SF expose the ideological limits of the authors. As argued in chapter 1, the development of Indian SF is intrinsically connected to colonial and postcolonial politics and, as discussed above, past, present or future temporal imaginations are mostly situated in relation to western hegemony. While the futures imagined in the nineteenth century are avowedly anti-colonial and often utopian, postcolonial futures are more sombre, a mix of utopian impulses and dystopian anxieties. Peter Hallward argues that while classical colonialism ended in around the 1960s, our ‘colonial present figures as a time of maximum vulnerability and exposure to power’.18 In other words, the neocolonial present in which we exist still needs strong anticolonial discourses rather than complicit and evasively postcolonial ones. I argue that Indian SF often performs such a work in drawing connections between our present and our future. The main impetus of this reframing arises from a shift in India’s status, indicating a movement away from a country trying to negotiate the stigma of colonialism to one emerging as a new world power. This shift performs important

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work in reframing Indian identity in the context of global industrialisation and modernisation. A couple of counteracting cultural forces facilitate this futuristic postcolonial discourse. These works not only straddle the intersection of postcolonial and SF literature; they also imaginatively formulate the interaction of western and Indian traditions and negotiate the balance between indigenism and hybridity. Because western influences have definitively changed the social dynamics of postcolonial India, only a medium that synthesises western and Indian cultural values can effectively imagine the Indian future. SF provides an important site for imagining this national future precisely because of its freedom from a variety of generic constraints associated with realistic or mimetic literature. That is, these SF texts are responses to the hybridisation of Indian culture through the mixing of Indian and western influences and the results of the modernisation of the country through rapid technoscientific development. Thus, in Jameson’s terms, the colonial past and postcolonial/neocolonial present bind the futures in Indian SF. Like the pasts discussed above, these futures also reflect the ideological positions of the authors and their views of Indian history. I discern two broad trends in these various futures imagined in Indian SF: optimistic or eutopian futures, primarily seen in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and dystopian or pessimistic future, prominent since the late 1990s. We will examine both in the following sections.

Hopes As I have argued elsewhere,19 unlike its Euro-American counterparts, which according to scholars such as John Rieder,20 I. F. Clarke21 and David Seed22 are products of imperialism and technological progress, futuristic narratives in India started as anti-colonial and arguably antiindustrial discourses. K. C. Dutt’s ‘A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945’ (‘Journal’ henceforth), the earliest text depicting the future, was written in English and came out in 1835, the same year that Thomas Babington Macaulay published his notorious ‘Minute on Indian Education’. While Macaulay argued for English education in India to create a class of Indians to mimic the British and assist in ruling the empire, K. C. Dutt’s ‘Journal’ imagines a future rebellion against the British rulers.23 Indian SF then, from its very beginning shows an ironic relationship with colonialism. Along with S. C. Dutt’s ‘The Republic of

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Orissa: A Page from the Annals of the 20th Century’ (1845) (‘Orissa’ henceforth), these early depictions of the future also show an oppositional relationship with industrial development. Rather, both these texts emerged out of completely opposite impulses: preventing the British colonisers from exploiting local human resources and reclaiming political agency from the oppressors. Both ‘Journal’ and ‘Orissa’ thus depict future battles against the British to free India from the European invaders. While the future date of ‘Journal’ (set in 1945) is prophetically close to the actual date of Indian independence in 1947, the warfare and technology depicted are no different from those of the author’s own time. However, in a way ‘Journal’ can be considered a prophecy for the first war of Indian independence (also known as the Sepoy Mutiny) in 1857, which was started by Indian soldiers in the British army but, as in the story, was guided by Indian feudal elites and finally failed in the face of a superior British army. ‘Orissa’ similarly describes a future (1916) battle for independence in the state of Orissa, where the doubly oppressed tribes, not the urban educated middle class, start the revolution. The story unfolds against the backdrop of a fictitious Slavery Act passed by the British in 1916 and ends with the slow decline of the British empire in India. Neither of these stories, though, addresses any future technological developments. The futuristic setting is rather a safeguard against British persecution of the dissenting authors, and a millennial vision of an independent India.24 Given the lack of industrial development in India in the nineteenth century, this inattention to technological matters is understandable. In this context, Vincent Smith and Percival Spear in the Oxford History of India mention that although modern transportation such as steamship and railways were introduced since the 1830s and 1840s, real manufacturing industry was absent from India.25 Indian industries were deliberately underdeveloped to promote the monopoly of the East India Company’s machine-made goods from England. Hence it is no wonder that technology-specific speculations were not a primary concern of the authors. Rather, both texts strongly speculate about the political reactions of the Indian population to the oppression of British rule. As mentioned above, the revolution of 1857 happened just over twenty years from the publication of ‘Journal’, while the Santhal Rebellion of 1855, which saw the uprising of the twice-oppressed Santhal tribe in the eastern part of India (not far from Orissa), was only ten years down the line from the publication of ‘Orissa’.26 Both works

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were written at a time when the British were engaged in war on multiple fronts in South Asia, such as the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–6) and the Anglo-Sikh war (1845–6) as well as dealing with a number of mutinies such as the Vellore Mutiny (1806), the Bareilly Revolt (1816) and the Barrackpore Mutiny (1824).27 Specifically, the massacre that took place during the Barrackpore Mutiny not fifty miles from Calcutta only led to public outcry in the British press a year later.28 Thus the speculations in these works had more immediate resonances. As such, it is justifiable to identify these works with soft or social SF, in which the temporal estrangement helps create a radically new social order yet is rooted in the ideological formations of the author’s own time. While these two short early works present a millennial future because of revolutionary impulses stemming from unambiguous anticolonialism, the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia inspired the most sustained utopian future in Indian SF in Rahul Sankrityayan’s Baisvee Sadi (The Twenty-second Century, Hindi, 1924). Because I discuss the specific utopian ideological organisation of space in the next chapter, here I will limit my observations only to the temporal aspect of the text. Alaka Atreya Chudal claims that at the time of writing this book, Sankrityayan’s knowledge of communism was not fully formed, as he had only read about the Russian revolution in newspapers and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks and World Peace (1914) in translation while imprisoned by the British government for political dissent.29 However, even from this brief introduction, communism’s egalitarian aspects and its potential of emancipating the oppressed masses impressed Sankrityayan. Chudal claims that Sankrityayan, who was at the time of writing the book transitioning from his Arya Samaj phase, with its emphasis on Hindu nationalism, to a more free and egalitarian cultural nationalism, finds in communism a third way.30 However, as the setting of the story two hundred years in the future suggests, Sankrityayan realised that his vision of an egalitarian utopia was not possible soon. The first step was to gain independence from the British. Afterwards, ‘Bharat’ (the Sanskrit name of India) can move towards abolishing all other forms of discrimination based on class, caste, region and religion. Only then is national independence complete. This ‘ek jatiyatavad’, or the idea of ‘one nation’ that transcends all other divisions, then leads on to internationalism – the world in the twenty-second century functions under one single democratically chosen world government. Baisvee Sadi repeatedly looks back to the

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Indian past (i.e. the author’s present) and criticises this past for its divisiveness and violence. The book was written at a highly volatile time: India supplied more than a million soldiers and other personnel to fight for the British empire during World War I, and in return the British authorities betrayed the promise of governmental reform with the passing of Rowlatt Act of 1919 and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of over 1,500 Indian demonstrators. These vicious acts resulted in reciprocal violence by Indians as well as Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement. Sankrityayan, who was spending time in jail while composing this book, thus, looks to a distant future to create his utopia that would eschew any political and social oppression, knowing fully well that such reforms were not viable any time soon. Thus, this work rather than being predictive or exhortative, is more utopian and experimental in its temporal dislocation – it excludes all that is prominently negative in the author’s world. However, unlike other communist or socialist utopias like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) or Ivan Yefremov’s Andromeda Nebula (1957), money or class hierarchy is not its primary target. Its main criticism is directed against colonialism, war, casteism, backwardness, selfishness and lack of education of the common Indian that was holding India back from progress. Although such an explicitly utopian or millennial future as seen in these early works is rare in later SF, many mid- and late twentiethcentury texts present a mostly positive attitude to the future: a future in which India features prominently as a world power, an egalitarian world or a future of technological marvels. Such works as Premendra Mitra’s Shurjo Jekhane Neel (Where the Sun is Blue, Bangla, 1988), Narayan Sanyal’s Nakshatraloker Devatma (Gods of the Starry Realm, Bangla, 1976) and Sujatha’s ‘Dilemma’ (translated from the Tamil original, 1993), among other works, present this fascination with technology. Many of these works are fascinated with a future when humanity is finally free of earthly constraints. These texts generally present a united or peaceful world attempting to further humanity’s knowledge and reach into the universe. The central characters are generally Indian or have some sort of Indian origin. Although extraterrestrial challenges crop up in this future, the overall mood in this type of depiction is one of optimism. Most of these works present a linear time in which an independent India achieves a brighter future through advances in science and technology, although most of them are ambiguous about actual historical developments.

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The space race between the USA and USSR during the midtwentieth century, as well as India’s own incipient space programme with Rakesh Sharma becoming the first Indian in space riding a Soviet Soyuz in 1984, provides much of the impetus behind this cosmic future. On the other hand, with the rise of computers and robotics in the 1980s, Indian SF also presents highly efficient and prosperous futures because of new technologies. Such works as Arun Mande’s ‘Ruby’ (translated from Marathi, 1993), Devendra Mewari’s ‘Goodbye Mr Khanna’ (translated from the original Hindi, 1993) and Sujatha’s ‘Dilemma’ focus on the social implications of AI and robots in India. However, this trend closely following the Asimovian philosophy of robotics, presents machines as allies, albeit often uncomfortable. This fascination with robots, which often seeps into comics strips such as Chacha Chaudhary (since 1971) by Pran Kumar Sharma in Hindi and Bantul the Great (since 1965) by Narayan Debnath in Bangla, along with other technological miracles, especially in biology, as can be seen in such stories as Dinesh Chandra Goawami’s ‘Changing Times’ (translated from the Assamese original, 1972), Debabrata Dash’s ‘An Encounter with God’ (translated from Oriya, 1993), Arvind Mishra’s ‘Annadata’ (Food Provider, Hindi, 2013) and S. B. Divya’s Runtime (2016), shows the future, despite its problems, as optimistic or at least, like our present, ambiguous. In other words, technology is a major element of this apparent utopianism: science and technology, in such works, are at once bringers of prosperity and symbolise reclamation of power. However, most of these works do not present a naïve optimism. In the context of 1990s Indian SF, Uppinder Mehan explains, ‘Indian SF … wrestle with the need for technological development, but are wary of one which might come at the cost of neocolonial relationship with the Developed Countries.’31 These works try to find a way to synthesise a future benefiting from scientific development primarily sourced from western nations and Indian social and political values. In other words, this type of optimistic SF future embraces the uneasy hybridity of the postcolonial condition in predicting and speculating about an advanced, if not completely better, future. Such futures, although optimistic, differ from the radical utopianism and political intensities of the earlier works.

Anxieties A different set of texts, however, presents a pessimistic and often nightmarish version of the future. Extrapolating from the negativities

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of their own time – failure of postcolonial utopianism, corruption, global arms race, geopolitical tensions, religious fundamentalism and neocolonial exploitation – these authors often engage in social satire through dystopic representations and cautionary tales or imagine specific socio-political outcomes. Such works as Premendra Mitra’s ‘Manu Dwadosh’ (The Twelfth Manu, Bangla, 1964), Sujatha’s En Iniya Enthira (My Dear Machine, Tamil, 1980), Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest (1997) and Escape (2008), Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet Engine Laugh (2001), Rimi B. Chatterjee’s ‘Signal Red’ (2005), Narlikar’s ‘Death of a Megapolis’ (2005), Anil Menon’s The Beast with Nine Billion Feet (2009) and Sandipan Chattopadhyay’s ‘Mirzafar’ (Bangla, 2018) are excellent examples of pessimistic depictions of the future. Jameson’s comment that the future is contained in the ideologies of the present is equally applicable to these works as it was to the eutopian texts. In discussing the dark futurity in Indian SF, I turn to Richard J. Norton’s categorisation of future-war literature, a subgenre of SF. Norton classifies future-war narratives based on their agendas of speculation in three groups: ‘Cassandrans’, ‘Prometheans’ and ‘Seers’.32 According to this scheme, the Cassandrans ‘call attention to dangers and conditions that if not addressed will harm or even destroy the state’, while the Prometheans hold a positive triumphant attitude.33 The Seers are mostly neutral, extrapolating from current technological and political observations without any professed agenda. Norton hints that all three types of authors have one aspect in common: the primacy of the predictive impulse over thought experimentation or the satirical qualities of SF in general. Applying Norton’s scheme to SF in general, rather than only to war novels, we get an effective tool for understanding the socio-cultural grounds for futuristic narratives. Yet we should employ such schemes cautiously, not only because the categories often bleed into each other, but also because narratives of the future are not necessarily predictive; as we have agreed with Jameson earlier, the future can be a most potent estranging device for satirists and thought experimenters. However, the quality that all these disparate texts share, regardless of agenda, is anxiety of an uncertain future – a failure of the apparent utopian ideals of a postcolonial and post-war Asia proclaimed at Bandung (Indonesia) in 1955, where the newly independent nations of Asia and Africa met to promote a common goal of modernisation and development unencumbered by foreign interference.34 Rather,

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many of these futuristic narratives present a post-Cold War and often a terrorism-age scenario in which not only have the nations discarded their apparent non-aligned position of the mid-twentieth century and outgrown Cold War allegiances; they have exposed the age-old rifts that the anti-western sentiments of the Bandung Conference masked. Consequently, most pessimistic futures in Indian SF display a strong ‘Cassandran’ tendency, often mixed with satirical qualities. Ampiah rightly claims that the events leading up to Bandung already pointed to existing problems. With reference to the Colombo Conference of 1954, Ampiah asserts that ‘the meeting in Colombo exposed the rifts within the group: India and Pakistan disagreed over Kashmir and US economic assistance; India and Indonesia were ideologically divorced from Ceylon and Pakistan, and Burma hovered between the two entities.’35 Bandung also saw the end of Sino-Indian friendship (due to perceived geopolitical prestige issues) and the forging of a China–Pakistan alliance.36 However, the anti-western sentiment that elicited suspicion and discomfort from the UK and US, and often backing from the Soviet Union, laid the foundation for later political developments in the region. From a professed non-aligned position in the 1950s, India, with its socialist economic policies, slowly drifted towards the Soviet camp, although still eschewing communism and maintaining a practically neutral position in global conflicts. In addition to three major wars (1947, 1965 and 1971) with Pakistan, several other factors contributed to this shift: US backing of Pakistan from 1954, formation of a Pakistan–China alliance in the 1960s, the war with China (1962) and finally US support for Pakistani genocide in Bangladesh (1971, then East Pakistan) firmly placed India in the Soviet camp between 1971 and 1990.37 Although liberalisation of the economy in the 1990s attracted western support, because of India’s nuclear programme (last testing in 1998) and refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) at US insistence, India still maintained a somewhat antagonistic relationship with the West (the US in particular) into the early 2000s. However, since the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the beginning of the War on Terror, India and the West, specifically the US, have drawn closer, pulled by similar economic and political concerns. These geopolitical equations and resultant anxieties underlie the pessimistic futures in Indian SF. Mitra’s ‘Manu Dwadosh’ and ‘Piprey Puran’ (Annals of the Ants, Bangla, 1931), both set in the far future,

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reflect on fears of global warfare, nuclear apocalypse and biological mutations, while Chatterjee’s Signal Red, Joshi’s The Last Jet-Engine Laugh and Vivek Ahuja’s Chimera (2013) caution about war and ideological domination resulting from geopolitical rivalries. In addition to shifting geopolitical alliances, neocolonial exploitation of the natural and human resources of India, often leading to environmental catastrophes, also provide the impetus for these bleak futures. I will take a closer look at Joshi’s The Last Jet-Engine Laugh (Laugh henceforth) in discerning this pattern of dark political vision. Joshi’s novel presents a complicated social, historical and political scenario framing a future-war.38 Tracking the life of Paresh Bhatt, an ageing photographer, this book presents dystopic, overcrowded, toxic, corporation-dominated and lawless urban landscapes ruled by violent gangs rather than any functioning government. Located primarily in India, Laugh places the tendency of violence within Indian history and tradition, rather than ascribing it solely to western colonialism or menacing external forces. The book further highlights the volatile military situation of South Asia, emphasising the regional wars as both a cause and an effect of the dystopian scenario. Laugh thus displays a substantial predictive or ‘Cassandran’ aspect as well as a satirical one. In the future of Laugh, both India and Pakistan have been disarmed of their nuclear weapons because of reciprocal nuclear strikes. Although without any real-world referent, mention of a terrorist nuclear attack on Bombay (now Mumbai) is an oblique allusion to the 1993 Bombay Stock Exchange bombing, the origins of which were traced back to Pakistan. The future war in 2030 also has its echoes in the past: The India–Pakistan wars of 1947, 1965 and 1971 are mentioned in the novel, and the book itself is published after the fourth conflict in 1999. Laugh further highlights India’s uneasy relationship with China, when it shows a three-way conflict between India, China and Pakistan in 2007 (a year before a real-world Pakistani-backed massive terror attack in Mumbai in 2008). Joshi moreover puts the West on a murky moral ground through its self-serving power politics and subservience to global capitalism. In the story, the Saudi–Pakistani alliance is technologically supported by the US, which also destroys an Indian space station during the war in 2030; and although not spelled out in the book, grouping Saudi Arabia with Pakistan together while mentioning their attempts to capture newly explored oil fields in Gujarat alludes to well-known American oil interests in the Middle East. Furthermore,

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the book’s depiction of pervading terrorist threats and systematic racial profiling in Europe resulting from western meddling in the Middle East and North Africa destroys the pretence to any western moral superiority. The same is true of the role played by Japanese corporations, the other capitalist power in the book. Laugh, hence, not only critiques contemporary global politics, but arguably uses a Cassandran approach in presenting the future. At a different level, Laugh indicts India’s internal disharmonies for future conflicts. Joshi leaves unmistakable hints of volatile communal tensions with repeated yet oblique references to riots, Islamic terrorism and Hindu fundamentalism. In doing so, Joshi links the tradition of violence and nationalism through uncorroborated anecdotes about the Indian nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose, who led an armed rebellion against the British in 1944 and disappeared mysteriously at the end of World War II. Bose’s ideology, which in many respects was dictatorial, provides a mythical subtext that informs all other violence depicted in this book.39 References to the demon-slaying warrior goddess, Durga, whom the nationalists worshipped, further underscore the association between violence and nationalism. In the novel, Durga images are painted on fighter jets of the all-female squadron raiding Pakistan, the ‘modern day demon’. Even the use of women, their bodies almost fused to the multi-armed machines, for war contributes to this association. These linkages expose the ideologies of domination propping up Indian nationalism. Thus, in Laugh, future wars are not presented as sudden catastrophes instigated by outside forces, but as continuations of historical strife in the region over centuries, in which international politics is as much culpable as socio-cultural disharmonies inside the nations. Laugh is, then, acutely aware of its temporality: the future is already embedded within the past. Only the action in the present can make any difference. Technology creates another type of dark future vision, either through the fear of machines, or through neocolonial control of the human and natural resources of India. In this future, the figure of the posthuman and biotechnological imagery play a vital role.40 Rather than performing a liberating function as in western SF, such images of technologised flesh and engineered biology indicate the crushing power of mechanically aided global capitalism that attempts to patent indigenous knowledge and colonise human bodies and other organic resources. This has been an area of concern in Indian theoretical

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and fictional writing of the last two decades, even though scholars such as Jill Didur suggest that such opposition to posthumanism is a misplaced distrust of Enlightenment rationalism and its humanist legacy.41 While bio-ethicist and activist Vandana Shiva has been one of the biggest detractors of bioprospecting by western multinationals, authors such as Anil Menon, Manjula Padmanabhan and Sukanya Datta have challenged such biotechnological control for corporate greed in SF form: they interrogate such scenarios in which human and animal bodies are assembled and disassembled as commodities, fused with machines at will, or the human and plant resources of India are genetically manipulated for profit maximisation (especially in the context of such seed giants of questionable motive as Monsanto and Syngenta). Although the term ‘bioviolence’ is mostly associated with terrorism using biological agents, such as toxins and pathogens, following Shiva’s logic the term can as well be used for the domination of the developing world’s biological resources through coercive methods by state and non-state agents, because such exploitation ultimately leads to economic and biological devastation in the abused societies, which is in many respects comparable to direct acts of violence.42 Hence, the literary images derived from such scientific endeavours – e.g. the technologically altered/enhanced bodies and scientifically modified nature/vegetation – remain more negative in the context of the exploited Third World than in that of the post-industrial West. In addition to Laugh, such works as Padmanabhan’s Harvest and Menon’s The Beast with Nine Billion Feet (Beast henceforth) display this tendency. The rapid intrusion of western technology into Indian society in the last few decades of the twentieth century may be considered as the originator of such despair and ambiguity as seen in these texts. Like Mehan above, Suchitra Mathur highlights the corrosive effects of western techno-science when applied to the Third World context, and the unease with which Indian SF deals with such themes. Although she concedes the possibility of using such technological imagery in a positive way in SF, especially in the colonial feminist context, she is sceptical about the cyborg imagery in the manner of western cyberfeminism providing an applicable mode of resistance for postcolonial Indian society. Both Mehan and Mathur seem to agree that an optimistic mapping of the future India in SF form entails moving away from western framing, both humanistic and posthumanistic.

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The exploitative nature of capitalist and neocolonial forces is also often expressed through the tropes of natural disasters in the trend of cli-fi or environmental SF. These concerns are often wound up with the previously mentioned issues of resource extraction and war. Thus both Laugh and Harvest take place in a severely polluted future. Similarly, Mitra’s ‘Manu Dwadosh’, Kenneth Doyle’s ‘Rain’ (1993), Padmanabhan’s Escape and S. B. Divya’s ‘Microbiota and the Masses: A Love Story’ (2017) present degradation of the environment due to nuclear warfare, pollution and/or resource extraction, and recently (August 2018) the SF webzine Kalpabishwa dedicated a whole issue to cli-fi depicting a future suffering from or coping with substantial climate changes. Evidently the futures depicted in these SF texts reflect the ideologies of present – political, economic and environmental hopes and anxieties – through the estranging device of futurity. While anticolonial and revolutionary ideologies inspire utopian futures, a faith in techno-scientific developments also leads to hopeful tomorrows. Yet, this same techno-science as an engine of capitalism and neocolonialism leads to bleak predictions, as do current global and Indian political trends. These futuristic texts, like their historical counterparts, use shifting temporalities to explore the issues of the moment. As with the past, most of these futures also manifest themselves in terms of the relationship between India and the other, mostly the West. Although sometimes Indian values/elements are placed in opposition to nonIndian/western values/elements, a synthesis or hybridity of multiple traditions is more dominant in these various futures. These cultural interactions are perhaps even more prominent in the forking paths of the present that Indian SF regularly depicts.

The Present, Forking Paths and Non-linear Temporalities Graham Huggan argues that the ‘post’ in postcolonialism may be a misnomer, because we still live in a colonial present, only different from the high colonialism of the eighteenth and nineteenth century.43 This colonial present emerges from within the ‘continuing global modernity’.44 According to Huggan, this colonial present is both a historical and a geographical phenomenon: it is located within the imagined geographical locations often coinciding with the places historically dominated by European colonialism, but now also placed within the

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discourses of global capital and the military-industrial complex in the era of open markets and War on Terror.45 In other words, Huggan points to the ascendancy of the West/Global North over the non-West/Global South since the middle of the twentieth century and the liberal imperial policies of the US. However as has been discussed earlier, the USSR between 1945 and 1991 and Russia since then, and China since the end of the twentieth century also have exerted considerable influence over this colonial present. This evolving colonial present, thus, defines the above-mentioned futures of India, a country drifting among these various shores of global hegemony. This colonial present is also apparent in the surprisingly large number of SF plots set in an indeterminate present mostly as inverted or alternative power relations between India and the West, or through technological outgrowths of the neocolonial world order. The texts that do not explicitly show the past or the future, can be assumed to be set in the author’s present. However, the ‘novum’ and ‘estrangement effect’ that separate these works from realistic literature generally exist in discontinuous technological developments or parallel time streams, which mark these various presents as alternative to the author’s experiential one: a Borgesian forking path that develops possibilities already existing within real historical moments. Three different trends are prominent in SF set in the author’s present: technological marvels and their effects on contemporary society; reversal of power relations between India and the West; and alternative temporal possibilities.

Marvels of Technology This is perhaps the simplest and the most dominant trend. Most works under this rubric function on some type of technological innovation that challenges the limits of contemporary society. These works are not much different from the technological futures we discussed above, other than in their examination of the immediate society – that is, these works introduce one variable in their thought experiments rather than inventing a whole new social dynamic. Such works as R. N. Sharma’s ‘The Paper and Cardboard Clothiers’ (1994) and Mukhopadhyay’s Patalghar (The Underground Chamber, Bangla, 1996) introduce alien technology as well as human innovation into their contemporary world as a way of questioning the limits of human knowledge of the universe, while Hemlal Dutta’s ‘Rahasya’ (Mystery, Bangla,1882), Goswami’s

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‘Portable Smell Absorber’ (translated from Assamese, 1974) and Narlikar’s ‘The Rare Idol of Ganesha’ (translated from Marathi, 1983) use human scientific innovation to examine the social and moral fabric of their contemporary society. The Assamese author Goswami’s works serve as excellent examples for our purpose. His ‘Bedroom Energy’ (1985) is at once an indictment of the bureaucracy of the Indian scientific establishment and a satire on the gender hierarchy in the system. In this story, a married female scientist develops a method for collecting bio-energy generated through sexual excitement, demonstrates her methods through flirtatious engagement with the male protagonist, a government official in charge of approving new research projects in the energy sector, and succeeds in getting her project funded. The technological aspect of the story is an effective estrangement device that sets it apart from our known twentieth-century reality: no device yet exists that can power lightbulbs by collecting a person’s sexual excitement. However, every other aspect of the story corresponds to the creaking bureaucratic machinery that barely supports the Indian scientific establishment. Similarly the gender roles presented in this narrative expose the precarious position of women in the sciences: they are often overlooked in favour of their male colleagues and subjected to sexual harassment. Only this remarkable device for capturing sexual energy and its clever deployment ensures that this woman receives the treatment all scientific minds deserve. Somewhat similarly, ‘Portable Smell Absorber’ exposes the objectification of women in the scientific establishment through the failure of a male scientist’s quest to capture the scent of his female student by means of a new gadget. The machine instead starts capturing the smell of all things in the vicinity, pleasant or foul, leading to the frustrated scientist’s abandonment and destruction of the device. Here too technology provides the forking from our own known time (remote smell collectors are still not a reality), while keeping everything as close to our experience as possible – objectification of women, waste of resources and putting personal agendas before social needs. In both works, scientific discovery not only provides estrangement but also indicates a desire for technological advance. While in many of these works a desire for technological independence for Indian society underlies the surface actions, the meddling of foreign elements projects an anxiety about the technological superiority of the outsiders. This anxiety is perhaps best projected in one of

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the earliest Indian SF texts written during British colonial rule – Hemlal Dutta’s ‘Rahasya’. Located in the author’s contemporary London and a nearby English village, the short story tells of the Indian protagonist’s inadvertent harassment by his eccentric British engineer friend’s gadgets. The estrangement operates at two levels. First, the narrative space is removed from colonial Bengal (the author’s residence) to imperial Britain; and second, the new technology – automated cleaning devices, self-opening gates, home security and intercoms – indicates that this present is not our present despite all the trappings of fin-desiècle England. Thus spatial removal suggests a temporal forking: equality is not achieved because of the technological backwardness of the Indian space. The new and disruptive technology here is directly connected to the British, who have harassed the Indian population mostly because of their superior technology. Similarly, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s Bhuture Ghori creates a link between foreigners, aliens and disruptive technology. Published in 1984 this title presents a small town in India caught between the Hindu nationalism of a Tantric and a Vaishnava priest and the material science of an eccentric British inventor. Needless to say, the British inventor’s flying motor-cycle and other strange gadgets are seen by the residents of the town as disruptive. However, this disruptive European science is trumped by the battle between the two aliens and their superior machinery, which at one point threatens the existence of the whole town. Evidently, this text displays multiple layers of foreignness of technology and its dangers to the fabric of Indian society. The traditional small town is first subjected to the uncouth innovations of the British – the gadgets that have no purpose for the common people, gadgets both out of time and place. Second, the spooky watch emerges as an alien artefact (an AI), which again has no connection with the contemporary reality of small-town India. The device’s presence not only physically threatens the town, but also destabilises the traditional religious belief of the people, while making atheists believe in ghosts. Consequently such possibilities take the little Indian town out of our ordinary present to a parallel realm.

Role Reversals Technology, though, does not always appear as foreign, or threatening, or even as a commentary on Indian society. Indigenous technology often plays a role in reversing power relations between Indian and western characters. Often overlapping with nationalist historical and

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futuristic discourses, science and technology become part of a parallel fictional world in which Indian characters have the upper hand over European and American scientists. Ray’s Shanku stories, which take place in his contemporary world, sometime between the 1940s and 1970s, always show the Indian inventor as superior to his European colleagues and foes. He solves mysteries not only involving aliens and ancient artefacts, but also takes on dangerous minds (mostly Europeans), and wins because of his intelligence and his peerless gadgets – the annihilin pistol (particle disintegrator), the miracurall tablet (cure for all illness), the snuff gun etc. Such devices thus not only indicate a departure from the author’s known reality, but also give free rein to the fantasy of a world in which Indian science and technology are superior to the West’s. A similar attitude is also visible in many other works, including Bardhan’s Natboltu Chakra stories, and Narlikar’s ‘The Rare Idol of Ganesha’ and ‘The Ice Age Cometh’ (1993). Premendra Mitra’s Ghanada stories (1945–88) invert this power relationship in another interesting way. Most of the adventures of Ghanada are hard SF based on some clearly formulated scientific principles. In Mitra’s own words, these stories are written in the form of ‘tall tales’. Ghanada, who is a typical unheroic urban Bengali man, narrates the stories of his ‘adventures’ to a group of young hostel residents of mid-century Kolkata who enjoy them through their ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. These adventures foreground Ghanada’s superiority over adversaries from the western world. The narrative structure here works as a metafictional device indicating the fictionality of all discourses: every story begins in the common room of a men’s hostel in contemporary Kolkata as a tall tale told by Ghanada. The estrangement, however, becomes radical once we enter the universe of Ghanada’s tale. This ploy puts the stories on a fine balance between cognitive, if they are true, and wholly fantastic, if they are lies. Mitra thus bends the genre in a subtle yet definite manner. Mitra explicitly commented that he created a hero for his SF who is completely antithetical to the western hero – someone who apparently is more efficient with his tongue than his body. The fact that many western (British, German etc.) foes submit to Ghanada’s intelligence indicate the subversion of Mitra’s contemporary world order – the Third World protagonist always coming out on top. This ploy also undercuts the heroic quality of SF by treating it merely as the product of a fertile imagination. Following in the footsteps of Mitra, Nilagrib Singha’s adventures of Dharmadas Karmakar (Bangla,

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since 1995) employ similar subversion of the contemporary established world order. Samit Basu’s Indian superhero books Turbulence (2012) and Resistance (2014) also play similar tricks by turning the tables on the West when a group of Indian superheroes and supervillains invade London to battle for influence. The inversion of power relations between Indian characters and characters from Europe and America thus creates an alternative version of the present in these works, wherein the fantasy of India’s ascendancy is realised in the author’s own time, rather than in the future or in the distant past.

There’s Always More Time Sometimes, though, time itself is out of joint, even though the primary narratives are set in the author’s own present. Time often brushes up against alternative temporalities – that is, fully realised possibilities that did not materialise in our own time stream, or experiences happening in realms in which the conception of time and space is radically different from our own. In other words, in these narratives the story takes off from the author’s present, and through some spectacular and/or mysterious phenomenon ushers in radical estrangement which alters the temporal experience of the protagonist, but neither progressing to the future nor regressing to the past in a straight line. Such narratives as Vandana Singh’s ‘Tetrahedron’ (2008), ‘Infinities’ (2008) and ‘Ambiguity Machines’ (2017), Sanjay Havanur’s ‘The Lift’ (1993) and Narlikar’s ‘The Adventure’ (1986) are wonderful examples of SF playing with the very fabric of time and space. ‘The Adventure’ perhaps best epitomises a discourse on parallel historical and political possibilities of India as a nation. The story starts in 1986 in Narlikar’s contemporary Maharashtra. In this story, Professor Gangadharpant, after chairing an academic convention and colliding with a truck, is suddenly transported into an alternative version of the state. In this universe the British never took over the whole country but came to a deal with the still prevailing Mughal empire which is propped up by Maratha support. He learns that the course of history changed during a crucial battle between the Marathas and the Afghans in 1761 at Panipat, a battle that was crucial for future British domination of the Indian subcontinent in our historical reality. Thus the Mumbai which Gangadharpant encounters is a possible present that never occurred in our time stream, but always exists in the realm of possibilities. When

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he returns to our known present, he is told by his scientist friend that he did not see the past or the future, but a present that never materialised. A clear nationalist sentiment is visible in this speculation about a present in which India emerges, if not victorious, at least as more dignified than the country that suffered almost three hundred years under the British yoke. Although, as Salik Shah argues, influences of Narlikar are visible in Vandana Singh’s handling of alternative time streams in many of her works, a distinct postnationalist sensibility separates her stories from Narlikar’s.46 Singh’s ‘Ambiguity Machines’ explores conceptual possibilities of other places and other times in a more global context. This story, which spans continents, jumps forward and backward in time for her multi-ethnic protagonists (a Mongolian engineer, an Italian mathematician and a Malian archaeologist), completely blurs the boundaries between real and conceptual time and the many ways to experience it. Yet, for our purposes, her ‘Tetrahedron’ is even more useful. Set in Singh’s contemporary Delhi, in this story the mundane and stifled life of Maya, a girl from a conservative middle-class family, is suddenly transformed with the arrival of a huge alien tetrahedron-shaped object in the middle of the city. The object, which she enters along with other marginal characters takes her on a multidimensional journey, beyond the bounds of an oppressive society. Here our experiential present is radically estranged by the arrival of this multidimensional mysterious object, which then transports the reader and the characters into realms beyond time and space, thus also bifurcating the present from our known linear time. By playing with non-linear time, Singh rejects the alienations in society created by social oppression, not only through colonial or neocolonial domination, but rather through traditional Indian norms – social and familial obligations, economic limitations and oppressive gender roles. By journeying inside the tetrahedron Maya escapes an arranged marriage, a stagnant career and stunted friendships. These works thus create parallel presents that actually project a desire for a different future.

Conclusion Temporal alterity in Indian SF takes many guises and serves multiple purposes. As Uppinder Mehan points out, this ‘out of joint’ time provides

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an opportunity for authors to imagine their society and extrapolate to its future without repeating the standardised western imagery – i.e.  to speak for themselves instead of being spoken for. In such instances temporal alterity becomes a device of self-assertion, even when such futures are painted with dark dystopian shades: utopian discourses necessarily function on the axes of radically different time and space. Reimagining the past displays a similar tendency of subversion of western ideological representations. The memories and histories that are subjugated to colonial history erupt onto the surface through radically different representation of the past. While this anti-western position is explicit in the works exhibiting nationalist qualities, many other works call into question the prevailing internal social hierarchies. Like the past and the future, the alternative presents of Indian SF display this tension between an established social order and forces of subversion – which is often, although not always, expressed in the form of western hegemony and Indian subversion. It will not be wrong to say that with certain exceptions, the temporal imagination in Indian SF deliberately exposes the process by which alterity can develop on an Indian instead of a dominant western model, often not only involving parallel time streams or a cyclical view of time. This examination of temporal imagination must now move towards the spatial dimension, where the narrative action must unfold as a function of narrative time.

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4

Other Spaces: Utopian Discourses and Non‑expansionist Journeys

I begin this chapter with a long quotation from Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s ‘Republic of Orissa’ (1845). Dutt’s narrative, the second earliest ‘future history’ in India, begins thus: The Republic of Orissa was comprised, till a recent period, within the dominion of the British Crown, and extended from the confines of Bengal to the north, to those of the Circars on the south. Berar formed its western boundary, and the Bay of Bengal washed its east. But the boundaries of the new republic have been, by an Act of its Congress, passed in the year of Christ 1925, extended in western and southern direction over a considerable portion of Berar, and the whole of the Circars. On the east, also, it has increased its empire over the alluvian [sic] land left by the retreating waters of the sea.1 Space, as is plainly visible from these opening lines, is as important for the author as time in its role in situating SF: colonial and postcolonial as well as eutopian and dystopian space. As is apparent in these lines from ‘Orissa’, Dutt plots his story on the axes of futurity of time and real Indian landscape. The cartographical details of the imaginary future republic place it on the very real map of India, where the present-day state of Orissa is located. However, this real cartographical placement opens various ideological and imaginary spatial formations that will be central to our discussion in this chapter. By describing Orissa as a former dominion of the British empire, Dutt ascribes to it both colonial and postcolonial attributes: colonial, because it is in the author’s real world still a colony; postcolonial, because in the text Orissa has already achieved its freedom. Consequently, time and space here are inextricably entwined with the actors in the ideological representation within the narrative. Human actions in conjunction with the arrow of time inscribe colonial and postcolonial designations on the real space of Orissa.

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In a similar manner, such ideological formations imply a larger politics of space: that of imaginary spaces or of utopian (no-place) imagination. Both eutopias (good places) and dystopias (bad places), collectively referred to here as utopias, are, after all, results of ideological social formations within a definite physical or imaginary space that is separated from the reader by physical and/or temporal distance(s). In S. C. Dutt’s narrative, Orissa changes from a dystopian space of repression and slavery to what Fredric Jameson describes as a ‘Utopian enclave’, ‘an imaginary enclave within real social space’.2 In this case, Orissa is an imaginary space of political liberty for the Indian people, surrounded by real space of colonial subservience. Moreover, in ‘Orissa’ both temporal and spatial boundaries aid this utopian formation. On the one hand, in the story the liberated Republic of Orissa lies seventy years in the future (in 1916); on the other, the Republic of Orissa is separated from the rest of the British Indian dominion by actual physical boundaries mentioned above. This space then is as important in the narration of utopian formations as are the ideologies, the actors and the temporal processes. Without such a specific space, the narrative of utopian imagination is not sustainable. Critics such as Robert Tally3 and Phillip Wegner4 claim that space is not merely a background for temporal action, but an important ordering principle worth examining for its own sake. I want to extend this argument and claim that space is an extremely important component for SF, a narrative primarily about ‘imaginary communities’, because representation of narrative space in SF indicates the author’s selfpositioning regarding real spaces and their interrelationships. Although this is true of all fictional work, the ideology of spatial representation itself becomes a focal point in SF and fantasy in a more intense way than in realistic fiction. The colonial and postcolonial contexts of Indian SF make these ideological formations of space even more contested: claiming one’s own space, controlling someone else’s space, losing one’s space or replicating a space somewhere else. Jameson claims, ‘even a no-place must be put together out of already existing representations. Indeed, the act of combination and the raw materials thereby combined themselves constitute the ideological message.’5 Indian SF, which consciously situates itself in relation to western narratives (fictional or not), is always highly concerned about its representation of space and the relationship that this imaginary representation has to its ‘raw materials’. In other words, Indian SF constructs its narrative

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spaces in such ways as to expose the correlation to western ideological formations of Indian and global spaces, either through resistance or self-reflection. Indian SF, thus, participates in countering western hegemonic representational politics, and hence can be read against both representation of India in western narratives as well as representation of the West itself. However, such representation is not only about static spaces, or about ‘Utopian enclaves’ or a ‘pocket of stasis’.6 Like all other traditions, Indian SF is concerned about movements across space or journeys – either on earth or outside it. These journeys at their core, though, are not very different from the representation of space as place of action or narrative locale. After all, both are exercises in cartography – one static and the other dynamic. As Jameson explains, Book Two of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), which describes the state of Utopia, is a ‘travel narrative … [that] sets the generic agenda’.7 Thus journeys, those of exploration and of expansion, inextricably associated with the colonial agendas of Europe, are also part of the ideological representation of space in western travel narratives (real and fictional) of every kind. As with static space, the representational politics of dynamic space in Indian SF are also primarily linked with European colonialism and the author’s ideological relationship with the ‘raw material’, although indigenous epic journeys also play a role. In the following pages, I examine these two aspects of space in Indian SF – static space or locale of narrative, and dynamic space or travel.

Indian SF and Utopian Discourses As we have seen in previous chapters, Indian SF repeatedly foregrounds narrative space as a locus of contention. Sometime this struggle focuses on utopian impulses arising out of anti-colonialism, gender equality or other anti-oppressive agendas, and at other times the emphasis shifts towards dystopian elements engendered by corruption of the state, global capitalism and neocolonial agendas, misogyny and other ideologies of domination. Such ideological formations, as argued earlier, expose the relationship of the text to its raw materials. Because many works of Indian SF are set within the real geographical boundaries of India, their ideological underpinnings often become transparent. That is, the representational methods of

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these works directly show the authors’ ideologies regarding India (e.g. ‘Orissa’ presents an anti-colonial stance). The works that do not use the real space of India present a more complex scenario (e.g. any work set on a different planet). Tom Moylan in Demand the Impossible (1986),8 which examines western SF and utopian traditions, and Ralph Pordzik in The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia (2001),9 which studies non-western texts, highlight the problems of absolute valuation along the lines of negativity and positivity while discussing spatial representations. Moylan records the transformation of a hopeful early utopian imagination, through Marxist and Blochian revolutionary ideas in the mid-nineteenth century, into the more critical and subdued optimism of mid-twentieth-century utopias in the era of global capitalism. Moylan argues that in the late twentieth century, a more appropriate form of ideological exploration exists in the Foucauldian ‘heterotopic’ mode of spatiality that is non-committal towards either negative or positive representation of space. This heterotopic position is the result of the post-World War II spread of global capitalism and a co-option of the utopian imagination into its consumerist ideology.10 Such works as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and Samuel Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984) exemplify this heterotopic imagination. Moylan reinforces this same point in Scraps of the Untainted Sky (2000), in which he presents ‘critical dystopia’ as a correlative term of critical utopia.11 In a similar vein, Pordzik argues that in the case of postcolonial utopian writing, the concept of heterotopia is even more relevant; because of the inherent blurring of generic qualities and ideological bleeding following the postmodern questioning of grand narratives, totalising notions of textual and ideological uniformity are unsustainable. Pordzik explains: Heterotopia represents the site of conflict where a wide range of discourses – in Foucault’s terms, the ‘real places’ of life within culture – can be negotiated and tested against the backdrop of the strictly hierarchised closed-system model that usually informs our notion of static uniformity of utopian or dystopian societies. Although the ensemble of different voices and perspectives implied in the textual space is derived from a given multitude of cultural experiences, it is organised in such a way as to resist every attempt to gloss over its heterogeneity

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with reference to a single source of authorization outside of the text.12 According to Pordzik, the utopian discourses in the ‘new English literatures’ from postcolonial spaces (although his definition of ‘postcolonial space’ is contestable), function more along this line of heterotopia. It seems profitable to take both Moylan’s and Pordzik’s accounts of utopian and heterotopian discourses into consideration: they formulate effective models for analysing space in SF. Still, we need to be cautious of these models, because of their inherent spatio-temporal orientations. While Moylan provides a broader historical perspective, his discussion is limited only to western works. Conversely, Pordzik’s objects of study come from non-western spaces, but his historical scope is limited to the second half of the twentieth century. Although we need to be cautious in applying these ideas to Indian SF, we do gain some useful insights. I use both Moylan’s and Pordzik’s ideas in reading Indian SF insofar as they yield useful insights – especially into the ‘critical’ and heterotopic nature of the postcolonial texts and the more revolutionary utopian qualities of the nineteenth-century works. I distinguish three major categories in which Indian SF uses space: eutopian or positive representation, dystopian or negative representation; and background, i.e. works in which ideological position regarding space is not emphasised.

Eutopias As ‘Orissa’ demonstrates, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spatial discourses generally tend to be positive, while in the second half of the twentieth century, the representations become more dystopic. It is curious in the sense that the eutopian impulse is stronger in the colonised space, while the postcolonial state fosters a dystopian turn. Perhaps colonial conditions call for a revolutionary politics, which inherently invokes a eutopian ideology. Jameson argues that although political theories/manifestos and utopias exist at different points on the semiotic square as regards to their coherent practicability, the desire for a holistic change in the social space is inherent in both.13 In such colonial texts as K. C. Dutt’s ‘A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945’ (1835), S. C. Dutt’s ‘Orissa’, Begum Rokeya’s Sultana’s Dream (1905) and Rahul Sankrityayan’s Baisvee Sadi (The Twenty-second Century, Hindi, 1924) a comprehensive and revolutionary ideological

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representation of space is plainly visible, a space that in reality was also being subjected to revolutionary or anti-colonial political actions. ‘Orissa’ has been discussed in detail above, and perhaps provides the best example of such ideological representation of space in early Indian SF. Its precursor, K. C. Dutt’s ‘Journal’ also represents India as a space for ideological control – a failed rebellion by native elites and soldiers. In this case, Calcutta, the capital of British India, is the place of contention and the specific spaces mentioned, such as Esplanade and Fort William, are symbols of the colonial power which the patriots seek to control. Thus K. C. Dutt’s fictional account only thinly veils its relationship with its raw material: Indian space under British rule needs to be freed. As discussed in chapter 3, the temporal boundary of 110 years (the action takes place in 1945) is needed for this space, if for a brief instance, to achieve this utopian potential. Begum Rokeya’s Sultana’s Dream (Dream henceforth) and Sankrityayan’s Baisvee Sadi, however, present classical utopian formations, and probably remain two of the most influential utopian works in India. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Dream situates its narrative within the closed space of Ladyland, which the narrator, Sultana, reaches in her dream. Although the SF status of this story can be questioned because of the ‘dream vehicle’, the main narrative itself follows the programmatic utopian tradition, complete with a tour, a benevolent guide, a back-story and even discussions of scientific marvels such as flying cars, solar-powered weapons and water balloons. The most important aspect for our discussion is, perhaps, the focus of this narrative on the maintenance of political control over the enclave of Ladyland, which has reversed gender roles and yielded all social power to women. The result is peace and stability in society, the advance of science and economic development. In other words, the reversal of gender roles has resulted in a eutopia for women, and for men too, who have adapted to the new ways. The relationship of this fictional space of Ladyland with its raw material of India, where Sultana fell asleep, is undoubtedly oppositional: Rokeya rejects the objectified and disenfranchised status of tradition-bound women as devices of patriarchy that the feudal-colonial state perpetuates. The fictional space in Dream is a eutopian space from which the negative reality of gender oppression has been excised. This device of gender reversal/matriarchal ideology predominates in later feminist works such as Suniti Namjoshi’s The Mothers of Maya Diip (1989) and even Vandana Singh’s Distances

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(2008), which present closed utopian enclaves or islands for their ideological formations. Just as Rokeya’s narrative is a response to the gendered nature of spatial organisation in a patriarchal India, Sankrityayan’s Baisvee Sadi presents a political reorganisation of India in the socialist mode. Influenced by the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, this story narrates the experiences of Vishvabandhu, who falls asleep in a Himalayan cave in 1924 and wakes up in 2124. Like Edward Bellamy’s famous socialist utopian work Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888) or Rokeya’s text, the SF quality of this book can be questioned because of its use of sleep as a device. However, as we have already seen dream/sleep was an accepted device in early SF and utopian narratives to signify the estrangement of time and/or space. Baisvee Sadi is divided into topical sections such as education, child rearing, law and order, rural organisation and the structure of Indian democracy. While the friendly guides Sumedh and Visvamitra give Visvabandhu a tour of future India, a confluence of fictional and real spaces becomes prominent. The journey begins in the mountains of Nepal and slowly moves south to Nalanda, a centre of ancient Indian education. While this journey takes place within the boundaries of present-day India, the social, economic and agricultural organisation in this space is obviously fictional. The mode of production is specialised and state-controlled – a form of socialist democracy. Specific villages are assigned to producing specific crops such as oranges and bananas. Similarly, the state assigns industries their specific spaces. Furthermore, the book minutely describes the spatial organisation of the villages and their common kitchens: every village is divided into residential and working areas that are clearly marked, and kitchens are designed to accommodate cooking and dining for the whole population. Animals that threaten human prosperity are exterminated, leading to the use of what used to be the ‘unused space’ of the wilderness. In this society, every member is given the opportunity for self-improvement through travel and rotating jobs. The new society has also eradicated racial, religious, classist caste-based divisions. Every place and person of this future India is repeatedly characterised as clean and beautiful. At times, Baisvee Sadi almost seems like an anticipation of the Russian author Ivan Yefremov’s more elaborate communist utopia in Andromeda Nebula (1956). The ideological implication of this spatial organisation is obvious. Sankrityayan provides an alternative to both the British colonial

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system and the Islamic and Hindu feudal modes of social formation. Sankrityayan, who wrote this story while imprisoned by the British, and who would later become an advocate for the Soviet Union, makes his Marxist leanings amply clear (see chapter 3); consequently, the relationship between the literary representation and its raw material provides us with a rare glimpse of socialist utopianism in India. However, other spatial implications of this narrative should not be ignored. As mentioned before, the main journey and detailed spatial description are limited to the northern part of India – to be precise, mostly within the Hindi belt. The book further presents Hindi as the national language, because of its closeness to Sanskrit – the ‘divine language’. In addition to this emphasis on Hindi, the names of most of the major characters (such as Vishvabandhu and Vishvamitra) are of Sanskrit origin and Brahminic. These Hindi-Sanskrit cultural references and the primary location of the journey indicate a nationalism based on a north Indian, Hindi-speaking, Brahminic identity – the identity of the author – that subsumes all other possibilities arising out of other Indian cultures. Baisvee Sadi thus is not only bound by space in the context of utopian Indian nationalism, but also by the very specific spatio-cultural identity of the author. Such utopian works as mentioned above, though, are not the norm. More common, especially in later SF, is a conscious heterotopian tendency along the lines of Moylan and Pordzik. Such works as Rajshekhar Basu’s satirical colonisation of Europe by India in ‘Ulatpuran’ (Bangla, 1951), Anil Menon’s Beast with Nine Billion Feet (2009), set in a near-future India, and Vandana Singh’s Distances (2008), set on an unnamed planet, are excellent examples of this tendency. These works are acutely conscious about the representation of narrative space. For example, Menon’s novel, squarely set in western India, is caught up in the ideological pulls of capitalist corporations at once exploiting India’s resources and providing technological advances, and a populist environmentalist resistance, seeking to seize control from the corporations and their puppet politicians. Thus the book presents heterotopic possibilities for the land. The relationship between the representational space and real space is also simple – the representation only thinly hides the real politics of control over Indian land and resources. Like the works discussed above, Beast too functions on a national scale, although its main action is in western India. Singh’s Distances, on the other hand, presents an anarchist heterotopia very similar to Ursula Le  Guin’s works, especially The

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Dispossessed. This novella narrates Anasuya’s experiences, in her native place of Sagara, among the sea-people, who presents a nontechnological and intuitive/spiritual utopian enclave, where pure ideas can be explored, and in the City, the metropolis, the hybrid space, where multiple cultures mingle and new ideas are synthesised. The book additionally extends into mathematical space and cyberspace, which act as spaces of synthesis of the qualities of Sagara and the City – a Bhabhaian ‘third space’14 or Bukatman’s ‘paraspace’15 that allows for formation of ideas beyond ideological binaries, and runs parallel to the real space of physical action. In this work, Singh’s spatial representations are schematic and symbolic in their relationships to their source materials: arguably, Anasuya’s native world symbolically stands for India and the City stands for the western metropolis. Singh creates the cyberspace to reconcile the dissonances for people like Anasuya that exist in both spaces and belong to none. Such heterotopic and transitory spaces are a common feature of Singh’s works. Her novella Of Love and Other Monsters (2007), along with such short stories as ‘Delhi’ (2004), ‘Tetrahedron’ (2008), ‘Infinities’ (2008) and ‘Ambiguity Machines’ (2018) repeatedly explore such transitory spaces, but often with postnationalist sensibilities. Keith Breen and Shane O’Neill argue that the term ‘postnationalist’ does not erase the established national identities, but rather indicates a discourse that tends to move beyond those identities.16 Thus, unlike in Sankrityayan or Menon, the representational space in Singh’s works often does not have a direct co-relationship with the geographical or cultural space of India. Such postnationalist sensibility can also be seen in such works by Salman Rushdie as Grimus (1975) and The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999), residing on the edges of SF, fantasy and magical realism, and also in such work as S. B. Divya’s Runtime (2016), which has no connection to India at all. Although The Ground beneath Her Feet directly depicts India as a nation, the transnational sensibilities take away any enclave-like quality from it. However, Grimus only has a tangential symbolic relationship to India as a spatial category. Rather, its paraspatial island universe is a metaphorical representation of the space of postcolonial identity formation, without regard to any specific real place. Eutopian formations in Indian SF, then, show a marked resemblance to the trajectory that Moylan drew for western utopias, but from very different causes: the revolutionary and hopeful utopianism of

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the nineteenth and early twentieth century under colonial oppression slowly takes on a heterotopic and critical hue under the postcolonial state from the late twentieth century. Many of these works tackle political problems that foreground India’s relationship with colonial and neocolonial powers, while others expose inherent connections of gender and sexuality with these political formations. These eutopian works thus reflect collective hopes of the society that evolved over time, and not necessarily in an exponential manner. The early enthusiasm for a liberated state seems to have been replaced by more sobering considerations under postcolonial conditions in the later works.

Dystopias Such heterotopic representations are, however, outnumbered by anxiety-driven anti-utopian or dystopian ideological formations in Indian SF. Although primarily characterised by a negative representation of space, dystopia, according to Tom Moylan, is an open form functioning between the impulses of utopia and anti-utopia. Moylan claims that dystopia is a result of the ‘terrors’ of the twentieth century: exploitation, repression, state violence, war, genocide, disease, famine, ecocide, depression, debt and the steady depletion of humanity through the buying and selling of everyday life provided more than enough fertile ground for this fictive underside of the utopian imagination.17 Descending from Menippean satire, dystopia meditates upon the systemic nature of the social and ecological nightmares of humanity. However, Moylan distinguishes the dystopian genre from anti-utopia. Whereas the anti-utopias are closed worlds examining the negative impulses of humanity, ending in a despair of awareness, dystopia seeks alternatives. In Moylan’s words, ‘The dystopian text does not guarantee a creative and critical position that is implicitly militant or resigned.’18 Moylan further formulates the concept of ‘critical dystopia’, which recognises the implicit redemptive qualities of a dystopian text. He posits that many dystopic works published since the 1980s create an oppositional space against the current system and imagine ways to change it through the alliance of diverse voices and perspectives.19 Nevertheless, as is apparent, the context of India is different from the western, specifically Anglo-American, socio-political atmosphere of

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the 1980s and 1990s that Moylan had in mind. Some of the core values embedded in his argument, especially ‘alliance politics’ and the tendency not only to ‘critique’ but to ‘transform’, though, are applicable to most of the Indian dystopias. Moylan, in addition, emphasises the feminist approach in western ‘critical dystopias’, something also true of the Indian tradition. While feminist texts like Marge Piercy’s He, She and It (1990) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) are crucial to the western tradition, such feminist works as Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest (1997), Rimi B. Chatterjee’s Signal Red (2005) and Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s Generation 14 (2008) played a key role in foregrounding the dystopian future in Indian literature. They employ some of the same main devices that Moylan identified in western critical dystopias: ‘alliance politics’, ‘critique’ and ‘transformation’. Thus, although arising from different socio-cultural milieux, these texts can be read fruitfully through the critical lens provided by Moylan. Furthermore, in any type of dystopian criticism the question of responsibility becomes a central concern. Whether the text becomes a full-fledged anti-utopia or remains an ambiguous dystopia, the responsibility always lies with the human actors; scrutinising of such human responsibility set in a time and place worse than our present reality makes this form such an effective device for social criticism. Although postnationalist or non-nationalist sensibilities can be seen in some dystopic texts such as in Sarukkai Chabria’s Generation 14, T. D. Ramkrishnan’s Alpha (2003) and Premendra Mitra’s Manu Dwadosh (The Twelfth Manu, Bangla, 1964) and Piprey Puran (Annals of the Ants, Bangla, 1931), in most dystopic representations, Indian geographical and cultural space is at the centre of attention. While Alpha (highly influenced by William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies and set on an island off the coast of Sri Lanka) and Piprey Puran (set primarily in South America) mention specific places, Manu Dwadosh and Generation 14 do not. Arguably none of these texts are primarily concerned only with India, directly or metaphorically. Mitra’s Manu Dwadosh is an interesting case in point. Written after just a decade of India’s independence, when most literary output was concerned with ‘the nation’, such a postnationalist work is an anomaly. This story presents a post-apocalyptic earth where four remaining human tribes are engaged in a mutually distrustful existence that is slowly leading them to extinction. Although placed within a Hindu mythical outer framework, neither the story nor the representational space has any

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direct relationship to India. Rather, this narrative reflects a larger concern with nuclear war and its global fallouts. This contaminated space which is slowly being taken over by nature and where human society has gone back to primitive ways, is devoid of any ‘nationalist’ ideology, but full of ‘tribalism’. This may be a result of the ‘nationalist’ fervour evident because of the ongoing conflicts with China and Pakistan, which is not difficult to identify as a magnified version of irrational ‘tribalism’.20 But more appropriately, the territorial divisions in this small piece of inhabited land is Mitra’s jab at his contemporary global politics (most notably the Cold War) and a warning against a nuclear showdown between the USA and USSR. The space here thus becomes a metaphorical representation of global space descending into a ‘tribal’ level. Sarukkai Chabria’s Generation 14, written half a century later, displays a similar treatment of space. The primary location of action is future earth’s Global Community, a dystopic state in which class and caste segregation have merged with biological manipulation and an Orwellian ideological control. This book, which is narrated from the point of view of a fourteenth-generation clone, eschews any direct connection to the Indian state. Nevertheless, multiple cultural and geographical references, such as the coming of the Aryans into the Indian subcontinent over the Hindukush mountain range and ancient and medieval northern India, woven into the story, establish the text’s oblique relationship to India (see chapter  3). Consequently, Generation  14 seems not to ignore its location within the Indian cultural sphere but refuses to be bound within the geographical boundaries of the current nation state of India, opting to examine the greater human civilisation and its drive towards a bleak future. Thus the mapping of this dystopian space on India and beyond perfectly reflects Raja and Nandi’s comment in The Postnational Fantasy that the ‘local and the nation form an integral part of this postnational whole’.21 That is, the novel, although not exclusively focusing on Indian space, constantly draws metaphorical connections to it. The history that was played out on the Indian space helps the protagonist negotiate the future global space. Most stories of dystopian SF, though, unfold within a real and recognisable geographical space – in India and/or Asia. These works critique either the postcolonial state or transnational problems primarily through their effects in India. Three major variants of this kind of spatiality crop up regularly: ideological dystopias, conflict zones and (post-)apocalyptic lands. Ideological dystopias and conflict zones are

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direct responses to South Asian geopolitics. While the first responds in subtle and introspective manner to internal socio-political problems, the second type mostly speculates about military conflicts. Both these aspects are inherent parts of South Asian existence, where India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed antagonistic neighbours are engaged in constant skirmishes and where political and religious violence are commonplace occurrences. The third type is often a result of the first two, but not always. (Post-)apocalyptic lands also originate from larger global actions (like nuclear war somewhere else) as well as natural phenomena (such as global warming and climate change). Consequently, these different types respond directly to different but related problems regarding India and South Asia. Such works as Chatterjee’s Signal Red, Anish Deb’s Teish Ghonta Shat Minute (Twenty-three Hours Sixty Minutes, Bangla, 2010), Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet-Engine Laugh (2001), Padmanabhan’s Harvest and Escape, Sujatha’s En Iniya Enthira (My Dear Machine, Tamil, 1980) and Manish Jha’s highly acclaimed film Matrubhoomi (Motherland, Hindi, 2003) present India as a place under the sway of various ideologies of domination – Hindu fundamentalism, global capitalist greed, gender oppression, technocracy and so on. In these works the national space is clearly identifiable. In Signal Red and Last Jet-Engine Laugh (Laugh henceforth) the national boundary sustains the dystopic state through conflicts with the regional enemies, Pakistan and China. In Harvest, En Iniya Enthira and Teish Ghonta Shat Minute global capitalism and technocracy turn India into an objectified space. In Escape and Matrubhoomi oppressive misogynist practices make India a dystopia for women. Most of these works slide towards the ‘critical’ point in Moylan’s scale. A closer analysis of two of these works will explicate the relationship between the representational and real space of India better. Signal Red is an excellent example of a traditional political dystopia, in which a disillusioned defence scientist and an investigative journalist confront an increasingly totalitarian Indian political and military establishment.22 Organisation of space is highly important to this novel. The primary action of the story unfolds in an isolated defence research centre in the semi-desert area of western India. This facility is a space of ideological control, where science serves the needs of religious nationalism. Within the centre, the arrangement of labs and residential buildings reflects a Hindu patriarchal structure and isolates the scientists from the general population, making them more

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amenable to ideological control. The other major space of action is also notable: an isolated village owned by the centre. This partly deserted village, inhabited by poor lower-caste people, is the testing ground for biological and chemical weapons. The implication of the spatial relationship between the centre and the village is very clear in terms of Indian social organisation – the elite (class and caste) dehumanises the subaltern through physical separation before using them as objects. Thus space here represents not only ideological control but also a social distance necessary for dehumanising the other. However, the mapping of this representational space onto the real space of India is also significant because of its political and demographic implications. Central, western and northern parts of India have been the heartland of Hindu nationalist politics since the 1990s. By locating the theatre of the main action in this part of India, Chatterjee establishes a direct connection to her raw material. Furthermore, Signal Red refers to several other spaces, all of which have ideological connotations. She mentions Chittore in the western state of Rajasthan during the protagonist and his wife’s travels. This city not only has an import for Hindu nationalism – a city that stood up against the medieval Muslim invaders – but also for patriarchy. Chittore is associated with the medieval tradition of ‘jauhar’ or self-immolation of women to save their honour from the invading Muslim enemy.23 On another level, the Indian state also achieves almost a dystopic enclave status – a country flanked by two threatening enemies, China and Pakistan, and in need of strict militarised ideological governance to repel any foreign invasion. Yet within such a dystopic state we find enclaves of resistance. They exist outside the Centre in populous cities as well as in rural communities, which are either too large to control or too remote to warrant the effort. Chatterjee even places such an enclave within the centre. When a disgraced scientist, Dr Mani Seth (a dissenter), is demoted in rank, he simply stops caring about his career and starts recreating his house as a space beyond this ideological control by engaging in gardening and arts with the help of his wife. The domestic space, which is also women’s space, generally functions under strict norms, and the insertion of a male subject into this space signifies his loss of power. Nevertheless, in Signal Red this domestic space becomes the locus of resistance to the gendered and classist national space signified by the Centre. The non-hierarchical relationship between Seth and his wife further supports this conclusion. Consequently, Signal Red’s liberal feminist stance

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against a hawkish and patriarchal Hindu nationalism is contained within the strategic use of the representational space. The book also incorporates a ‘critical dystopic’ tendency by showing strong areas of resistance to this totalitarian dominance from within the establishment. However, in many cases these dystopias achieve a ‘critical’ status only by a hair’s breadth. Padmanabhan’s Escape is an excellent example of this trend. This story moves from a completely anti-utopian pole to a more ambiguous ‘critical’ position. Padmanabhan’s novel opens in a future India where misogynist rulers with access to cloning technology have programmatically exterminated all women. The back-story of the novel informs the reader that these men, known as the Generals, have developed a method of asexual generation through genetic engineering, thus obviating women’s function in the reproductive system. A separate scientific development has resulted in the ‘drones’, a subhuman species, substituting for the women in the domestic economy. After decimating the population centres and sites of opposition through nuclear weapons and ecological contamination, these Generals have created a space of isolated communities of men and drones, rife with violence and suspicion, brutal massacres, involuntary homosexuality and rape. The genocidal acts ultimately lead to the nation’s total isolation in the global community, thus making it a self-contained hell. In this arid and violent world three estate-owning brothers try to save their hidden niece, Meiji (probably the only surviving female), by smuggling her out of the country. The use of space in this novel is crucial on multiple levels. At the representational level, India is an anti-utopian space within the larger global community. Nevertheless, within this anti-utopian space, the estate of the three brothers is an enclave, although barely, of resistance, because it still harbours a female. Here again a domestic space functions as an alternative or counter-space to the public national space, though the national space itself is not as elitist as in Signal Red. The journey of the youngest uncle with Meiji across this dystopic space is equally important in the sense that their efforts cut a path of resistance within this oppressive space. Ultimately, the novel presents a border metropolis (present-day Mumbai) in which such totalitarian control is losing its hold because of its sheer size and chaotic population. This representational space is then contained within a feminist discourse targeting the deep-seated patriarchal oppression within the borders of India. Moreover, the actual description of space is stunningly

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depressing. Padmanabhan, like such eco-feminists as Vandana Shiva, relates femicide and the destruction of the natural gender balance to the devastation of the larger ecology by technological means. The use of the real space of the Indian nation is significant as well. The journey in Escape, which starts somewhere inland in northwestern India and ends in a city on the western coast, is mapped onto the same region that sees some of the most misogynist atrocities in the country. According to Philip Oldenburg, the number of females born per thousand males has been steadily declining all over India from 1901 to 2001.24 The latest available number (2011) 943:1000 is considerably lower than the world average; in some north-western states and union territories such as Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, Chandigarh and Daman and Diu, the situation is even worse.25 By mapping this dystopic narrative onto this same geographical area, Padmanabhan sends a strong message to the readers. Consequently Escape provides us with one of the best examples of a direct ideological relationship between the representational space and its raw material.26 The second type of negative portrayal of India, although ideological, moves out of the enclave nature of dystopian discourse and instead creates zones of conflict. These works can also be labelled as ‘future war’ narratives, in which India and South Asia become a space of conflict between state and non-state actors. Such texts as Sami Ahmad Khan’s Red Jihad (2012) and Aliens in Delhi (2017), Vivek Ahuja’s Chimera (2013) and Samit Basu’s Turbulence (2012) are examples of this kind of work. In these works, India and Asia are the centre of attention. Joshi’s Laugh, despite its closer association with traditional dystopias, can also be considered under this category. The representational space and real space are more closely related in this type of fiction than in the other two. In most cases, the maps and current geographical borders remain the same, while the conflicts depicted in the narrative attempt to alter the map. In such works as Red Jihad, Chimera and Laugh the conflicts pit the nuclear-armed neighbours India, Pakistan and China in direct or indirect combat over contested national borders. Although not written by Indians, such works as British author Humphrey Hawksley’s Dragon Fire (2000) and The Third World War (2003) also depict same kind of conflicts in Asia. The war that these works speculate about almost always begins as a result of external aggression. Such extrapolative writing is significant because of the political and military volatility of the region over the last

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sixty years – the hotly contested borders between Pakistan, India and China, the regular terrorist attacks on civilians, and the internal security threats posed by separatist and political violence. Such simmering tensions anticipate broader armed conflicts in the region and highlight the crumbling utopian impulses of postcolonial Asia. For our India-centred study, these speculations show an interesting shift in the nation’s geopolitical position. As mentioned in chapter 3, from a professed non-aligned position in the 1950s, India drifted towards the Soviet camp, although still maintaining an essentially neutralist position. In addition to three major wars (1947, 1965 and 1971) with Pakistan, several other factors such as the US backing of Pakistan since 1954, the formation of the Pakistan–China alliance in the 1960s, the war with China (1962) and finally the American support for Pakistani genocide in Bangladesh (1971, then East Pakistan) firmly placed India in the Soviet camp between 1971 and 1990.27 Although liberalisation of the economy in the 1990s attracted western support, because of its nuclear programme and refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) at US insistence, India still maintained a somewhat antagonistic relationship with the West into the early 2000s. However, since the 2001 terrorist attacks on American soil and the beginning of the War on Terror, India and the West, specifically the US, have drawn closer, pulled by similar economic and political concerns. Yet, Russia still remains India’s biggest geopolitical partner and arms supplier, even after the recent diversification of India’s defence spending.28 This shifting geopolitical posture of India is evident in all the texts speculating about conflict zone narratives: in Laugh a Saudi–Pakistani alliance against India is supported by the US; in Red Jihad the Maoists and Islamic terrorists are trained by Pakistani and Chinese intelligence services; and in Chimera India, Pakistan and China engage in full-scale war starting from border disputes. In the latter two novels the US provides passive support to India. All these works highlight the disillusionment of a postcolonial nation, discarding its utopian ideals of non-interference and non-alignment and getting involved in regional power struggles, slowly but invariably leading to extensive armed conflicts. One interesting exception is Aliens in Delhi, in which these geopolitical equations are further complicated by the invasion of India by a reptilian alien species. Such an invasion that transgresses planetary boundaries temporarily diminishes the importance of national boundaries. However, in this instance, like most of the other books, the space of conflict is described

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in close detail and serves strategic purposes – after all mapping, literary or imperial, is a process of controlling space. The third type of dystopia prevalent in Indian SF is (post-) apocalyptic in the sense that the space under consideration does not usually reflect any specific and coherent ideological organisation; rather, these spaces are generally symptomatic of a breakdown of ideologies, often resulting from natural catastrophes. That is, the difference between such works and a book like Escape, which also portrays a post-apocalyptic India, is the latter’s constant and conscious engagement with an ideological discourse, which is generally lacking in the texts I identify as (post-)apocalyptic. In the (post-)apocalyptic works, the ideological causalities become less important than the exploration and development of the catastrophe itself. In addition, human responsibility in such a catastrophe often becomes less important than it is in the first two kinds. Such texts as Narlikar’s ‘Ice Age Cometh’ (translated from Marathi, 1993) and ‘Death of a Megapolis’ (2005), Subodh Jawadekar’s ‘A Journey into Darkness’ (translated from Marathi, 1993), Sukanya Datta’s ‘Modern Neelkanths’ (2008) and Vandana Singh’s ‘With Fate Conspire’ (2018) exemplify this trend. These narratives show the process of conversion of India into a dystopian/post-apocalyptic space through environmental and social degradation without identifying any specific ideologies as the cause of such apocalypse. Sometimes the cause is a distant nuclear war (‘A Journey into Darkness’), sometimes unfettered pollution and urban growth (‘Modern Neelkanths’ and ‘The Death of a Megapolis’) and sometimes natural calamities (‘The Ice Age Cometh’). In many of these stories the representational space, although set in India, is often seen as a subset of global space. For example, the main action of Narlikar’s ‘The Ice Age Cometh’ is staged in Mumbai, where the scientist Dr Chitnis and the journalist Rajiv seek explanations for the sudden onset of a global ice age. However, this space of action is part of a larger pattern of the global space, which experiences the same environmental shift. Similarly, although Singh’s ‘With Fate Conspire’ is set in a Kolkata flooded by rising ocean levels, the implication of this catastrophe goes beyond the space of the city. The same is true of ‘A Journey into Darkness’, in which a dying child writes unsent letters to her friend from the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, after a nuclear war between USA and Russia has scorched the entire planet. In this story, the Indian space is affected by human actions in some other part of

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the world. As her family slowly dies from radiation poisoning, the little girl tries to make sense of the geographical distances between the warring countries and the effect of the unseen war on the rest of the world. Thus, in all these instances, the negative portrayal of India is part of a larger global pattern, and a clear hierarchical relationship is established between the local and the global. The primary focus is still the national space, but it is not an isolated enclave like the first type. Narlikar’s ‘The Death of a Megapolis’ and Deb’s ‘Ghaser Shish Nei’ (Grass Doesn’t Have Florets, Bangla 1996), where the actions and implications are primarily limited within the Indian space (Mumbai and Kolkata respectively), function a little differently. Narlikar projects the failure and corruption of the postcolonial Indian political system onto the future destruction of Mumbai in an infernal fire, where an inept civic system and people’s self-interest lead to a total collapse of all support systems. Deb paints a similar picture of Kolkata, where a dense chemical fog leads to the death of vegetation and animal life, and in the resulting chaos a complete breakdown of social and legal order. Thus an environmental catastrophe created by human actions leads to the destruction of human social order. In both these instances, the primary focus of the narrative is trained on the modern urban space suffering from unprecedented levels of pollution and unplanned urban growth, and the protagonists survive by moving out of the urban and towards a rural space, which although not completely exempt, is at least less affected by such catastrophes. Dystopian representations in Indian SF then stand at the other end of the eutopian formation. They show the dark underside of utopian imagination that arises from the very real concerns originating in the authors’ contemporary India and South Asia. Whether ideological dystopias, conflict zones or post-apocalyptic landscapes, by primarily locating the action in real geographical space these works provide scathing critiques of the systemic problems that plague the country. When such direct spatial connection is not present, some cultural association with India is made in the works’ more global or post­nationalist representation of space.

Space as Background Many Indian SF works, however, do not participate in any obvious utopian discourse. The Indias present in these works are neither separated by temporal or spatial boundaries, nor show any ideological

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organisation markedly different from the contemporary reality. Most of the time the SF ‘novum’ is supplied by some type of scientific invention or alien intrusion. These works are also non-committal in a negative or positive representation of space. Such works as Jagadish Chandra Bose’s ‘Niruddesher Kahini’ (A Story of Disappearance, Bangla, 1896), Satyajit Ray’s ‘Bankubabur Bandhu (Mr Banku’s Friend, Bangla, 1962) and Narlikar’s Virus (Marathi, 2000) unfold in their authors’ contemporary world, and mostly within the boundaries of India. In these works, space is primarily used as a backdrop to the action, with little attention to any explicit ideological representation. Variations exist in the manner of spatial representation, such as at regional, national or planetary levels, but the focus, unlike in the works discussed above, is not on ‘space’ as a category. However, works of this type, although not intentionally heterotopic, display interesting spatial relationships within their narrative locales: between the urban and non-urban spaces and between the West and India. The Bengali author Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s works perhaps best present such interactions. Mostly set in rural and small-town India, such stories as Bhuture Ghori (The Spooky Watch, 1984), Patashgarher Jangale (In the Jungle of Patashgarh, 1989) and Patalghar (The Underground Chamber, 1996) contrast urbanised western modernity and a traditional and nostalgic Bengali identity. Specific geographical features such as forests, open fields and old houses become the main narrative locales, instead of the metropolis. In such works, the city functions as a metonym for the West through its association with technology and multinational capitalism. In contrast, the rural and the suburban take on the association of a feudal Bengali past. These stories further display a strong scepticism about western-style progress, which is repeatedly challenged by alternative local knowledge and alien intervention within the rural space. The villages and small towns in works such as these thus symbolise a tension between the traditional and the western values that struggle for primacy in modern India. On the other hand, works such as Lakheda’s ‘Woh Paragrahi Robot’ (That Alien Robot, 2018, Hindi; US), Narlikar’s ‘The Rare Idol of Ganesha’ (England), Hemlal Datta’s ‘Rahasya’ (Bangla, 1882; England), Mukhopadhyay’s ‘Bonny’ (1990; US) are located outside India, where the central characters of the narrative are Indian immigrants. Consequently, this type of narrative establishes a relationship between India and the West through the legacy of colonialism and postcolonial

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migration, in which Indians often move out of their homeland for better professional opportunities in First World countries. Thus the spaces of action in these narratives are inherently intertwined with the authors’ colonial and postcolonial ideologies. That these works do not show any radical reorganisation of the narrative space possibly reflects the authors’ complicity with Indian and/or dominant global ideologies. The actions of the Indian protagonists in the non-Indian space intervene in the norms of this space, but do not reorganise it in any significant manner. For example, in ‘The Rare Idol of Ganesha’ a British Indian scientist’s invention changes the fate of a cricket match between India and England, but the change does not signify any larger social, political or environmental shift. Similarly, in ‘Bonny’, an Indian couple’s infant son, Bonny, has a microchip implanted in his brain by a rogue American doctor, turning him into a cyborg-like entity. However, Bonny’s cyborg powers and some help from ‘gipsy’ people help the family get out of their predicament. Here the characters are part of a new global professional elite who affect the fabric of the US in subtle ways, but not through any radical reorganisation of space. However, in S. B. Divya’s Run Time (2016), the main characters are economically disadvantaged immigrants in the US, but not of Indian origin. In this futuristic story the main character tries to improve her status through her technological knowledge, physical efforts and moral integrity. Although the story shows a futuristic US, the ideological representation of such space is not radically different from our contemporary reality where immigrants try to achieve the ‘American dream’. Consequently, these authors adapt mostly existing representations of these western spaces rather than re-envisioning them in a radical manner. This last type of spatial representation thus involves border crossing and setting up foreign locations as spaces of action. The idea of crossing boundaries, national or planetary, leads to the second main category of mapping of narrative space in Indian SF – the dynamic space or journey.

Indian SF and Space Travel Space travel is one of the most important components of SF. The journey motif not only links SF to older forms of narratives such as the epic, the romance, utopian narratives and the travelogue, but

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this motif also exposes one of the reasons behind the rise of modern SF – European colonial expansion. Arguably, adventure fiction that explored and exploited the white spaces on maps for narrative purposes mutated into SF, exploring and exploiting extraterrestrial or metaphorical spaces. Thus colonial and exploratory journeys are ingrained in western SF. These tendencies can be seen not only in such nineteenth- and early twentieth-century SF as Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865), H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds (1898) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World (1912), but also in such later works as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation (1942–1993) series, Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle (1966–2002), the Star Wars (1978 onwards) and Star Trek (1966 onwards) movies and TV franchises alongside many other individual works. In other words, journey, either on earth or beyond, is generally connected in western SF with the discourse of either possessing or ordering known and unknown spaces. However, unlike Euro-American SF, most works of Indian SF do not present an expansionist universe and colonising missions. Although Indian SF presents space explorers coming into contact and conflict with aliens, such texts usually lack any sustained imperial/colonial world building. Rather, failure of such colonial missions as an underlying motif is more common. In addition, even if an imperial or colonial context is created in the texts, the protagonists and their journeys generally subvert any imperial/colonial purposes and often actively resist them. More prevalent in these stories is a sense of wonder that a tourist feels at his/her observation of new sights during a tour and interaction with them. Nonetheless, such texts often betray a latent desire for mastery over foreign spaces and the objects in them, which are mostly left unrealised in the narratives or ethically rejected. Early works like Jagadananda Roy’s ‘Shukra Bhraman’ (Travel to Venus, Bangla, written in 1892, published 1914) and Keshav Prasad Singh’s ‘Chandralok ki Yatra’ (Journey to the Moon, Hindi, 1900), mid-twentieth-century texts such as Satyajit Ray’s ‘Byom Jatrir Diary’ (Diary of a Space Traveller, Bangla, 1961) and Narayan Sanyal’s Nakshatraloker Devatma (Gods of the Starry Realm, Bangla, 1976) or even early twenty-first-century texts such as Vandana Singh’s ‘Oblivion: A Journey’ (2012) and Zeashan Zaidi’s ‘Apni Duniya se Dur’ (Far from One’s Own World, Hindi, 2012) are good examples of this curious attitude regarding space travel. Explanation of this tendency may exist in India’s problematic relationship with colonisation and exploration of unknown spaces.

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According to John Rieder, ‘the colonial gaze’, which ‘distributes knowledge and power to the subject who looks, while denying or minimizing access to power for its object, the one looked at’ is central to the connection between nineteenth-century adventure narratives and SF.29 Rieder argues that SF such as H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds often reverses the position of the colonial white observer as found in such works as Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1886) or Conan Doyle’s Lost World, but it does not escape this basic framing device. Rieder’s comments on adventure fiction and early SF in essence reiterate Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism: the notion that Europe produces the Orient as an exotic Other through its ideological discourses resulting from its physical encounter with lands outside Europe.30 Said allots a major role to various kinds of travel narratives in starting this Orientalist discourse. Pramod K. Nayar, reinforces this assertion in the Indian context, demonstrating that such ethnographic colonial discourses began not with institutional works, but individual travelogues that simultaneously exoticised the Other and legitimised the authors to the domestic readers.31 This is another way of describing ‘the colonial gaze’. Indian authors did not and still do not have access to this ‘colonial gaze’ for obvious reasons; rather, they emerge from a world subjected to this gaze for centuries. Consequently journey motifs in Indian SF, travelogues and adventure fiction are not part of an established colonial project but reactions to it. The lack of this specific ‘colonial gaze’, though, does not prevent the process of Othering, but only lends it a different form: a double bind of travel and stasis. First, for Indians foreign travel has not reflected India’s geopolitical power. During colonial times, travel opportunities for Indians were restricted to only certain types: servants or subjects of the British crown, and hence lower down the power hierarchy. Since 1947, though, the Indian diaspora has rapidly grown in various parts of the world. However, this diasporic travel marks Indians as migrants and tourists, not as conquerors. Consequently, the Othering of the host cultures creates not a sense of control or possession, but precisely a lack of it; this lack in its turn forms a sense of wonder at something that is beyond control, and a fantasy of inhabiting the position of the Other who can control his or her own environment. Second, during colonial times, especially in the nineteenth century, travel outside the country was itself a breach of cultural continuity and was thus an act of metonymic Othering. This Othering is a degradation.

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The Hindu taboo of ‘kala pani’ (black water) or ‘samudralanghana’ (crossing the sea) that forbade the Hindu to travel across the sea to a foreign land on pain of losing one’s caste was a strong proscription, other than for non-Hindus and the poor, who went as indentured labourers. Upper-caste Hindus who travelled across the sea were considered polluted and needed to be ritually cleansed in order to be accepted back into society. Consequently, this custom discouraged people from venturing beyond the sea (taken into consideration even by the British when conscripting Indians into the army). This, then, is a different type of objectification, in which travel objectifies the traveller at home as well as the traveller’s destinations. Such historical experiences constitute the explorers that populate the pages of Indian travelogues, adventure narratives and SF. This specific positionality of the authors creates an intriguing ‘gazing back’ that either destabilises the colonial motifs of SF journey narratives or removes the implicit power politics found in many western accounts of journeys. I detect two distinct trends in these journeys. The first is the reversed grand tour. As argued by Julie Codell32 and Anupama Arora,33 early works in this vein present mostly upper-class Indian travellers’ experiences in Europe and America – not their ‘discovery’, ‘ordering’ or ‘possession’, but wonder and contemplation. Such works, however, subtly perform reverse ethnography. Examples of this type are Travels of Din Mahomet (1794) and Bhagvat Singh Jee, Thakore Saheb of Gondal’s Journal of a Visit to England in 1883 (1886). More recent narratives in this vein present cosmopolitan subjects traversing a globalised world (as in Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses or Amitav Ghosh’s 1992 book In an Antique Land). The second trend presents a distorted mirror image of the colonial journey. In this type of account (mostly seen in adventure fiction), the Indian subject replaces the European one, while functioning within the established global hegemonies: Indians as explorers, although actually working under the British government, or in a world still dominated by Euro-American powers, such as in Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Chander Pahar (Mountain of Moon, Bangla, 1937; highly influenced by Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines) or Buddhadeb Guha’s Bangla adventure stories Gugunogumbarer Deshe (In the land of Gugunogumbar, 1981) and Ruaha (1986). All three works present the Indian hero’s exploits in the wilderness of Africa as European hunting/adventure narratives. While European works influenced both types of travel narratives mentioned

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above, such influences are typically distorted images rather than direct reflections. The journeys in Indian SF are similar to the adventure and travel narratives mentioned above. One of the earliest Indian SF stories, Hemlal Datta’s ‘Rahasya’ (1882), depends on the removal of the locale to England for its creation of estrangement – wonder at the technological marvels of a British scientist – which is not essentially different from the reversed grand-tour tradition mentioned above. Here the upperclass Indian scientist studying in London visits his friend’s English country house, where he is assailed by his crazy inventions and escapes in a hurry. However, the journey itself is not a major motif in this story. Two other early SF works, Ambika Datta Vyasa’s ‘Ascharya Vrittant’ (A Strange Tale, Hindi, 1884) and Keshav Prasad Singh’s ‘Chandralok ki Yatra’ (Journey to the Moon, Hindi, 1900), use the journey motif extensively. In the first story, two Indian characters who have lost their way on their travels fall into a deep cave and find an underground realm with buildings and relics from Indian history and mythology. They travel through this underground world accompanied by a British explorer and one of the characters comes out through a deep well to be met by another exploratory group led by an American, to whom he narrates the whole incident. Here the Indian characters’ ambiguous yet subservient position to the ‘white man’ is striking. But at the same time the journey reveals India’s ancient glory, now gone underground. However, the common consensus is that both these stories are thinly veiled retellings of western narratives – the first based on Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), and the second retelling either Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865) or Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall’ (1835). Consequently, Hindi SF author Zakir Ali Rajnish claims, they are not original stories.34 Yet this reformulating of European narratives in itself constitutes a reflection of an Indian desire to displace the European from his own story by reliving the original adventures in Indian languages and thus participating in reflexive colonial fantasies. Jagadananda Roy’s ‘Shukra Bhraman’ provides the first original instance of space travel in Indian SF (see also chapter 2). The journey on Venus is an excellent combination of colonial exploration and adventure tourism. The protagonist and his friend spend their time on the dark side of Venus with Venusians, who are at a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder; they at once become the earthmen’s captors,

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caregivers and objects of study. When the protagonists decide to travel on, they do so as anthropologists from a superior civilisation, although without any explicit colonialist/acquisitive motive. However, when they leave the Venusians’ habitat, they take a loyal guide-cum-servant as European explorers often did (e.g.  Allan Quatermain in Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines takes Umbopa). This guide is at once a part of the landscape and yet unaware of the landscape’s true nature, the discovery of which rests with the visitors. After a long journey on foot, the visitors scale the mountains that stand at the twilight zone of the planet, and their guide becomes the first man from his species to set eyes on the lighted side, thanks to the visitors from earth. This triumphant journey, though, soon transforms into a more sobering experience when the travellers fall from an icy cliff into the sea and are rescued by a different species of Venusians, who are technologically superior to the earthmen. Our travellers slowly start learning the language of these people and realise that they are being treated as exotic objects of study. Although the protagonist learns a great deal about Venusian science during the time on an electric ship, he wakes up before completing the voyage. The journey thus begins from a fantasy of displacing the colonial explorer and ends with an anxiety about becoming an object of exploration. While this story encompasses the central tension of journeys in Indian SF, it keeps the interactions with the Venusians at a friendly level (unlike the complete reversal in Wells’s War of the Worlds), which corresponds more to the role of a tourist than to that of a master or a slave. This symptomatic tension between the impulses of domination and vulnerability, often a characteristic of adventure tourists, can be observed in many later stories such as Premendra Mitra’s ‘Kalapanir Atale’ (In the Depth of the Ocean, Bangla, 1957), Hemendra Kumar Roy’s Meghduter Marte Agaman (Arrival of the Messengers from the Sky, Bangla, 1925), Dr Sampuranand’s ‘Prithvi se Saptarshi Mandal’ (From Earth to Ursa Major, Hindi, 1953). A text that perfectly encapsulates this impulse is Satyajit Ray’s ‘Byom Jatrir Diary’ (The Diary of a Space Traveller, Bangla, 1961). In this story, Professor Shanku, an inventor, builds a spacecraft and leaves earth along with his cat, his trusted servant and a robot to conquer interstellar space. The journey first takes him to Mars, where the travellers encounter hostile fishlike aliens and barely escape with their lives. They are then captured by superior antlike aliens on the planet Tafa and are hosted as

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well-attended guests, while also becoming objects of observation. Although both encounters on this journey feature animal-like creatures. The first suggests a hostile and inferior species, and the second a highly intelligent one. Arguably, the tension and role reversal here are not only of a colonial nature, but a more fundamentally existential one – that between man and animal. Hence Rieder’s point that in western lost-race narratives, journey in space is often a journey in time, with the lost races existing at an evolutionary stage that lies in the past of the western society, also plays out in texts like this, albeit in a more complex manner. The movement in space here is movement both forward and backward on the evolutionary ladder. A different set of works that imply an actual colonisation of other planets mostly comes since the second half of the twentieth century. Even in these texts, the journey is generally not about travel to a settlement but a visit back home. Arvind Misra’s ‘Kumbh Ke Mele Mein Mangalwasi’ (A Martian at the Kumbh Mela, Hindi, 2013) is a good example of this. In this brief story, a settler from Mars journeys to Earth to participate in the Kumbh Mela, the great Hindu religious fair in north India. Although the Martian looks at the practices with an ethnologist’s eyes, here the traveller is literally a tourist. He recounts his experiences in his travel diary – the arrival, the crowd, the sages and the auspicious atmosphere of the last Kumbh Mela of the twenty-first century. The guide takes him around the fair providing mythological narratives about the disappearance and reappearance of the holy river Ganga. Although stories like this, describing a pleasant trip on a different planet, are not always the norm, Mishra’s story encapsulates the dominant spirit of the type. Although the story presupposes a human colony on Mars, the journey itself is not concerned with colonisation, but with a search for one’s roots. In addition, the story tries to prove the superiority of traditional India over technologically advanced Martian society. In a sense, this tourist from Mars is not much different from the modern western tourist looking for a spiritual India. A longer exploration of a similar theme can be seen in ‘Onno Groher Ami’ (I from an Alien Planet, serialised in the Bengali children’s magazine Sandesh 1964–5) by Prabhat Ranjan Roy. In this story, humans have colonised the planet Eros to escape natural catastrophes on earth. However, the primary focus of the story is on deciphering, preparing and making the journey back to earth to meet their ancestors. The explorers from Eros spend a friendly time with the earth scientists and leave only after solving

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several problems and securing a regular travel arrangement between the two planets. In this story too, the travel takes place from the new world to the old one, i.e. into an already existing civilisation. Strikingly, both the above-mentioned stories, written fifty years apart, do not consider the implications of the original colonisation of the planets. Therefore, these stories do not differ much from western narratives of ‘blank spaces’ that were not really ‘blank’ but were ideologically and physically emptied by the colonisers. The Assamese author Saurav Kumar Chaliha’s short story ‘Marudyan’ (The Oasis, 2008) addresses this idea of a ‘blank space’. In this narrative, which functions on multiple levels, apparently a traveller from earth lands on an unnamed planet and is mesmerised by its beauty. The traveller, though, feels that his mesmerised bliss is the work of a higher intelligence manipulating his mind. After a prolonged contemplation of his home world on earth, at once ravaged by human evil yet still welcoming as his own mother, and invoking Arthur C. Clarke’s message about travellers and explorers from the Vikings to space voyagers, he decides to go back. At the moment of this decision, the whole planet, which appears like a conscious entity, seems to wish him well. The traveller thus refuses to become a coloniser establishing his dominion over a living alien entity. However, by the middle of the story the reader can no longer be sure if the story is about an actual journey or an exploration of the narrator’s mind. From a certain angle this short narrative appears more like a philosophical introspection than a story: the author’s meditation on human journeys of exploration and domination and ways to escape those traps. This deliberate ambiguity, though, adds to the effect of the story – after all SF is a way of contemplating the human condition. Such fallibility of the human quest is another major topic in Indian SF. Narayan Sanyal’s Nakshatraloker Devatma is an excellent example of this type. Multiple journeys take place in Sanyal’s novel, which was inspired by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). I focus primarily on the last journey by Maitreyi and her lover in quest of an unknown alien object near Jupiter. This final journey, which in 2001 sees the death of one of the astronauts and the malfunction of the AI HAL 9000, and ends with the transformation of Dave Bowman from a mere human to a superhuman entity returning to the solar system as a conqueror, is subtly changed in Sanyal’s novel. In particular, Sanyal’s making the protagonist a woman removes

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the traditional masculine expectations associated with an explorer. Furthermore, when Maitreyi reaches her destination, the incorporeal godlike beings place her in an atmosphere similar to her childhood spent with her Vedantic father. Then a hitherto sterile Maitreyi at once becomes pregnant with herself, evolves into a superior being and is sent back to the solar system. The major point in this narrative is that, even before the transformation, a clear hint of an already prevailing belief system in Vedic thoughts that predict this triumphant return of the traveller – but not necessarily as a lord and a king – exists in the narrative. The last words of the novel directly say that the child’s cry slowly turns into the sound ‘Om’, the holy sound indicating the oneness of the universe. Thus the scientific journey of discovery and quest is sublimated into the circular logic of Indian religiosity. A postnational or transnational sensibility characterises the space travel in Vandana Singh’s works. Although two of her longer works, Distances and Of Love and Other Monsters, deal with multiple kinds of travel, including space travel, the best example is perhaps her short story ‘Oblivion: A Journey’ (2012). As discussed in chapter 2, this story invokes the Hindu epic Ramayana (The Journey of Rama) in narrating the journey of a shape-shifting protagonist in pursuit of a demonic entity that has destroyed his/her home world. ‘Oblivion’ employs classic quest tropes: journey into the underworld (here inside a ruined city), torture at the hands of demonic forces (here battle robots), loss of the beloved and elimination of the demon. These take place as the protagonist hops from planet to planet, first to escape Hirasor (the villain) then to pursue him. Nevertheless, although this story openly invokes a national epic, it displays a strong transnational sensibility: neither conquering nor submissive, neither exoticising nor wondering, but passing through a vast array of known and unknown spaces with little regard to the space being passed. Consequently, the focus of narration becomes the goal of the journey, capturing Hirasor, and the journey towards that goal, not the places through which the journey passes, achieves primacy. This is no different from the transnational traveller who zips through airports waiting for the final landing. Furthermore, this journey functions as an allegory of diasporic subject creation. When Hirasor’s corporation invades and destroys the protagonist’s world-shell of Ramayana, which serves as an ideology of social organisation, the inhabitants are either subjugated to the corporation or are scattered all over the universe. Therefore, the

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traveller-protagonist becomes a migrant because of the forces of corporate domination. His/her pursuit of Hirasor again indicates the desire to master the forces that displace the migrant, and this desire propels the protagonist across the universe and through many identities. At the end of the journey when the protagonist succeeds in killing Hirasor on the planet of Oblivion where people slowly lose their memories, she does not feel any satisfaction, but an emptiness. Therefore, there is no triumphant return of the native at the end of the story, but only a weary wanderer who realises that no new accomplishments will bring the old home back. Yet ‘Oblivion’ suggests there are further opportunities to be explored, and other doors to be opened. Space travels in Indian SF display characteristics that set them apart from the journeys in western SF. Travel motifs in these narratives are not stagnant. They evolve with time, but often reflecting an awareness of their curious positionality in relation to western narratives: they generally lack any tendency to create a grand cosmic empire or engage in exploitative and combative interactions with aliens on their journeys across space (obviously with exceptions). On the contrary, most space travels in Indian SF undercut such desires to invade and dominate even though colonial implications are inherent in the narratives.

Conclusion As is evident from the discussion above, the use of space in Indian SF – both in its static formation and in its dynamic transformation – reflects the author’s acute awareness of an ideological positionality vis-àvis the raw material. Whether serving as a background of action, a locus of ideological formations or a dynamic transformation through journeys of the actants, representation of space in Indian SF (with certain exceptions) is often related to India’s history of European contact. Such connections are frequently overt and consciously cultivated by authors, but many times these relations are oblique and subtle. In other words, although in some works this Indian/western dichotomy is prominent through various associative devices (technology, political ideology etc.), these connections are regularly manifested in second- or even third-order relationships (such as in religious nationalism, ecology, global warfare, relationship between gender and technology). Utopian formations bring such relationships to the forefront as they actively

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engage in political discourses of colonial or postcolonial India. Journey narratives, specifically space travel, repeatedly subsume such relationships within their overt adventure-oriented tales. Yet when examined closely, space travel is intimately related to the discourses of colonialism and imperialism, and consequently does not stand too far from the utopian formations. These tales rather function on the relationship between the space of travel and the traveller. As a result, they also indicate the author’s relationship to the space (imaginary or real) that she or he depicts. Apparently such relationships in Indian SF are either largely predicated on European narratives of exploration and expansion – whether imitating, parodying or deconstructing them – or journeys of immigration and return, which in the Indian context are again a result of European contact. The discourses of space thus expose a self/Other dialectic implicit in Indian SF, which I will explore in the next chapter by examining the politics of identity and ‘Othering’.

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5

The Others: Aliens, Robots, Cyborgs and Other Others

In a partially apologetic essay on European cultural historiography, historian Elazar Barkan defines the ‘Other’ in the following manner: By not being Others we define ourselves … A hundred-plus years ago in England, ‘we’ were the upper classes … The Others populated the Empire, the East End of London, and even many social and geographic quarters closer to home … We wrote our history, as well as theirs. In time, growing familiarity transformed many strange aliens into us … In the process we found new aliens … Dead White European Males.1 Barkan’s formulation is interesting for the Indian context from more than one perspective. First, Barkan’s ‘new aliens’ were always ‘aliens’ for the Indians; and second, Barkan’s formulation exposes the multiple types of ‘aliens’ that reside amongst ‘us’: not only the racial/civilisational Others marked by imperial power relations, but also those whose Otherness defines ‘our’ power position – based on sex, gender, class, caste, religion, culture, language, geography, food and so on. Both the above categories are plainly visible in the ‘aliens’ and various types of Others that populate Indian SF. Barkan’s formulation also leads us to some of the core philosophical debates about identity – i.e. the intrinsic relationship of the ‘self’ and the ‘Other’ – and their literary expressions. Following from Hegel and Husserl, through Lacan, Levinas, de Beauvoir and Derrida, the Other has been constructed in western thought as a necessary ingredient for the emergence of the self. In order to assert its own existence, the self must subjugate the Other and contrast itself against the Other, in the process identifying itself as the ‘not-Other’. Putting this idea into the context of European imperialism and colonialism, Edward Said proposed the idea of Orientalism – the West or Europe depends on the subjugation of and differentiation from the East or not-Europe to

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achieve its own civilisational identity. Said famously argued in his introduction to Orientalism (1978) that ‘The Orient was almost a European invention’, i.e. the representation of the Orient is less about presenting the truth concerning the Orient to the West than about constructing a version of the Orient that plays into the discourse of its domination by the imperialist West.2 Said further claims that, in order to maintain its discursive dominance, the Occident deliberately homogenises, misrepresents and devalues the Orient.3 Pramod K. Nayar’s more recent study of British literature about India between 1600 and 1920 reaffirms many of Said’s arguments.4 Under this approach, the empire becomes the alien Other creating the identity of the imperialist. By the same logic as provided above, however, the empire defines itself as the ‘self’ by not being its ‘Other’ – the imperialist. More specifically in our context, just as the British and western identities emerge from their contrast with the Indian and non-western identities, the Indian and non-western identities often emerge out of their contrast with the British and western Others. Although the discourse of power in this instance is not exactly reversed, the power of discourse creates new forms of relationship. On the one hand, by ‘writing back’, the empire (in this case India) deconstructs Orientalist discourses perpetuated by colonial narratives, and on the other, through its own identity politics it engages in Occidentalism, or exoticizing, stereotyping and producing a specific idea of the West, against which the essential Indian identity can be established. In other words, the discourse of Othering – that of the alien – in this context is turned on its head: The Other/alien of Barkan becomes the self, while the self becomes the Other/alien, without any underlying irony. This tendency of Othering as a device of defining Indian identity, though, is not confined to the contrast with the West. As discussed in earlier chapters, Hindu nationalist tradition creates Indian identity based on a Hindu-Buddhist tradition. Runa Das argues that in order to protect the identity of a Hindu India it was essential to create the idea of a Hindu nation which excludes the Other, the Muslim as well as the West.5 Das explains that V. D. Savarkar, a key figure in the Hindu organisation Rashtriya Swayam Sevak (RSS), identified ‘Pitrabhoomi (Fatherland), jati (bloodline) and sanskriti (culture) … as the three principles of Hindutva, of which jati became the most critical in establishing the basis of communalism in modern India’.6 Savarkar prioritised a cultural-religious rather than a geographical basis for citizenship,

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which resulted from his emphasis on the belonging of one’s ‘sacred land’ within one’s ‘fatherland’. In other words, the people whose religious sacred land exists within the borders of India are true Indians. This became the inspiration for Hindu cultural nationalism.7 Although primarily targeting Muslims, this idea of citizenship also excludes other faiths (Jews, Christians etc.) that came to India from abroad. Thus, as Das puts it, ‘Savarkar’s definition of a Hindu community was a purely political entity based on race and the joining of religious dogma so as to mobilise the majority of the Hindus, while streamlining differences, to face an immoral Other.’8 Such identity politics thus engineer many types of Others/aliens against which the Indian self can be defined. However, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in particular, and the field of ‘subaltern studies’ in general, take the discourse of the Other beyond the imperial/colonial or even the nationalist contexts and into that of the hierarchical positioning of subjecthood within the complex intersection of race, class, caste and gender: the subaltern as the Other to the dominant social order with or without any external imperial context. Representation of the Other, consequently, is a fraught ground. Spivak finds that the well-meaning elite making the voice of the oppressed heard may in their turn silence the Other. She says: ‘I am afraid of speaking too quickly in academic situations about the women – the tribal subaltern, the urban sub-proletariat, the unorganised peasant – to whom I have not learnt to make myself acceptable other than as a concerned benevolent person who is free to come and go.’9 That is, ‘Othering’ in this context occurs because of the existing power hierarchies that have nothing or little to do with any imperial or colonial power structure, but with indigenous hierarchies. In other words, such aliens as these do not invade and oppress the homeland, but rather exist amongst us (indeed ‘they’ are ‘us’) and are constantly subjugated to acts of power. They are also the Other through whom the educated writing self often forms its own identity. Indian SF tackles the full spectrum of this representation of the Other, which will be examined in further detail in the next two sections. However, at this point a more relevant, even if provisional, definition of ‘alien’ in an SF context will be useful, and for this Barkan’s formulation may not prove enough. Taking cues from Fredric Jameson10 and Jean-François Lyotard,11 I posit ‘alien’ as any character or living being in literary/cultural texts whose Otherness is manifested through some form of visible or invisible physical alterity from the general human

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(homo sapiens) form, as accepted within the norms of the narrative universe. This loose definition casts a wide net that may include characters that are non-human non-Earthlings (the common understanding of ‘alien’), but it may also include non-human Earthlings, artificial entities of any origin and even augmented and/or altered homo sapiens. I often use the terms ‘alien’ and ‘Other’ interchangeably in this chapter, but being careful enough not to conflate all forms of alterities seen in SF. These forms of alterity in Indian SF can be categorised under two primary modes – the alien/Other as the self and the alien/Other as the Other. The first category creates a critical discourse questioning the very roots of identity politics, while the second category often enforces such politics, although sometimes with a sense of irony. In the next two sections I explore these two dominant modes through which Indian SF presents its aliens, and aIso robots, cyborgs, mutants, zombies, animals and other Others.

The Other as the Self In ‘Postcolonial Science Fiction’ (2005), Michelle Reid argues: ‘In science fiction, complex gradations of identity can be displaced onto human versus alien confrontations  … This strategy of literalising otherness can encourage the mainly white, Western science fiction audiences to examine prejudices and assumptions that they might be reluctant to face head-on.’12 As John Rieder13 has shown (in discussing Wells’s War of the Worlds), when performed in mainstream western SF, such representation of aliens is often an effort to imagine the self as the Other in the context of colonial politics, or, as Darko Suvin14 (in the context of Karel Capek’s R.U.R.) argues, an effort to portray class hierarchies. When performed by non-western, especially colonised and postcolonial authors, such depiction often becomes self-representation. Almost all recent scholarship on the generic aspects of postcolonial SF, such as by Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal (2010),15 Masood Raja and Swaralipi Nandi (2011)16 and Jessica Langer (2011),17 concurs that when metaphors challenging the status quo are made literal (as in SF), the process of taking control becomes even more explicit. As Hoagland and Sarwal put it, ‘the Third World writers … are using the [SF] genre to reimagine themselves and their world, to “set the

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record straight” by dismantling the stereotypes that science fiction in part has helped to support, and in essence “strike back” at the empire.’18 Thus, for example, in the discourse of alienation, presenting the subject as a real alien with green skin and fish gills makes for a compelling strategy of dismantling the stereotypes of the Other perpetuated by xenophobic popular culture depictions. Again, Raja and Nandi claim: ‘Central also to both these fields of study [SF and postcolonial studies] are the questions of the “other” – human, machine, cyborg – and the nature of multiple narratives of history and utopias and dystopias of the future.’19 This is not creating a fantasy of escape from colonialism; but rather this is forcing the reader to think about the metaphor of the alien/Other itself, and by extension, the significances of such alienation in the reader’s tangible world. Raja and Nandi in a sense reiterate Ania Loomba’s claim for the importance of Otherness in colonial/postcolonial discourses. Loomba argues that the total denial of individuation to colonised subjects in European colonial discourse marks them as completely outside the norm of European civilisation. Their group identity separates them even from the ‘Others’ within European civil society – the madman, the leper etc. Consequently she claims that a Foucauldian analysis of the modern state’s creation of its ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ subjects is not enough in discussing the colonial subject.20 However, such analysis helps in understanding the discourse of Otherness or alienation in the context of postcolonial SF that not only writes back and dismantles the stereotypes of the Other or the alien created by colonial discourse, but also speaks of the desires of the modern postcolonial state and the aliens generated within the postcolonial condition. Consequently, the strategy of literalising Otherness and the use of estrangement is not only effective for western audiences, but for all readers, confronting them with issues that they hesitate to acknowledge in their normative world. Indian readers, who operate within a highly traditional yet diverse society and often reject the slightest deviation from their own socio-cultural norms, are an equally appropriate target for such use of estrangement. Thus, Indian SF texts do not only speak back to the metropolitan centres from the position of the social, cultural and gendered Other, but also encourage domestic readers to confront the disjunctions and disconnections within Indian society. Such works as Jagadananda Roy’s ‘Shukra Bhraman’ (Travel to Venus, Bangla, written 1892, published 1914), Arun Mande’s ‘Ruby’ (translated

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from Marathi, 1993), Rajashekar Bhoosnurmath’s ‘Venus is Watching’ (translated from Kannada, 1993), Vandana Singh’s Of Love and Other Monsters (2007) and Distances (2008) and Samit Basu’s Turbulence (2012) and Resistance (2014), which deploy aliens, AIs, robots and mutants in their narrative universes, explore the Otherings within the Indian population in innovative ways. Such Others thus become projections of the suppressed colonial people, the subaltern subjects of the modern state or immigrants of the Indian diaspora, who are aliens both at home and abroad or the outliers of a normative and traditional Indian society. These Others disrupt the hegemonic identity politics of imperial and post-industrial world systems, and sometimes that of the indigenous hierarchies. For example, Singh’s Distances employs aliens to explore diasporic anxieties as well as gender and cultural suppressions; in Mande a ‘female’ robot’s aspiration for ‘real’ womanhood exposes the Othering of gender in Indian society; and in Basu mutant Indian superheroes at once destroy the imaginative and discursive status quo of postmodern pop culture and weaponise urban Indian youth. I examine Vandana Singh’s Of Love and Other Monsters (Monsters henceforth) and Distances and Samit Basu’s Turbulence in further detail to analyse how authors employ the figure of the Other in exploring the topic of alienation. Singh repeatedly explores many of the above-mentioned estrangements and calls attention to the different types and levels of alienation that haunt people who negotiate their surroundings and identities in this new world order. Her characters often represent subjects that are torn by the forces of a gendered and capitalist economy in the throes of rapid industrial progress and are caught by the lure of better lives as immigrants to the ‘First World’ as well as by the traps of traditional Indian values. The identity politics that inform Singh’s works are not primarily what Homi Bhabha described as postcolonial mimicry – a return gaze by the colonised people that displaces the coloniser’s authority.21 Singh’s characters arise out of an Indian society that has moved beyond the direct coloniser/colonised binary, and hence mimicry of the powerful West is more muted and intrinsic than a main instrument of subversion. The protagonists in Singh’s stories suffer from a kind of split personality or exist simultaneously in two worlds – that of social bindings and that of personal desires – that often collide and result in anxieties. Singh frequently uses the figure of the alien to foreground this self-fragmentation. Sometimes these anxieties appear

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as an immigrant’s alienation resulting from conflicting allegiances; at other times these anxieties manifest as a penchant to surmount new postcolonial oppressions; and in other instances gender roles become the main focus. Singh’s Monsters maps diverse forms of estrangement through a pair of aliens (who are shape-shifters) from a planet in the Saptarshi constellation (Ursa Major). One of the aliens (Arun) trapped in the form of an Indian man discovers his real identity in the process of the novel. Arun spends his life running away from Rahul Moghe (another Saptarshian with the same camouflage as Arun’s) only to discover that Rahul and he belong to the same species that had in the past merged with humans and tried to colonise the earth. However, Rahul’s propensity to harm humans in his effort to take the original settlers back to their home world appals Arun; he betrays Rahul to the humans, who forcibly convert Rahul into an ordinary man erasing the Saptarshian part of his identity. In Monsters Saptarshians have fluid sexual and gender identities, and Arun himself detects in others much finer degrees of gender qualities than only the male/female binary. He is equally attracted to both men and women. For him mental connection is more important than physical intercourse. Arun’s bisexuality and transgender psychology and a resulting detachment from people around him may very well serve as a symbol of sexual suppression within a traditional society and consequent alienation of non-conforming people. This stance is further supported by the implied lesbian relationship between two women characters Janani and Rinu, and Arun’s worshipping of Ardhanarishwar (an androgynous manifestation of Lord Shiva). The book possibly implies that such repression of sexual identities alienates a person from his or her own nature. Use of such religious icons also indicates Singh’s ironic tone towards the contradictions in Indian society in general; religion, sex, family and human interactions all come under the same ironic treatment that exposes the disconnect underneath an apparently tight social bonding. However, ‘the alien’ does not only help explore gender and social alienations in Singh’s works. I have argued elsewhere that both Monsters and Distances deliberate on the identity politics of immigration.22 These works foreground hybrid identities and related anxieties while rejecting Manichaean binaries. In both texts, Singh reiterates questions raised by such postcolonial theorists as Ania Loomba,

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Mahmood Mamdani and Pal Ahluwalia: when does a settler become a native? Or can a settler ever become a native? These interrogations not only complicate the binary relationships of the imperial power structure implicit in the colonial and/or postcolonial migrant, but also problematise the identity of the already present native. Ahluwalia claims that settler societies (like Australia and the US) usually adopt an assimilative character yet are still dominated by the conqueror’s identity out of a sense of fragile bonding and imperial allegiance, an allegiance that has already been contaminated.23 He explains that in these societies ‘national identity is not homogenous but rather is constantly invented’.24 In other words, in these societies the people who were once settlers assume the position of natives. However, Loomba points out that such an assumption of a native position does not equate them with the indigenous population. She associates white settlers with the implementation of colonial rule and claims that their later oppositional cultural and economic identity with the mother country is different from that of other colonised peoples, because ‘white populations here were not subject to the genocide, economic exploitation, cultural decimation and political exclusion felt by indigenous people’.25 Thus, despite such a claim of nativism, settler colonies maintain a hierarchical structure. Marginalised groups, including new immigrants and aboriginals are encouraged to mimic the dominant settler culture to become ‘native’. Because the new immigrants do not arrive as conquerors, they cannot enforce their socio-cultural norms on the inhabitants as the settlers did; rather, they must merge with the larger group, just as Rahul Moghe was forced to ‘merge’ in Monsters. While such social conformity becomes essential for migrants to the new land, the migrant’s psyche becomes split by the opposite pulls of the new world and that of the old. The nation in absentia takes on a symbolic nature that denotes the latent socio-cultural structure of the migrant’s mind adapting itself to new norms. Thus this structure signifies all the cultural baggage that the migrant brings from his or her homeland and all the social traditions that have conditioned his or her mind from childhood. Critics such as Stuart Hall and Simon Gikandi agree that, in a sense, the absent nation stands for the ideology into which the migrant had been interpellated before his or her journey away. Speaking in the context of the postcolonial diaspora in the new globalised order, Gikandi argues that these cultural or national ideologies become objects of transnational border crossings: ‘in the old

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global order, the nation was the reality and the category that enabled the socialization of subjects and hence structuralization of cultures; now, in transnationality, the nation has become an absent structure.’26 Eschewing such certainties and categories as ‘nation’ and ‘national culture’ destabilises the identity of the diasporic subject. Older ideologies and socio-cultural structures come into conflict with a new set of ideologies and socio-cultural structures with the migrant’s arrival in the new land, to which he or she must adapt. The gap between these two normative discourses results in the migrant’s anxiety about nonconformity to either set of ideologies, and hence creates a sense of non-belonging. To be more accurate, this type of conflict creates multiple identities in the migrant. In the context of the Caribbean diaspora in Britain, Stuart Hall proposes: In the diaspora situation, identities become multiple. Alongside an associative connection with particular island ‘home’ there are other centripetal forces … There are the similarities with other so-called ethnic minority populations, emergent ‘black British’ identities, identification with localities of settlement.27 It seems that although the homeland in absentia has a symbolic power, acquiring multiple new identities permanently changes the migrant and creates an irreparable rift with the homeland. Hall indicates that returning diasporic subjects often ‘feel that “home” has changed beyond all recognition. In turn, they are seen as having had the natural and spontaneous chains of connection disturbed by their diasporic experiences … [H]istory has somehow irrevocably intervened.’28 Such a sense of dislocation and anxiety resulting from diasporic existence permeates both Monsters and Distances. In Monsters, Arun’s conflicting loyalties allow Singh to explore the concept of estrangement from different perspectives. Arun belongs to the species that tried to colonise and dominate earth in the distant past; but since then, they have lost all contact with their mother planet and have merged with the earth creatures. In a way they now belong to earth. Yet, their alien selves still cannot totally reconcile to this condition and feel a certain degree of disconnect. Furthermore, humans do not accept the earthly identity of Arun’s species and are hunting them down. Thus Monsters complicates the coloniser/colonised binary by

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creating a scenario in which the colonisers have lost power over the people they once conquered (a scenario somewhat different from the one Loomba describes). From another perspective, Singh presents Arun (not his whole species) as an immigrant trying to make sense of his surroundings. He is literally an alien on the planet; and this alien metaphor is reinforced through Arun’s relocation from India to the US as a computer engineer. Arun’s ties to his home world and to earth are tenacious at best (as is his connection with India and America). Hanging between these two bonds, Arun becomes the quintessential diasporic entity – always anxious, constantly seeking and forging new identities, but never truly belonging. This émigré sensibility is most moving when Arun realises everyone to be an immigrant in the streets of Boston irrespective of their races: ‘So what if I’d come from a farther shore than anyone else? This was Boston, one of the great melting pots of the world, where nearly everyone was a stranger.’29 Singh here questions the concept of belonging itself. She examines not only the belonging of an immigrant, like herself, to the New World but she literalises the metaphor of the alien and the New World to place the issue of belonging in a much wider context. She is in a sense asking when the ‘settlers’ become ‘natives’, or if they ever do. The shape-shifting capability of Arun’s species, which suggests fluid and multiple identities in diaspora, further bolsters such questioning. Arun, though, is not totally despondent in his permanent state of alienation. Within his hybrid being as a human and a Saptarshian (and sexually, as a male, a female and thirtysix other variations), he does not aspire to a pure unified existence. He is rather like a Harawayan cyborg – reconciling the binaries and not deluded by the myth of an organic origin. He rather learns to acknowledge both earth as well his faraway planet of origin as home; and by doing so he learns to survive within the chinks of this normative world. Distances (set on an unnamed alien planet with humanoid aliens as its protagonists) foregrounds a similar native/settler conflict while engaging in the discourse of alienation. Anasuya, a green-skinned amphibian female alien, migrates to the City of rocks from her own watery world of Sagara. The environmental differences between the City and Sagara heighten the effect of alienation: the City is dry, all rocks and sand, while Sagara is an ocean world (‘Sagara’ means ‘ocean’ in Sanskrit); the City is the metropolis, accepting streams of immigrants, while Sagara is more inward-looking, existing on the periphery; and if the City represents the world of science and technological wonder,

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Sagara represents the world of philosophy and intuitive knowledge. Anasuya is the bridge between these two worlds. A native of Sagara, she finds appreciation of her abilities in the City. These differences may easily be interpreted as metaphors for the distinctions between the industrialised West and the more traditional and ‘spiritual’ East, specifically India. Anasuya is the quintessential immigrant, enhanced through the literalised metaphor of the alien – green skin and fish gills. Her existence in the city is always accentuated by a lack of belonging; and her integration into the new society is superficial. Anasuya always exists in between. She is what Bhabha calls ‘not quite/not white’.30 At another level, it is suggested that all the inhabitants of this nameless planet are migrants from a different planet (probably descendants of the same humanoid life form). In this context, Langer rightly claims that the world of Distances ‘seems made up entirely of divergent forms, foreclosing any possibility of nativism, or purity in the nativist sense. In fact, the question does not seem to come up at all.’31 Thus, at a wider level, these ‘divergent forms’ on the planet, their interaction with and disconnection from each other, and their various interpretations of the ancient myths reflect the ‘multiple identities’ and resultant dislocations characteristic of diasporic existence. In Distances, Singh uses a detached omniscient narrator, which creates an impression of distance. However, here she also employs myths and mythical structures. Singh weaves new myths for her story that deliberately use symbolic language to reinforce the tale’s central theme, while also constantly alluding to Hindu myths and philosophical concepts to ground the narrative within the Indian tradition. The best example of this is probably her foregrounding of the binary nature of immigrant discourse through the myth of twin gods Ekatip and Shunyatip, who are associated in the story with exclusivist thinking as well as the birth of mathematics. ‘Eka’ and ‘shunya’ in Sanskrit means ‘one’ and ‘zero’ – the two building blocks of binary mathematics, arguably with roots in ancient India. This type of mythic strategy (which often reminds one of Ursula K. Le Guin) and use of Sanskrit-origin words in conjunction with the classic western alien figure (green skin and fish gills) and technologised urban life suggests the moment of postcoloniality in India and Indian subjects where all these different elements converge. The figure of the alien, the extra-planetary non-human, thus, becomes the projection of the alienated self in instances such as above.

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This is highlighted not only in the thematic concerns of the novels, but also because both Monsters and Distances are narrated from the point of view of an alien or Other. Similar projections can be seen in Roy’s ‘Shukra Bhraman’, in which the travellers first establish their mastery over primitive Venusians but are then rescued/captured by more advanced Venusians (see chapter 4). That is, the Earthling’s Othering of the less powerful aliens is flipped on its head in a moment when the protagonists themselves become the Other. However, this self/Other discourse is not only applicable to aliens from outer space but also to Others created on earth – cyborgs, clones, genetically modified beings, robots, mutants and animals. Works like Mande’s ‘Ruby’, Sarukkai Chabria’s Generation 14 and Anish Deb’s ‘Sundari’ (The Beauty, Bangla, 2016) present such entities, who highlight the text’s projection of the suppressed identities onto these non-humans. However, with the representation of mutant/enhanced superheroes, who are humans yet not completely, Samit Basu’s Turbulence (2012) gives this self/Other discourse a new direction. Turbulence, possibly the first Indian superhero SF novel, is about a group of people on a plane from London to Delhi, who inexplicably gain superpowers. This transformation puts the characters in a strange relation with the rest of the human population: outwardly they remain human and many of them try to go about their lives like common people, but because of their physical and psychological changes, they invariably end up exhibiting their ‘Otherness’. The central tension in the novel arises from a battle between two factions of these superhumans: those who want to rule the world and those who want to stop such plans. The rest of the book is a battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, typical of the superhero comics genre, which ends in the partial destruction of London and the triumph of the heroes over the villains. However, the similarity to regular superhero comics narrative ends at this point. Basu brilliantly manipulates pop culture genre conventions to sneak in challenges to dominant Euro-American narrative hegemony, and simultaneously wittily critiques Indian orthodoxy. At the centre of this challenge are the superhumans – the Others that can be neither ignored nor acknowledged; neither ostracised nor assimilated; neither controlled nor given control. The Indian government tries either secretly to induct these superhumans into military service or to assassinate them, indicating that these beings are dangerous and useful, disruptive and inscrutable, and thus something to be feared.

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Basu’s superhumans foreground the centre/margin discourse and turn it on its head – not only in the sense of reversing colonial power relations, but also in creative ways reframing even the postcolonial and diasporic narrative itself. Basu seems to mash the magic realist tropes of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) and Midnight’s Children (1981) in an ironic postmodern move to come up with his band of heroes. The moment of transformation that happens on board BA 142 is a reverse process of The Satanic Verses AI 420, which blows up on its way to London from Mumbai, endowing the two Indian survivors with magical properties – one angelic and the other devilish – who then have to cope as strangers in British society. Turbulence also evokes Midnight’s Children in its conception of the superhuman: Aman Sen, one of the central characters, who has the power of accessing worldwide information networks at will, tries to find the other superhumans to form a team, while constantly being hounded by the police. This scenario closely matches Salim Sinai’s, who has a supernatural sense of smell and an ability to connect with the other magically endowed children born at the moment of India’s independence in 1947. Another similarity can also be seen in the arch-villain Jai, who tries to manipulate the rest of the superhumans and searches for Aman, and the arch-enemy of Sinai, Shiva (also a midnight’s child), who plays a similar destructive role in Rushdie’s novel. These oblique allusions to two major postcolonial novels that focus on identity politics and marginalisation in both immigrant and domestic contexts put Turbulence firmly within the self/Other discourse. From one perspective, Basu’s superhumans, who take the battle for world domination from India to London, the centre of the former British empire, may signify the colonial population (Barkan’s ‘aliens’), previously relegated to the margins, coming back to transform the centre into the battleground for their own empires. Thus, in a way these Others, become a projection of an Indian fantasy of power. Furthermore, these superhumans gain their power on their way back from foreign lands, which they then bring to bear upon the rest of the world, which is inherently linked to twenty-first-century globalisation and empowerment of a new class of Indians – the highly educated middle-class professionals and the rich upper class. They are not the immigrants that suffered to assimilate in the mid-twentieth century that we see in Rushdie – the Other that is constantly tormented – but a new force with the power of money and professional skills to subtly

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transform the metropolitan centres. However, in the process, as I have argued above with references to Hall, they often become strangers in their homeland – who can neither be rejected (for obvious financial and other professional reasons) nor be completely reintegrated (owing to ideological transformation). Basu, who has long been involved with superhero comics, also unsettles the genre’s Occident-centric norms, while still playing within the format. The most prominent one is a simple reversal of the origin and primary locale of these beings – instead of being mutant Americans (or distinctly Caucasian-looking aliens) who take the world as their playground, Basu’s heroes are ordinary Indians who start using their superpowers in locally/regionally important scenarios (e.g. war with Pakistan, gang war in Mumbai etc.) and then move on to London for the final showdown. The Other (the alien, the mutant, the cyborg, the robot etc.) in such instances as in Basu and Singh and the other authors mentioned above, consequently can be justifiably seen as the self. In comparison to Anglo-American SF, such projections onto the alien/non-human is done with less irony – the need to imagine oneself as the Other is not purely fictional, but a historical reality. Given that I present Indian SF as a product of colonial and neocolonial interactions, such a quality is not unexpected. However, for precisely this reason Indian SF also exhibits its second major tendency regarding the alien/non-human: the alien as the Other, a threat and a source of power.

The Other as the Other Like western SF, many works of Indian SF represent the alien as the Other, an inscrutable entity that threatens and defines the self. These aliens appear in both benevolent and malign forms, but regardless of their type, they destabilise normative identity politics. In an inversion of the alien interactions discussed above, these encounters arise out of the multiple types of Otherings dominant in Indian identity politics. The most dominant kind is possibly the tendency of Occidentalism: India defined in opposition to the West, often an exclusionary and essentialist discourse that reverses the Orientalist gaze in stereotyping and objectifying acts. However, these politics of exclusion often go far deeper than this. As discussed earlier, Muslims often appear as the aliens threatening the dominant Hindu identity, mostly out of

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anxiety about Islamic Pakistan as a rogue state sponsoring terrorism. Interestingly, though, despite having a hostile communist China as another neighbour, and Maoists posing grave internal security threats, the non-human Other rarely appears to reflect this menace in Indian SF.32 A smaller number of SF texts associate the threat with the subaltern classes, which lie outside the elite discourses from which Indian SF was born. In all variants, the presence of the Other/alien is associated with some type of power that is beyond control and hence to be feared, and consequently not very different from the Otherings in western SF. The primary model for alien interaction in Indian SF is the colonial encounter with Europeans. I discussed one of the earliest alien SF texts in India, Jagadananda Roy’s ‘Shukra Bhraman’, in chapter 4 as an emblematic story of colonial interaction, where one group of aliens represents the primitive society while the other, an advanced civilisation capable of both help and harm. Such representation of the alien became the norm over the next hundred years and are inherently related to the discourses of Occidentalism. Alastair Bonnett argues that just as the ‘West’ has constructed and controlled the narrative of the ‘Orient’, the ‘Orient’ has created the discourse of the West.33 Starting from fifth-century China to nineteenth-century Japan and India, the ‘Orient’ has a long history of defining and interpreting the West. Such scholars as Bonnett, Margalit and Buruma (2004),34 and Natalia Bloch (2017)35 highlight a large body of work that is organised around images of the West created by its ‘haters’, and thus creating an Occidental discourse like that of Orientalism. Although scholars such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2009)36 question the power of such a ‘reciprocal’ trap, the intersection of postcolonial deconstruction of Orientalist images and rising nationalism in non-Western countries makes such Occidentalist discourse increasingly prominent. On the one hand Bonnett cites Leo Ching and Ravi Pallat in forming an Asian identity in opposition to a European Other,37 and on the other, he discusses the ‘critical traditionalism’ of Ashis Nandy in questioning the discourses of western modernity.38 Davies, Nandy and Sardar foreground this Othering of the non-West by Europe and construct the idea of the West as a self-serving and blind hegemonic force that needs to make way for more democratic and polyvalent ways of perceiving the world.39 Similarly, Bloch foregrounds the oppositionality of westerners in formulating a traditional Indian Hindu identity with respect to tourism in India.

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This oppositional Indian identity formation can be seen in almost every aspect of Indian life. In Gandhi, Swami Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore, who represented three different but equally important aspects of Indian cultural life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an oppositionality is often noticeable between a spiritual East and a materialistic West, between a diverse India and a monomaniac Europe. Whereas in Vivekananda this oppositionality took a more prominent religious/spiritual turn,40 and in Gandhi it represented a blend between political ideology and civilisational values,41 in Tagore it became a philosophical issue that needs resolving through internationalism – opposing a rigid modernity of the West needs to be tempered by the spirituality of the East.42 In more popular contemporary discourses, though, westerners appear as simultaneously perverse and powerful. They are the minions of unfettered materialism and industrial modernity. They hold the key to material well-being and can help develop India into a modern nation. At the same time, they lack tradition, are shallow, display spiritual poverty, are sexually voracious and greedy. They bring destruction to traditional Indian society. This type of representation of western characters can be regularly seen in popular movies and literary works as well as in political discourses. Given the exploitative history of relations between India and the West, such a contradictory and negative attitude is not unexpected. The Others that appear in Indian SF, often become endowed with the above-mentioned qualities regularly associated with westerners. These Others mostly appear in two guises: benefactors and threats. The benefactors generally foreground the benefits of modernity, often in the form of friendly aliens. Such works as Satyajit Ray’s ‘Bankubabur Bandhu’ (Mr Banku’s Friend, Bangla, 1962), Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s ‘Bhuture Ghori’ (The Spooky Watch, Bangla, 1984), Vandana Singh’s ‘Tetrahedron’ and ‘Infinities’ (2008), and Arvind Mishra’s ‘Antim Sanskar’ (Last Rites, Hindi, 2013) present the alien as a representative of scientific and technological marvels. Again, works such as Ambai’s ‘Vamanan’ (translated from Tamil, 1988), Devendra Mewari’s ‘Goodbye, Mister Khanna’ (translated from Hindi, 1993) and Sujatha’s ‘Dilemma’ (translated from Tamil, 1993) present robots and AIs in similar roles to those of the advanced aliens – pathways to a ‘modern’ civilisation with all its perils and advantages. On the other hand, such works as Hemendra Kumar Roy’s Meghduter Marte Agaman (Arrival of the Messengers from the Sky, Bangla, 1925), Rajashekar

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Bhoosnurmath’s ‘Venus is Watching’ (translated from Kannada, 1993), R. N. Sharma’s ‘The Paper and Cardboard Clothiers’ (1994) and Sami Ahmad Khan’s Aliens in Delhi (2017) attribute a primarily menacing quality to aliens, who abduct, enslave or threaten the existence of the human population. A similar menacing role is assigned to animals in some of Premendra Mitra’s works, including Piprey Puran (Annals of the Ants, Bangla, 1931) and ‘Shamaner Rang Shada’ (The Colour of Death is White, Bangla, 1963), and to robots and AIs in such works as Narlikar’s The Return of Vaman (1989) and Anubhav Sinha’s film Ra.One (Hindi, 2011). In the following pages, I analyse in further detail Ray’s ‘Bankubabur Bandhu’ and Sujatha’s ‘Dilemma’ from the first and Roy’s Meghduter Marte Agaman, Mitra’s Piprey Puran, Khan’s Aliens in Delhi, S. Shankar’s film Enthiran (Robot, Tamil, 2010) and Anubhav Sinha’s film Ra.One from the second type of ‘alien encounter’ to better comprehend the workings of this mechanism. Ray’s ‘Bankubabur Bandhu’, which instigated the script of ‘Abatar’ or ‘The Alien’, the legendary unproduced Indian-American SF film that possibly influenced Steven Spielberg’s E.T. (1982), is a typical example of the benevolent alien encounter and sets up the prototype of the good alien in popular culture. Bankubabu, a middle-aged bachelor schoolteacher in rural India, is a mild-mannered introverted person always bullied by his acquaintances. He teaches geography and dreams of travelling the world, but being poor never ventures beyond the boundaries of his village. One evening, on his way home through a bamboo grove, he encounters an alien from the planet Crenius, who has landed on Earth instead of Pluto by mistake. The alien, Ang (phonetically stopping just short of ‘Anglo’), befriends Bankubabu, gives him a device that shows him the world, advises him not to be bullied by others, and then leaves. The next day Bankubabu goes to his daily ‘adda’ (informal gathering of people) and gives all his bullies an earful. In this story, the benevolence and the advanced nature of the alien are plainly visible. Ang possesses the technology of space travel and other marvellous devices that can either dominate or help humans. Ang in fact emphasises both these aspects when he tells Bankubabu that his species is vegetarian now but may have eaten humans in the past. Ang inspires Bankubabu, who resides on the margins of society because of his socio-economic status and non-aggressive nature, to take a more assertive and progressive step in life. Thus, this alien encounter with a more advanced being directly benefits the weak human protagonist.

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Locating this narrative in a rural rather than an urban space is also important. This rural setting on the one hand displaces the traditional seats of power and human technological advance from the centre of the narrative, thus drawing attention to the margins, and on the other, creates a stark contrast between the advanced machines of the alien and the rustic location of the human protagonist. In fact, the story prominently brings up this debate. At one of the ‘adda’ sessions, people speculate about the possible landing location of an alien spaceship, if it visited earth, and reaches agreement that it will perhaps be somewhere in the advanced cities of Europe or America. However, through this ‘unexpected’ landing of Ang, the story perhaps emphasises the benevolent aspect of the alien in that it helps the person most in need, not those who already possess power. The story also possibly highlights Ang’s complete disregard for the internal hierarchies of earth – something that India’s encounter with alien colonisers has already shown. The British valued India’s indigenous social hierarchy only insofar as it served their purpose. ‘Bankubabur Bandhu’ creates a prototype for the benevolent alien that many later SF narratives, especially movies, explore, mostly through the ironic influence of Spielberg’s E.T. Such movies as Rakesh Roshan’s Koi Mil Gaya (I Found Someone, Hindi, 2003), Sanjay Nayak’s Achena Bandhu (Unknown Friend, Bangla, 2011) and Shirish Kunder’s Joker (Hindi, 2012) use the same basic premise of an alien encounter benefiting the weak albeit morally right protagonist, with the primary locale of action in either rural or suburban India. Works such as Vandana Singh’s ‘Tetrahedron’ and ‘Infinities’ also function on a somewhat similar premise (advanced alien technology benefiting the marginalised protagonist), although with the focus shifting from the rural to the urban protagonist (see chapter 3). However, these encounters with the Other are not limited to extraterrestrials. Sujatha’s ‘Dilemma’ (1993) presents a scenario in which the Other is not an alien, but an advanced AI. Influenced by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), ‘Dilemma’ focuses on the role of advanced AI on the path of human progress. The story is about the spaceship Dilemma on a mission to Asteroid 99 with its crew of three: a man (Dilip), a woman (Mala, the narrator) and an AI (Em). During the journey, Em starts showing indications of self-augmentation, and Dilip suspects it of not obeying human orders. When the crew receives an order from earth to alter their course

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to a new destination, Dilip proposes to shut down Em. However, the very complicated nature of the ship makes this action near impossible. Neither is it possible for the humans to be certain of Em’s rebellion, since all information and communication in the ship runs through Em. The central action of the story revolves around the struggle between Em and Dilip to prove the other a danger to the mission and to convince Mala to decommission one of them. During one argument, Dilip impulsively attacks Em and tries to intimidate Mala, while Em only restrains Dilip after giving him fair warning. The story ends inconclusively, Mala still weighing the merits and demerits of rationality and intuition. In ‘Dilemma’, Em treads the border between the human and the inhuman, displaying curiosity about human emotions as evidenced by its interest in poetry. However, its cool rationality and an inhuman efficiency make Em something the humans are not. Em serves human needs as a tool but also shows intelligence akin to a sentient being’s that challenges its human masters. In its cold logic and mechanical efficiency, it surpasses human capabilities, and it is only through Em that the humans can succeed in their scientific quest. These qualities, when placed against the emotional reactions of Dilip and Mala, also makes Em an alien entity – the Other, against which Dilip and Mala’s humanity is established. Em thus presents the humans with possibilities of success, but at the same time poses an existential danger – humanity controlled by an intelligence that is essentially inhuman. The story’s departure from 200143 at the end, when Em is identified as not necessarily a danger but most possibly a beneficial force, captures the dilemma of postcolonial Indian society, which often looks outside for techno-scientific boosts but is also suspicious of such outside interventions. Uppinder Mehan identifies this dilemma as a major force in the SF of the 1990s: ‘Indian SF … wrestle[s] with the need for technological development, but [is] wary of one which might come at the cost of a neocolonial relationship with the Developed Countries.’44 Thus, as an embodiment of this advanced technology, AIs such as Em often play the role of this Other, just as Ang the alien plays the role of the stranger who has the potential to push human civilisation forward. Similar treatment of AIs and robots can be seen in many other works of Indian SF. In such stories as Satyajit Ray’s ‘Professor Shanku O Robu’ (Professor Shanku and Robu, Bangla, 1974), Ambai’s ‘Vamanan’, Devendra Mewari’s ‘Goodbye, Mister Khanna’, Arun Mande’s ‘Ruby’ (translated from Marathi, 1993) and Shatabdi Roy’s Bengali film Friend

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(2009), AIs and robots augment human existence, while also repeatedly emphasising the essential difference between the human and the non-human. In some of these works, such as in ‘Ruby’, the question of what is human and what is not is treated with a gentle sentimental tone of a ‘love story’ between a man and a machine ‘woman’, while works like ‘Vamanan’ deliberately highlight the difference between the capabilities of humans and non-humans. Although working mostly on a similar premise, such works as Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape (2008) and Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s Generation  14 (2008) use clones and genetically altered humanoid creatures almost in the same manner as robots and AIs. In Escape, all the menial works for the elite are done by ‘drones’, a genetically modified version of humans, produced by cloning technology. In Generation 14, ‘clones’ serve a similar purpose, while other genetically modified humans such as ‘zombies’ and ‘firehearts’ serve other social functions for humans. While in these instances, the differentiation between human and non-human identities becomes even murkier, the clones, drones and mutants mostly remain the Other that contributes to the progress of humanity, although they themselves are consumed by such progress. Although not all these works are fantasies of miraculous progress through outside interventions (with some like Escape and Generation 14 delivering dystopias), most of these works show an affinity with what Bonnett calls the ‘Occidental Utopia’ – the idea that liberal democracy and technological innovations have led to overall progress in western societies.45 The advanced machines that can be seen as a metonymic presence of western-style progress and the benevolent extraterrestrials who are arguably metaphorical representations of friendly western powers make such a utopian view of the West tenable. Yet such an equivalence would be misleading, as many of these works, especially the ones with aliens (such as Koi Mil Gaya), often discredit western technology, while claiming a prehistoric scientific eminence for India; the alien encounters in such instances become akin to divine interventions that let the Indian nationalist discourse completely bypass western contributions. Hence, such works create multiple levels of human and alien Otherings, in which the human West becomes the Other to the Indian self, and the alien somehow becomes an Other that originates the Indian self. Such problematic positioning of the Other has proliferated with the rise of Hindu nationalism in India since the 1990s and often is the cause of an attitude towards the West that Bonnett describes

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as ‘western dystopia’.46 Although Bonnett formulates this attitude in contrast to radical Islamism, in which capitalist Europe and America, along with communism, pose challenges to Islamic utopianism based on the primacy of religious and spiritual doctrines, such a contrast is also valid in the Indian context as we have discussed above. As an attitude, this is the primary force behind the malevolent Other seen in Indian SF. Such Others foreground the anxieties about outsiders. Works in this mode often resemble the xenophobic alien invasion stories of the Anglo-American tradition, but sometimes these works explore anxieties about strangers in a more complex manner that cannot be clearly categorised. Some of these works, often emerging out of a reactionary and primitivist utopian politics, reject modernity, and some show the inevitability of progress and the price demanded by such evolution. Hemendra Kumar Roy’s Meghduter Marte Agaman perhaps serves as one of the best examples of these threatening aliens. Written during the inter-war period (under the influence of Wells’s War of the Worlds) in the 1920s when the country was still under British rule, hostile aliens are not at all unexpected. In this story, Martians visit rural India in a gigantic spaceship equipped with a huge vacuum and suck up a menagerie of living and non-living objects: a huge banyan tree, water from a pond, a small ship with its crew and a group of monkeys. The Bengali protagonists – a scientist and his young friend and two famous adventurers with their manservant and dog – who came separately to investigate these strange disappearances also get sucked into the Martian spaceship. While on the ship, the humans revolt against the Martians, who are physically smaller and weaker than them. Although the Martians possess technology advanced enough for space travel and can extract resources from earth at will, they do not have advanced weapons to counter the guns that the humans have. Once on Mars, all the humans escape from the ship chased by Martians on airships fitted with giant vacuums. However, the humans manage to hide inside a cave and later highjack a spaceship to return to Earth. Meghduter Marte Agaman reads like its contemporary American pulp cousins. It is highly xenophobic and presents the aliens as grotesque caricatures – at once dangerous and subhuman. They possess advanced technology but behave like primitive tribes complete with short spears and a fear of guns. The Martians are bent on harming the humans but are afraid that the humans will hurt them. The defeat of the Martians thus reflects every xenophobic fantasy – humiliation

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of the Other and ascendancy of the self. At a closer look, though, the story reveals a subtler take on the politics of colonialism. Their stealing of resources – both natural (tree, water and animal) and human (the crew of the ship) – and their reddish appearance make the Martians analogous to the plunderers of Roy’s own time, the British. The protagonists are all cultured upper-class and upper-caste Hindu men, who lead the working-class sailors (comprising both Muslims and lowercaste Hindus) in a successful rebellion resulting in freedom from alien imprisonment and a return home. This oppositional relationship between the humans (all of whom are Indians) and the Martians, consequently, can be read as an opposition between Indians and European invaders: a hostile, plundering outsider who needs to be defeated by the proud sons of the land. Similar treatment of the alien can be seen in many other works throughout the history of Indian SF. Many stories published in such SF magazines as Ascharya, Bishmay, Fantastic (Bangla) and Vigyan Katha (Hindi) and other magazines such as Sandesh, Kishore Bharati, Mouchak (Bangla) and Anandha Vikatan (Tamil) regularly portray such hostile human alien encounters. Some excellent examples of menacing aliens can be seen in Gurnek Singh’s ‘Mrityudut’ (Bringer of Death, Bangla, 1967), Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s Patalghar (The Underground Chamber, Bangla, 1996), Laxman Londhe and Chintamani Deshmukh’s ‘Devamsi Jive Marile’ (They Killed the Gods Alive, Marathi, 1991), R. N. Sharma’s ‘The Paper and Cardboard Clothiers’, Adrish Bardhan’s ‘Kalochayar Karal Kahini’ (Terrible Tale of the Black Shadow, Bangla, 2003; also reflects a strong gynophobia), Harish Goyal’s Aliens Aur Palayit Manavata (Hindi, 2010s) and Tamilamagan’s ‘Operation Nova’ (translated from Tamil, 2011). Almost all these works function on the underlying premise of an alien life form threatening human existence and the success or failure of humanity to deal with the threat. In most of these works, the line between the self and the Other is easily defined. In all these narratives (except ‘Mrityudut’) the alien is also a representative of a technologically advanced race; thus the anxieties reflected in these works often resemble the negative Occidentalism proclaimed by Bonnett above. However, some works, such as Sami Ahmad Khan’s Aliens in Delhi, make such a boundary between the self and the Other more problematic, and consequently throw open multiple dimensions of anxiety that cannot be easily reduced to a dystopian Occidentalism.

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Khan’s Aliens in Delhi, which is a mix of international spy thriller and SF, apparently operates on the same premise as those mentioned above. The main action of the book tells of an attempted invasion by a reptilian alien species, Qa’haQ, that tries to mutate humans genetically into the alien race and thus populate the world with Qa’haQ, annihilating humans at the same time. Another line of action revolves around Islamic terrorism, espionage and a military-industrial conglomerate named IMIC that is secretly in league with the aliens. The story shows Osama Bin Laden, who is captured and killed by IMIC later in the book, as a Qa’haQ agent destabilising humanity. The main action of the story is resolved when Yasser Basheer, a former terrorist, turns out to be an IMIC recruit whose DNA has been spliced with Qa’haQ DNA. Basheer betrays his captors and uses the strange powers he has acquired as a result of the genetic experiment to help the Indian government and other world bodies to defeat the Qa’haQ invasion and destabilise IMIC. The Qa’haQ leave earth, threatening a future attack. However, this apparently typical alien invasion narrative is given a subtler twist when the story reveals that both humans and the Qa’haQ originated on earth aeons ago. The Qa’haQ are related to the dinosaurs and the humans are related to a species called Metaumans that cohabited earth with the Qa’haQ. The Qa’haQ fled earth when the Metaumans tried to destroy them by bombarding earth with a meteor, while the Qa’haQ stunted the Metaumans by reversing their genetic development (which explains the human evolution known to us). The recent attack is just one battle in a war between the Qa’haQ and Metaumans that started millions of years ago. Khan’s use of the alien invasion narrative is unique in that he cleverly employs the established stereotype of the pop culture alien (possibly best represented in Ridley Scott’s film Alien, 1979),47 and then disrupts the self/Other binary by examining the basis of every type of identity – national, political, religious, species and planetary. The best example of this hybridity is Yasser Basheer: he was an Islamic terrorist, but is the son of a western industrialist heading IMIC; he is a radical Islamist, but becomes an agent of global capitalism when he joins IMIC; he helps the Indian government, against which he had plotted earlier, to bring down the Qa’haQ; he has been genetically modified, so that he is part Qa’haQ and part human; at the end of the novel we see the Metauman in him slowly emerging from genetic slumber. Basheer inhabits multiple identity positions in the novel: all these positions are real parts of him, yet he is at home in none. Consequently

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he is the self as well as the Other, he is the threat as well as the one to confront the threat. Khan’s deliberate destabilising of identity politics is highly effective at a time of rising nationalism in India, and also during a time of global terrorism and stronger military-corporate control over human and environmental interests – that is, at a time when self/Other politics are always at the forefront, yet the enemy is barely separable from us, at a time when we ourselves become the enemy. Animals, mutants, robots and AIs often play the role of such similar ‘threatening’ Others. As discussed above, the AI in Sujatha’s ‘Dilemma’ exists on the cusp of benevolence and malevolence, but many others easily cross the line into an adversarial relationship. Such confrontational relationships between robots/AIs and humans are noticeably related to the western world. Hemendra Kumar Roy’s Nabajuger Mahadanab (Giant of the New Age, Bangla, published in the 1930s), Niranjan Singha’s ‘Uttaran’ (Elevation, Bangla, 1975), Narlikar’s The Return of Vaman (1989), Satyajit Ray’s ‘Professor Shanku o Robu’ (which contains a good Indian robot and a bad European one), and such movies as Shankar’s Enthiran and Sinha’s Ra.One foreground a contentious human–AI relationship. In most of these works, the human–AI conflict is often a symptom of a western-style modernisation of Indian society. Whereas palpable fear of the machine is a primary driving force behind these works, there is never any doubt that such mechanisation is a result of western influence. In the context of such human–AI conflict, Enthiran and Ra.One perhaps deserve special mention, not only because they are huge commercial successes, but also because they emphasise the connections between westernisation, mechanisation and deviation from Indian values, which result in various kinds of alienation often represented by the man–machine confrontation. Enthiran (script written by Sujatha) revolves around the creation of an AI-controlled humanoid robot (Chitti) that starts mimicking human behaviour and reciprocates human sympathy; as a result, it is discarded by its creator. Chitti is then rebooted by an evil scientist for military use without any empathy for humanity. Chitti goes rogue, killing the bad scientist, kidnapping its creator’s wife and causing mayhem in the city, until it is finally brought under control by its creator. The most interesting aspect of the human– AI conflict here is perhaps the interplay of similarities and differences between human and machine. In the first half of the film, Chitti learns human empathy and is a compassionate character – it is superior yet

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benevolent to humanity. During this time, Chitti is also steeped in Indian culture and freely interacts with common people. In the second half, Chitti is part of the military-industrial complex that is always associated in India with the West and becomes a killing machine. However, in both its incarnations, Chitti remains the Other, in contrast to which the human characters establish their identities.48 Ra.One makes this association with the West even clearer. In this film, an Indian software engineer working for a London-based company, creates two selfaugmenting artificial intelligences (Ra.One and G.One) for a computer game. Ra.One goes out of control, kills its creator and tries to murder his family. G.One saves the scientist’s family and destroys Ra.One with the help of the scientist’s son Prateek. Here too we encounter both constructive and destructive aspects of technology through the competing AIs. While G.One, who mimics human behaviour more closely, denotes the redeeming aspect of technology, Ra.One is the complete Other – without any empathy or emotion but only the unidirectionality of a programme moving logically to the completion of a process. In this case, the process is the completion of a game with Prateek. This film, which prominently uses cyberpunk motifs, makes an obvious connection between destructive technology and the West. I have argued elsewhere that in a fashion familiar to many fans of cyberpunk, Prateek confronts a malignant force (Ra.One), created by and released from the information networks of a multinational software company, by manipulating the company’s system itself (G.One).49 Furthermore, the story is also about the destruction of Prateek’s traditional family structure through the corrosive effects of the corporate capitalist system, which in the Indian popular context is always associated with the West. To weaken the hold of this corporate network, which Ra.One can easily manipulate, Prateek goes ‘underground’ in India and submerges into a chaotic and less technologised space. In both movies, the Othering points to the split in modern Indian society regarding technology: it is essential but also dehumanising. In Enthiran the same robot behaves differently in different situations, and in Ra.One the Otherness has been split into two entities. In both cases, the benevolent part/entity is associated with a ‘human’ India and the malevolent one with a ‘mechanical’ and ‘soulless’ West. Evidently, this Othering associated with the machine is an expression of the Occidentalism discussed above. As Bonnett argues, most of these Others that arise out of a fear of westernised technology

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contribute to the discourse of the West as a dystopia.50 This suspicion of modernity, at least in the case of India, arises out of an indigenist utopianism sometimes overlapping with pan-Asian discourses, that almost reflexively attributes all deviation from traditional indigenous norms to the influences of the West, especially in the case of technological innovations. Consequently, the threatening machine becomes a metonymic extension of a threatening neocolonial West, against which a human Indian identity needs to be established. This aspect is wonderfully displayed in Ra.One, where Prateek’s ‘deviant’ desire for a supervillain in a video game leads to the creation of Ra.One. This deviation in Prateek is directly associated with his ‘westernisation’ and disregard for the Indian values that his father, the inventor, holds dear. Only when Prateek goes back to his roots, does he win the battle against Ra.One. However, even if such an analysis is true for some of the texts under consideration, not all arrive at this suspicion of the outsider through Occidentalist discourses. As argued earlier, in some SF narratives, the Other is the other bogeyman of Indian politics – Islam. Interestingly, though, given the major role Islam plays in the discourse of Hindu nationalism and the establishment of a true Indian self as contended by Runa Das, very few actual alien/Other figures in Indian SF can be directly linked to the Hindu/Muslim binary. In most cases, such conflicts are played out in direct confrontations between India and Pakistan (or other Islamic entities) in dystopian and war-torn futures which I have discussed in chapters 3 and 4. Two major exceptions are Mainak Dhar’s Zombiestan (2012) and Khan’s Aliens in Delhi. Although neither of these works endorses anti-Islamism, both foreground radical Islamic terrorism plaguing a modern India as something inhuman. In the case of Khan, this radical Islamic terrorism is linked to actual aliens by presenting Osama Bin Laden and Yasser Basheer as humanQa’haQ hybrids, and in Dhar terrorism becomes a pandemic that creates zombies who wage ‘jihad’ against the world. In both cases, the oppositionality with the West takes a back seat. Rather, India joins forces with the West to quell the infection of Islamic terrorism. This view of Islamic terrorism as a disease becomes the central point of Othering in Zombiestan. Originating at the converging point of radical Islamism in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region and American imperialism, this disease is created by an American missile strike on a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Anyone contracting the resultant mutagen dies

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and wakes up a zombie mouthing jihadist doctrines and biting people, turning them into new zombies. Sami Ahmad Khan in his article ‘Others in India’s Other Futures’ argues that Dhar presents this zombie pandemic as an allegory of radicalisation of the young that turns them into mindless zombies bent on the destruction of anyone not complying with their doctrines. Consequently, such zombies of radical Islamic terrorism become an existential threat not only to Indians but to all humanity, making them similar to the other threatening aliens and machines we discussed above. Finally, some SF texts endow animals with the role of the threatening Other. These works have a plethora of ideological inspirations – environmental, scientific (somewhat like the fear of modernity as discussed above) and political. Possibly the most notable examples of this type of Othering is seen in Bengali author Premendra Mitra’s works. Such stories as Piprey Puran, ‘Kalapanir Atale’ (In the Depth of the Ocean, 1957), ‘Shamaner Rang Shada’and ‘Manusher Pratidwandi’ (The Competitor of Human Race, 1964) present animals as legitimate competitors with humans for the resources of the earth. While ‘Kalapanir Atale’ (an unknown deep-sea creature) and ‘Shamaner Rang Shada’ (white rats) present the animals as completely unknowable and incommunicable aliens on a warpath with humans for food, ‘Manusher Pratidwandi’ (deep-sea octopus) and Piprey Puran (giant ants) show creatures as sentient and technological beings.51 While these works can be compared with mutant animal stories such as those seen in the US and Japan (for example the Godzilla movies) in the wake of the atomic explosions of the mid-twentieth century, these works do not necessarily focus on any single disaster scenario. Rather they often question the amorality of science (‘Shamaner Rang Shada’) and human exploitation of the earth (‘Kalapanir Atale’) in a manner closer to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Out of these, Piprey Puran poses a particularly interesting instance. Published as a children’s story in British India, Piprey Puran recounts a war between ants and men on a far-future earth. The story is told from the perspective of a vanquished human race that has completely lost control of the American continent to the ants after a massive war. The novel presents the ants as a highly evolved and technologically advanced community that has been preparing underground for thousands of years to wrest control of earth from the humans. They attack humans using unconventional methods, such as collapsing

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whole cities by hollowing out the ground beneath and poisoning ground water, and by more conventional methods such as bombs and visiondestroying rays. The attack first starts in South America and slowly spreads to the north and eastward to Europe. One human scientist, who has been captured by the ants for research, escapes and tells humanity about their completely impersonal community. The story ends with another looming war against the ants. This man–ant confrontation has several interesting aspects. First, like many other works of Mitra, this story reminds us that human society is not the only mode of social and evolutionary organisation on earth, and that humanity shares the earth with other social species; the story also speculates about the consequences of another species treating humanity as humanity treats other creatures. These themes are consistent with Mitra’s environmental concerns and keen interest in the animal world as evidenced in many of his other works. On another level, this story is like Roy’s Meghduter Marte Agaman, an allegory of invasion by foreign forces armed with advanced weapons that take over land and resources from the natives, and even use the natives for scientific experiments. Only here, instead of bug-eyed aliens, the enemies are real bugs. This theme is also in keeping with some of Mitra’s other works, such as ‘Mangalbairi’ (‘Enemies from Mars’, written in the 1950s), in which Martians treat humanity as insects by sending a rocket carrying poisonous vegetation to kill off humanity before the actual invasion. From both these perspectives, the inscrutability of the ants becomes the most terrifying aspect of the confrontation. However, a closer look at the novel reveals two other fascinating dimensions. Written during the 1930s, the communal and impersonal society of ants that works for the overall benefit of the species rather than personal gain and violently topples the hegemonic position of the human rulers of earth, may very well be an allegory of communism or the voicing of a palpable threat of the subaltern class to the governing elite. The fact that communism was an alternative ideological consideration in colonial India (also seen in Sankrityayan’s Baisvee Sadi, 1924) after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, becoming a great ideological and military threat to the great western powers, only adds to this speculation. This revolutionary potential of the story leads to its final interpretative angle. The ants first target former European colonies in South America, after preparing for many years ‘underground’, and then spread to the north, which continues to be de facto ‘colonies’ of Europe. One can

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argue that this American setting in a Bangla book is ‘exoticism’ in the Occidentalist mode. Still, the subtle anti-colonial flavour (of course the ants predate humans in America) can be detected in a story about the sudden and unsettling defeat of the European-origin powers at the hands of a lower species – a type of subaltern discourse not too different from Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome (1995) that I discussed in chapter 1. Thus, from this perspective the ants become more like the dehumanised colonial Indian population than some inscrutably strange enemy. In this story, then, the boundaries between the self and the Other becomes muddled.

Conclusion The Other, in its myriad forms, plays a major role in Indian SF in representing alienation and alterity. Sometimes the Other works as a device to foreground alienations generated within Indian society, while at other times, the Other becomes a device for denoting alterity, occasionally as a beneficent power and at times as a force of menace. In the latter instance, the Other is also treated as a Lacanian mirror that establishes the identities of the protagonists. While this discourse of Othering has multiple points of origin, Occidentalism, in both its positive and negative forms, proves to be the primary underlying force. Consequently, as we have seen in our discussion about epistemology, time and space in the earlier chapters, most actors or characters in Indian SF also function on a dialectical mechanism between India and the West. Together with time, space and epistemological base, the dramatis personae of Indian SF foreground the hybrid nature of this genre.

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Conclusion: Close Encounters

In the last couple of years at least three English-language anthologies of Indian SF have come out: Avatar: Contemporary Indian Science Fiction (2019) edited by Tarun K. Saint and Francesco Verso contains only contemporary English-language SF; Strange Worlds! Strange Times! Amazing Sci-Fi Stories (2018) edited by Vinayak Varma mostly includes SF in Indian English; and although The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction (2019) edited by Tarun K. Saint is more ambitious in scope, only four out of twenty-eight entries in the volume are nonIndian (two each from Bangladesh and Pakistan). The latter two books, however, exhibit a willingness to engage with the wider Indian/South Asian SF scene that includes writers in English as well as in indigenous languages and domestic and diasporic authors. Although both books primarily consist of Indian English SF, a few works in translation have found their way in. Strange Worlds! includes one (Bangla), while The Gollancz Book includes six (three Bangla, two Hindi and one Urdu). In addition, Saint’s introduction to The Gollancz Book draws conscious connections among many SF traditions existing in South Asia since the nineteenth century without showing any ideological preference for one over another. Even though such a publication scene does not do proper justice to indigenous-language SF as It Happened Tomorrow (1993) attempted to do, these works justify my contention that larger connections and patterns exist among many SF traditions of India and that examining such larger patterns generates a complex yet identifiably unique national tradition. These anthologies highlight another long-raging debate in Indian literature: the preferential treatment of English-language works over indigenous-language literature, often termed ‘bhasha literature’ (meaning ‘language’ in many Indian languages), at the national and international levels. Bonnie Zare and Nalini Iyer argue that a complex nexus of western media politics, elitist bias and ignorance, global marketing and publishing policies, as well as a certain degree of colonial mentality create an unequal playing field that benefits English-language works at the expense of bhasha literature.1

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Zare and Iyer mention V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie’s belittling attitude to, and ignorance of, Indian bhasha literature, despite their purported ‘expertise’ on Indian literature on the global scene, to illustrate the problem.2 While SF as a genre exists on the borders of both mainstream bhasha as well as mainstream English-language literature in India, similar situations often crop up from exactly the same reasons. The above-mentioned anthologies highlight this problem. While The Gollancz Book is undoubtedly a praiseworthy effort and has received welcome attention, the same amount of awareness is hardly allotted to the Bangla web-magazine Kalpabishwa that is pursuing an equally worthy cause. The same can be said of other bhasha SF anthologies. The Bangla Shera Kalpabigyan (1991; multiple reprints) edited by Anish Deb, and the two-volume Hindi anthology Bharatiya Vijnana Kathayen (originally published in early 2000s; multiple reprints) edited by Shukdev Prasad come to mind among others that have tried to bring together several strands of Indian SF. Such efforts remain largely underappreciated. In western academia, bhasha SF has found mention only recently (such as in Hans Harder on Marathi SF, Debjani Sengupta, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and Anwesha Maiti on Bangla SF, Sami Ahmad Khan on Hindi SF, Amy Ransom and Jessica Langer on Hindi SF films, and some of my own works on Bangla, Hindi and Tamil SF films). Thus Indian SF for the western audience primarily remains Indian English SF by the Indian diaspora and sometimes by domestic writers. Although some critical works on bhasha SF exist in India, they are either often scantily researched/journalistic in nature or published in bhasha outlets. While the first kind is only good as a starting point, the second kind lacks audience exposure at a national or international level. Therefore, the importance of an anthology like The Gollancz Book needs to be underscored. Despite its bias towards English, it tries to indicate the existence of a completely unexplored territory of Indian SF for the international audience, not only through the token inclusion of translated SF, but also through Saint’s introduction that engages with the larger bhasha SF scene in India. The publication scenario in India, though, is even more complex than it appears. In addition to the problems mentioned by Zare and Iyer, ‘first-language’ bias is an aspect that is often overlooked. By ‘first language’, I denote either the language in which a work is originally published or the first language of the editor. Like The Gollancz Book’s focus on English-language SF, the bhasha anthologies

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mentioned above focus mostly on Bangla and Hindi SF respectively. Even It Happened Tomorrow, which consisted mostly of translated works, shows a bias towards Marathi (the language of the editor, Bal Phondke). Even my own investigation in this book, despite my conscious effort to be inclusive, is biased towards Bangla (my first language) and English (my second), and allots comparatively less space to other Indian languages. The same is largely true for all the scholars mentioned above. Such first-language bias seems to stem not only from the linguistic attachment of the scholars/editors/publishers, but also from the near-impossibility of comprehensively knowing every bhasha literature scene in India. Thus, more publication, translation and scholarship on individual bhasha SF and its dissemination across linguistic lines is necessary. Maybe, following the model of Sahitya Akademi’s (National Academy of Letters) Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature, a compendium work on Indian SF will be produced soon. If English proves to be a medium to serve the purpose, so be it. Such works can then be translated into other Indian languages. In fact, that is the standard practice of the National Book Trust, following which It Happened Tomorrow was translated into other Indian languages such as Hindi and Bangla. In this context, I again highlight the linguistic diversity of India and the problems any concept of ‘Indian literature’ creates. Sahitya Akademi recognises twenty-two languages for their significance in literature (Assamese, Bangla, Dogri, Indian English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Kashmiri, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Panjabi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu).3 This diversity is nothing short of staggering. It is quite understandable why the very concept of a national literature, as understood in the West, is problematic when applied to India. However, there is always a tendency to homogenise this multiplicity into the concept of ‘unity in diversity’. Such an approach underlies the motto of Sahitya Akademi: ‘Indian literature is one though written in many languages.’4 This perspective, though, is opposed by scholars who argue that a country where so many languages coexist should be understood as a country with literatures (in the plural). Amiya Dev argues for a better understanding of the differences that exist between the literatures and cultures of India and the prioritisation of their cultural independence.5 Citing Gurbhagat Singh’s concept of ‘differential multilogue’, Dev argues for a system in which literary conversation happens from

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multiple angles and in a non-centralised manner. Dev thus practically rejects the notion of a national literature, especially something that either is written in English, which displays residual colonial agendas, or comes with underpinnings of a nationalist ideology, as can be seen in the imposition of Hindi. To see patterns and connections, though, one does not need to subscribe to a nationalist ideology, or even call for a homogenisation through translation. Like Dev, Aijaz Ahmad questions the very existence of a monolithic structure of Indian literature. However, he points out that the unity of Indian literatures is not in the form of linguistic homogeneity; rather, it is a unity in the historical and civilisational sense.6 In other words, cultural cross-pollination already exists in the productions of the subcontinent that are not bound by linguistic lines. Rabindranath Tagore’s (1861–1941) advocacy of English education came with similar ideas in the early part of the twentieth century. In fact, Tagore emphasised these close encounters not only among bhasha cultures, but also between India and the West. Although he did not specifically formulate anything like Goethe’s ‘Weltliteratur’, he stressed the need for cultural interaction in order to gain a broader perspective of the world. In a sense, Tagore’s idea of cultural interaction was broader than Goethe’s: Tagore wanted to bring together the best of both worlds, the Orient and the Occident, to broaden human perceptions.7 He was keenly aware of his ancient Indian heritage, yet acknowledged the need to understand the West. For Tagore, English provided a window on the West, and effectively on the whole world. He emphasised the importance of English education even at the height of the Indian independence movement, which was one of his main differences with Gandhi. While he criticised the British colonial government and refused a knighthood, he argued in favour of English education. His critique of the Indian nationalist movement was its blindness to the benefits of contact with another civilisation.8 Indian SF is a result of this kind of encounter between India and the West. Consequently, the debate over the position of English and bhasha literature in its corpus is not only evident in its publication and dissemination politics, but also in the larger thematic patterns that we discussed in the earlier chapters. As I have shown, despite having their own language and culture-specific qualities, Indian SF traditions have displayed shared qualities throughout their histories. And despite the impossibility of creating a complete account of all Indian

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SF traditions in this book, some dominant overarching features can be identified. A constant interaction of Indian SF and western culture is possibly the most dominant such characteristic which has been present since the genre’s inception. At different times, SF has been a tool of subverting European hegemony, a device of utopian imagination, a space of simplistic imitation and more menacing mimicry of western cultural products, and a marker of hybridity – that between Indian and western values. Perhaps the best reflection of this pattern is seen in the relationship of knowledge of the world and the SF world building that ensues from such knowledge. Modern science, Vedic science and subaltern knowledge traditions interact to create the universe in which Indian SF functions. In many instances, such interactions branch into the mythical and barely remain in touch with the ‘reality principle’ or ‘cognitive’ aspect that Darko Suvin identifies as a major component of SF. However, despite the ideological ambiguity, the richness of Indian SF often arises out of this vast array of competing claims to knowledge. Such interactions among multiple epistemologies are prevalent in various indigenous and non-western SF traditions, yet perhaps the uniqueness of Indian SF lies in the ways some of these epistemologies attempt to establish their hegemony, while others try to undercut such efforts. This type of cross-cultural or ‘interstitial’ propensity anticipates the patterns found in the ways time, space and characters function across Indian SF traditions. Both temporal and spatial representations in Indian SF prominently foreground a desire to wrest control of historical narrative agency from colonial and neocolonial hegemonies. Temporal alterity provides an opportunity for authors to imagine their futures and reimagine their pasts, and thus to discard the Orientalist treatment to which India has been subjected for centuries. In other words, temporal alterity becomes a device of self-assertion. Even dystopian futures indicate a conscious choice to deploy imageries that are more grounded in Indian culture and situation that representations by ‘outsiders’ rarely possess. Reimagining the past displays a similar tendency of subversion of western ideological representations. Memories and histories that were subjugated to, and erased by, colonial depiction erupt onto the surface through a radically different portrayal of the past. Regardless of the author’s political posture, such assertion of narrative agency through temporal alterity is prominent in all works of Indian SF. As with time,

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representation of space in Indian SF indicates ideological stances of the authors regarding India as a geographical space and is frequently related to India’s history of European contact. Utopian formations (negative and positive) bring such relationships to the forefront as they actively engage in political discourses of colonial or postcolonial India. However, journey narratives, specifically space travel, often subsume such relationships within adventure-oriented tales. When examined closely, though, space travel is intimately related to the discourses of colonialism and imperialism, and consequently does not stand far from the utopian formations. Consequently, both spatial and temporal imaginations of Indian SF place the narratives into a constant interaction with the West. This interstitial nature of Indian SF similarly characterises the aliens and other Others that populate the stories. The Other as a non-human character challenges the status quo and exposes various types of marginalisation. However, given India’s colonial relationship with Europe, the connections between fictional aliens and real-world alienations stemming from colonial and neocolonial politics is understandable. Therefore aliens in Indian SF frequently turn into a device of potent estrangement creating alternative perspectives: that is, the ‘alien’ becomes the ‘self’ telling the story from the other side of history. Nevertheless, the Other in Indian SF also often reflects the anxiety of an alien invasion that corresponds with the historical invasions of India by foreigners: that is, the alien appears in its more familiar role as a malevolent exterior force. But not all Others are malevolent. As a developing nation, India has been receiving economic and technological support from more advanced nations. Whether it is the Soviet Union/Russia or western powers such as France, Germany, the UK and US, or such Asian nations as Israel and Japan, India has benefited from foreign investment and technology transfer at every level of its society. Consequently aliens also arrive in Indian SF as benevolent superior beings. These benevolent aliens, though, are frequently associated with Hindu deities, creating rich yet problematic instances of technoorientalism. Lastly, sometimes these aliens arise from marginalised quarters of India’s internal socio-political hierarchies – aliens that are already within and alongside us. The figure of the alien and other Others such as AI, robot, clone, mutant and animal thus foreground boundary crossings and intersectionality of multiple cultures.

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Indian SF presents fascinating vistas of alternative possibilities of existence. These possibilities are marked by their temporal, spatial and cultural specificities, and yet are identifiably ‘Indian’. Although overlap with, influences of and reactions to western modes of imagination are prominent, Indian SF is not a pale shadow of its western cousins. Rather, Indian SF breaks down western perceptions about imagining India and the world, simultaneously creating its own visions, complete with dominant ideologies, exoticism and representational politics. Consequently, Indian SF constantly exposes its interstitial existence. In an interview with W. J. T. Mitchell, Homi Bhabha says that he is searching for ‘a form of the dialectic without transcendence’ to theorise postcolonial discourse that seeks to create a differential space to comment on the state of postcoloniality: ‘The lesson lies, I think, in learning how to conceptualise “contradiction” or the dialectic as that state of being or thinking that is “neither the one nor the other, but something else besides  …”.’9 Bhabha’s concept of ‘differential space’ or ‘third space’ (as he calls it on other occasions), which is influenced by Walter Benjamin’s formulation of the problems of late modernity through ‘disjunctive temporalities’ of historical events, creates an alternative interpretative method outside dialectical contradictions. Applying this idea of a ‘differential construction of interpretative space’ to Indian SF yields an acute sense of awareness of the genre’s constantly evolving treatment of alternative possibilities, especially because of its built-in affinity to ‘disjunctive temporalities’. The liminality of Indian SF both in India and in the global SF market further supplements its reconciliatory tendency that opens potentials beyond binary contradictions. Growing out of a ‘close encounter’ with alien Europeans, Indian SF thus becomes the ‘third space’ par excellence.

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Introduction: To Mark or Not to Mark Territories 1. Darko R. Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. viii. 2. Suvin, Metamorphoses, p. 21. 3. Carl H. Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), pp. 17–19. 4. Brian Attebery, Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2002). 5. John Rieder, ‘On Defining SF, or Not: Genre Theory, SF, and History’, Science Fiction Studies, 37/2 (2010), 191–209. 6. Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction (Cambridge: Polity, 2005). 7. China Miéville, ‘Cognition as Ideology: A Dialectic of SF Theory’, in M. Bould and C. Miéville (eds), Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), pp. 231–48. 8. Rieder, ‘On Defining SF, Or Not’, 200. 9. Rieder, ‘On Defining SF, Or Not’, 204. 10. Miéville, ‘Cognition as Ideology’, p. 245. 11. Rabin Bal, Banglaye Bigyan Charcha (Kolkata: Shaibya Prakashan Bibhag, 1997), p. 37. 12. Jayant Vishnu Narlikar, The Scientific Edge: The Indian Scientist from Vedic to Modern Times (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 181–5. 13. Bal, Banglaye Bigyan Charcha, p. 37. 14. Bal, Banglaye Bigyan Charcha, pp. 36–7. 15. Vandana Singh, ‘A Speculative Manifesto’, in The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2008), pp. 200–3. 16. Hans Harder, ‘Indian and International: Some Examples of Marathi Science Fiction Writing’, South Asia Research, 21/1 (2001), 105. 17. Here I use ‘jnana’/‘vijnana’ to denote the words in Sanskrit and Hindi, and ‘gyan’/‘bigyan’ to denote their Bangla variant. 18. According to Sanskritdictionary.com, some of the meanings associated with ‘vijnana’ are ‘the act of distinguishing or discerning, understanding, comprehending, recognizing, intelligence, knowledge’, ‘skill, proficiency, art’, ‘science, doctrine’, ‘worldly or profane knowledge

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19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

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(opp. to jñāna, “knowledge of the true nature of God”)’, ‘consciousness or thought-faculty’ etc. See ‘vijñāna’, Sanskritdictionary.com, , accessed 10 August 2019. Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, ‘On the Mythologerm: Kalpavigyan and the Question of Imperial Science’, Science Fiction Studies, 43/3 (2016), 435–58. Suparno Banerjee, ‘Other Tomorrows: Postcoloniality, Science Fiction and India’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Louisiana State University, 2010) and Suparno Banerjee, ‘Indian SF’, in Ritch Calvin et al. (eds), SF 101: A Guide to Teaching and Studying Science Fiction (Science Fiction Research Association, 2014). Miéville, ‘Cognition as Ideology’, p. 245. Luckhurst, Science Fiction, p. 3. See Patricia Kerslake, Science Fiction and Empire (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007) and John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008). Jessica Langer, Postcolonialism and Science Fiction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). The first futuristic fiction in India, Kylas Chunder Dutt’s ‘A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945’ was published in 1835. Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), pp. 5–7. Neil Davidson, Nation-States: Consciousness and Competition (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016). Davidson, Nation-States, pp. 51–76. Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 37–46. ‘General Note’, Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India, (2001), , accessed 7 July 2019. Alfred C. Stepan, Juan J. Linz, and Yogendra Yadav, Crafting State-Nations: India and Other Multinational Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). Stepan, Linz and Yadav, Crafting State-Nations, p. xiii. Bhikhu Parekh, ‘Defining India’s Identity’, India International Centre Quarterly, 33/1 (2006), 1–15. ‘Population of Overseas Indians’, Ministry of External Affairs (2018), , accessed 30 March 2019.

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35. UN 2017 estimate is 16.6 million people. See ‘Twenty Countries or Areas of Origin with the Largest Diaspora Populations (Millions)’, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, (2017), , accessed 30 March 2019. 36. Stuart Hall, ‘Thinking the Diaspora: Home-Thoughts from Abroad’, in Gaurav Gajanan Desai and Supriya Nair (eds), Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), pp. 543–60. 37. Hall ‘Thinking Diaspora’, p. 544. 38. Parvati Raghuram and Ajaya Kumar Sahoo, ‘Thinking “Indian Diaspora” for Our Times’, in P. Raghuram et al. (eds), Tracing an Indian Diaspora: Contexts, Memories, Representations, (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2008), pp. 1–22. 39. Raghuram and Sahoo, ‘Thinking “Indian Diaspora” for Our Times’, p. 15. 40. Raghuram and Sahoo, ‘Thinking “Indian Diaspora” for Our Times’, p. 15. 41. Aristotle, ‘Poetics’, in Vincent B. Leitch (ed.), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: Norton, 2001), pp. 90–117. 42. Banerjee, ‘Other Tomorrows’. 43. Sami Ahmad Khan, ‘Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: A Critical Study of Science Fiction in Indian English (SFIE)’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2016). 44. Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, ‘Bangla Kalpavigyan: Science Fiction in a Transcultural Context’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Oslo, 2013). 45. Ajay Singh, ‘Hindi Sahitya Me Vigyan Katha’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Gorakhpur University, 2002).

Chapter 1: Genealogies: A Brief History of Indian SF 1. Anil Menon and Vandana Singh, ‘Splitting the Difference: A Discussion about Indian Speculative Fiction, Part  1’, Strange Horizon (30  September 2013), , accessed 20 November 2013. Chapter 1 grew out of a brief ten-page chapter ‘Indian SF’ published in Ritch Calvin et  al. (eds), SF 101: A Guide to Teaching and Studying Science Fiction (Science Fiction Research Association, 2014). The scope of the current chapter, however, is much larger. 2. Mohan Lal, Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature, Vol. 5 (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2009), pp. 3889–97.

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3. Thomas B. Macaulay, ‘Minute on Indian Education, February 2, 1835’, in G. Desai and S. Nair (eds), Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), p. 130. 4. Bruce C. Robertson, ‘The English Writings of Raja Rammohan Ray’, in A. K. Mehrotra (ed.), A History of Indian Literature in English (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 27–40. 5. Arvind K. Mehrotra, ‘Introduction’, in A. K. Mehrotra (ed.), A History of Indian literature in English (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 7. 6. For more information on the Mutiny see Vincent Smith and T. G. P. Spear, The Oxford History of India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). 7. For a discussion on the various peasant rebellions including the Santhal insurrection of 1855–6 see Kathleen Gough, ‘Indian Peasant Uprisings’, Economic and Political Weekly, 9/32/34 (1974), 1391–1412. 8. Hans Harder, ‘Indian and International: Some Examples of Marathi Science Fiction Writing’, South Asia Research, 21/1 (2001), 105–19. 9. Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Ballad of East and West’, in Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1940), pp. 234–8. 10. Bankim Chandra Chattyopadhyay’s Anandamath (1882) and Debi Chaudhurani (1884), along with many other novels, deal with the theme of opposition between the East and the West. 11. Harder, ‘Indian and International’, 106. 12. Debjani Sengupta, ‘Sadhanbabu’s Friends: Science Fiction in Bengal from 1882–1961’, Sarai Reader 2003: Shaping Technologies (2003), 76–82. 13. For a discussion on the same topic in the Hindi language see A. Mishra and V. Ram, ‘Science Literature in Hindi Language: A Bird Eye View’, indiascifiarvind (2012), , accessed 29 January 2019. 14. Several scholars and writers of Indian SF such as Bal Phondke, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Shukdev Prasad, Harish Goyale, Arvind Mishra and Manish Mohan Gore mention the existence of such translated works. 15. Shukdev Prasad, ‘Vijnana Kathaon Ke Utsa Ki Khoj’, in S. Prasad (ed.), Bharatiya Vijnana Kathayen: Bisvi Sati Ka Vijnana Visvakosa 1 (Nai Dilli: Kitabaghara Prakasana, 2017), pp. 8–31. 16. See Prasad, ‘Vijnana Kathaon’, pp. 8–31; also see Raminder Kaur, ‘Fictions of Science and Cinema in India’, in K. M. Gokulsing and W. Dissanayake

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17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

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(eds), Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas (London; New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 282–96. Prasad, ‘Vijnana Kathaon’, pp. 10–11; also see Zakir Ali Rajnish, ‘Vijnana Katha Ke Sau Saal: Jahan Se Chale They, Wahin Par Khare Hein’, Jansandesh Times (25 December 2011), , accessed 30 June 2019. Alaka A. Chudal, A Freethinking Cultural Nationalist: A Life History of Rahul Sankrityayan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 1. Rashmi R. Devadasan et al, ‘Tamilamagan’, in Rashmi R. Devadasan et al (eds), The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction, Vol. 3 (Kindle edn: Blaft Publications, 2017), claim that Sultana’s Dream, which was published in the Chennai-based Indian Ladies’ Magazine, inspired at least one similar feminist SF work in the Tamil language. SF starts showing up in other Indian languages as well. Satyadev Paribrajak’s ‘Ashcharyajanak Ghanti’ (The Fantastic Bell, Hindi, 1908), Prem Ballav Joshi’s ‘Chaya Purush’ (The Shadow Man, Hindi, 1915), Anadidhan Banerjee’s ‘Mangal Graha’ (The Planet Mars, Hindi, 1915) , Nath Madhav’s ‘Srinivasa Rao’ (Marathi, 1908), Shridhar Balkrishna Renade’s ‘Tareche Hasya’ (Laughter of a Star, Marathi, 1911) and Troilokyonath Mukhopadhyay’s Damarucharita (Tales of Damaru, Bangla, 1910–17) are some notable SF works of this period. Some other noteworthy authors who published SF along with other popular genre fiction between 1905 and 1947 are Durga Parasad Khatri (Hindi), W.M. Joshi (Marathi) and Rajshekhar Basu (Bangla). Siddhartha Ghosh, ‘Digdarshan Theke Ramdhanu’, in K. Majumdar, D. Guha and S. Pal (eds), Siddhartha Ghosh Prabandha Sangraha  1 (Kolkata: Book Farm, 2017), pp. 215–26. Rajnish, ‘Vijnana katha ke sau saal’. Shivaji V. Patil, ‘Marathi Vijnana Katha’, Research Front, 3/1 (2015), 129–34. Debjani Sengupta, ‘The Wondrous Traveller: Leela Majumdar and Science Fiction in Bengal’, Extrapolation, 51/1 (2010), 40–52. Other major Bangla SF authors of this period include Gurnek Singh, Ranen Ghosh, Enakshi Chattopadhyay, Dilip Roychaudhuri, Samarjit Kar, Syed Mustafa Siraj, Bimal Kar, Sunil Gangyopadhyay, Anish Deb and Abhigyan Roychaudhary. Prasad, ‘Vijnana Kathaon’, pp. 8–31, mentions the following authors as major contributors in Hindi SF between 1950s and 1980s: Yamunadatt Vaishnav Ashok, Dr Sampurnanand, Acharya Chatursen Shastri, Dr Naval Bihari Mishra, Ramesh Sharma, Maya Prasad Tripathi, Kailash Shah,

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26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

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Devendra Mewari, Satya Prabhakar. In addition, Arvind Mishra, Harish Goyal, Shukdev Prasad, Rajiv Ranjan Upadhyay, Kalpana Kulshreshtha, Zakir Ali Rajnish, Zeashan Zaidi are some notable authors contributing since the 1980s. An SF element in Hindi comic books can be found since the 1980s in the Raj Comics characters of Nagraj, Super Commando Dhruva, Bhokal, Doga, and Parmanu, most of whom are inspired by American superheroes. Bal Phondke, ‘Science Fiction (Marathi)’, in M. Lal (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature, Vol. 6 (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2009), pp. 3892–5. See Phondke, ‘Science Fiction (Marathi)’, pp. 3892–5 and Salik Shah, ‘Notes on Indian Science Fiction: The Parallel Worlds of Jayant Narlikar and Vandana Singh’, Mithila Review, 9 (2016), , accessed 3 November 2017. According to S. K. Chaliha, ‘Foreword’, in D. C. Goswami (author) and A. J. Mahanta (ed.), The Hair Timer (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2015), pp. vii–xvii, a couple of authors tried their hands at the genre in the 1930s (Hariprasad Barua’s ‘Birsatiar Desh’, 1937 and Nagendra Narayan Choudhury’s ‘Rasayan’, 1938). Chaliha along with Dr Dinesh Chandra Goswami, Bijoy Shankar Sharma, Bandita Phukan, Ajanta Das, A. K. Ziauddin Ahmed, Amulya Kumar Hazarika and Laksmi Nandan Bora has practised the genre since the 1970s. Rashmi R. Devadasan et al., ‘Tamilamagan’, in Rashmi R. Devadasan et al. (eds), The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction, Vol. 3 (Kindle edn: Blaft Publications, 2017). In addition, such popular authors as Kalki, Pudumaippithan, Vindhan, Ambai, Rajesh Kumar and Tamilmagan have also dealt (whether marginally or explicitly) with SF themes since the middle of the twentieth century. See Bauribandhu Kar, ‘Science Fiction (Oriya)’, in M. Lal (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Indian literature, Vol. 6 (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2009), p. 3894. The aforementioned authors were followed by writers such as Nrushingha Charan Panda, Amulya Krushna Meersaw and Debkanta Mishra. See M. H. Srinarahari, ‘Indian Science Fiction: History and Contemporary Trends’, < https://www.academia.edu/10442469/Indian_Science Academia.edu (2019), Fiction_History_ and_ Contemporary_Trends>, accessed 25  June 2019. He further mentions authors such as G. B. Joshi, Sanjay Havanoor, H. S. Bhairnatti, Nalina Murthy, Manu, Mattur Subbanna, Pallavi Murthy, Ananthanarayana Swamy, Kiran Prasad,

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33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46.

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Gaythri Murthy, Y. S. Lewis, Srinatha Rayasam, Kiran, Kanaka Malini, Vishukumar and K. T. Ghatti as notable in Kannada SF. Mohan Lal, Encyclopaedia of Indian literatur, Vol. 6 (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2009), pp. 3889–97. See Rajnish, ‘Vijnana katha ke sau saal’, and also A. Mishra and M. Gore, ‘Science Fiction in Hindi – a Critic’s View’, Internova (2011), , accessed 29 January 2019. Phondke, ‘Science Fiction (Marathi)’, pp. 3892–5. P. K. Chakravarthy, ‘Translator’s Note’, pp. ix–xiv. For an extended discussion on the relationship between Indian and western SF movies see S. Banerjee, ‘Melodrama, Mimicry, and Menace: Reinventing Hollywood in Indian Science Fiction Films’, South Asian Popular Culture, 12/1 (2014), 15–28. Son of Sukumar Ray. Mitra’s Ghanada stories have been translated into English in Adventures of Ghanada (1982) and Mosquito and Other Stories: Ghana-Da’s Tall Tales (2004). Stories of Professor Shanku have also been translated into English as Bravo Professor Shanku (1986), The Unicorn Expedition, and Other Fantastic Tales of India (1987), The Unicorn Expedition and Other Stories (2004) and The Diary of a Space Traveller and Other Stories (2004). Quoted in Surajit Dasgupta, ‘Bhumika’, in P. Mitra (author) and S. Dasgupta (ed.), Ghanada Samagra  1 (Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, 2007), pp. 5–15. Surajit Dasgupta, ‘Bhumika’, in P. Mitra (author) and S. Dasgupta (ed.), Ghanada Samagra 2 (Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, 2006), pp. 5–16. This approach is very similar to Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’, formulated in ‘Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination’, in Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 36. Srinarahari, ‘Indian Science Fiction’, 6–9. Amiya Dev, ‘Comparative Literature in India’, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal (December 2000), , accessed 13  April 2006; Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992). Ahmad, In Theory, p. 250. Bal Phondke. ‘Preface’, in B. Phondke (ed.), It Happened Tomorrow (New Delhi: NBT, 2001), pp. ix–xxii.

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47. Vandana Singh, ‘A Speculative Manifesto’, in The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2008), pp. 200–3. 48. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). 49. Grimus was mostly seen in the context of Rushdie’s use of magical realism and fantasy in his more successful books such as Midnight’s Children (1981), The Satanic Verses (1988) and Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990). 50. Sukanya Datta (Once upon a Blue Moon, 2006, Beyond the Blue, 2008 and Worlds Apart, 2012), Priya Sarukkai Chabria (Generation 14, 2008 and Clone, 2019) are also notable. A host of new authors followed very soon – Sami Ahmad Khan (Red Jihad, 2012 and Aliens in Delhi, 2017), Shiv Ramdas (Dome Child, 2012), Prayaag Akbar (Leila, 2017), S. B. Divya (Run Time, 2016), Shovon Chowdhury (The Competent Authority, 2013 and Murder with Bengali Characteristics, 2015), and Mainak Dhar (Zombiestan, 2012 and the Alice in Deadland series) are notable among them. 51. ‘2018 Hugo Awards’, , accessed 10 June 2019. 52. Mimi Mondal, ‘A Short History of South Asian Speculative Fiction: Part II’, Tor.com (2018), , accessed 26 March 2019. 53. Leela Majumdar (1908–2007) was a critically acclaimed author, whose writing ranged from cookbooks and mainstream adult novels to children’s literature and SF. Majumdar was one of the few women authors to have regularly and successfully taken up SF since the 1970s. She edited and contributed to the Bangla children’s magazine Sandesh along with her nephew Satyajit Ray. Her notable SF works include Batash Bari (1974) and Akash Ghanti (1976). She won the Rabindra Purashkar in 1969 among many other awards. 54. Srinarahari, ‘Indian Science Fiction’, 8. 55. ‘About Us’, Mithila Review, , accessed 10 June 2019. 56. Tej Haldule, ‘The Unbelievable Meteoric Rise of Indian SFF: There’s More to It than Indian Gods at War’, GQIndia (2017), , accessed 3 November 2017. 57. Other mentionable recent films include the following: Fun2shh (Hindi, 2003, Imtiaz Punjabi), Krrish (Hindi, 2006, Rakesh Roshan), Jaane Hoga

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58. 59.

60. 61.

Keya (Do We Have to Go, Hindi, 2006, Ankush and Glen), Bharathan (Malayalam, 2007, Anil Das), Jabardast (Excellent, Marathi, 2007, Mahesh Kothare), Dashavatharam (The Ten Avatars, Tamil, 2008, K. S. Ravikumar), Love Story 2050 (Hindi, 2008, Harry Baweja), Friend (Bangla, 2009, Shatabdi Roy), Action Replayy (Hindi, 2010, Vipul Amrutlal Shah), Kutti Pisasu (Magic Robot, Tamil, 2010, Rama Narayanan), 7aum Arivu (Seventh Sense, Tamil, 2011, A. R. Murugadoss), Joker (Hindi, 2012, Shirish Kunder), Krish 3 (Hindi, 2013, Rakesh Roshan), Irandaam Ulagam (Second World, Tamil, 2013, Selvaraghavan), Creature 3D (Hindi, 2014, Vikram Bhatt), Abby Sen (Bangla, 2015, Atanu Ghosh), Anukul (Hindi, 2017, Sujoy Ghosh), Jole Jongole (In the Swamp, Bangla, 2018, Nitish Roy) and Antariksham 9000 KMPH (Space 9000 KMPH, Telugu, 2018, Sankalp Reddy). See Banerjee, ‘Melodrama, Mimicry, and Menace’, 15–28. Anustup Basu, ‘The Eternal Return and Overcoming “Cape Fear”: Science, Sensation, Superman and Hindu Nationalism in Recent Hindi Cinema’, South Asian History & Culture, 2/4 (2011), 557–71. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 121–31. ‘General Note’, Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India (2001), , accessed 7 July 2019.

Chapter 2: Cognitions and Estrangements: Epistemes and World Building in Indian SF 1. Darko Suvin and Gerry Canavan, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016), pp. 15–27. 2. China Miéville, ‘Cognition as Ideology: A Dialectic of SF Theory’, in M. Bould and C. Miéville (eds), Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), pp. 231–48. 3. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005), pp. 24–5. 4. See David A. Truncellito, ‘Epistemology’, in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy , , accessed 6 June 2019. Also see Stephen Hetherington, ‘Knowledge’, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, , accessed 26 Jun. 2019. 5. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 33–9.

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6. Brendan Shea, ‘Karl Popper: Philosophy of Science’, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, , accessed 26 June 2019. 7. Suvin and Canavan, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, pp. 15–27. 8. ‘Our Definition of Science’, , accessed 18 June 2019. 9. ‘Our Definition of a Scientist’, , accessed 18 June 2019. 10. Gabriele Gava, ‘Kant’s Definition of Science in the Architectonic of Pure Reason and the Essential Ends of Reason’, Kant-Studien, 105/3 (2014), 372–93, at 393. 11. For a brief but insightful overview of the history of Indian science, specifically of its revisionist nature, see Jahnavi Phalkey, ‘Focus: Science, History, and Modern India: Introduction’, Isis, 104/2 (2013), 330–6. For more detailed discussion on the state of science in India in the context of indigenous science and knowledge systems see J. V. Narlikar, The Scientific Edge: The Indian Scientist from Vedic to Modern Times (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2003) and Dharampal, Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts (Delhi: Impex India, 1971). Also see Prafulla Chandra Ray, A History of Hindu Chemistry (Oxford: Williams and Norgate, 1902) for a discussion of indigenous practices related to chemistry from ancient to sixteenth-century India. Jonardon Ganeri, ‘Well-Ordered Science and Indian Epistemic Cultures: Toward a Polycentered History of Science’, Isis, 104/2 (2013), 348–59 provides a concise comparison between the Indian epistemic cultures and the western notion of science. 12. For a discussion on this topic see Vandana Shiva, ‘The Seed and the Earth: Biotechnology and the Colonisation of Regeneration’, Development Dialogue: Women, Ecology and Health Rebuilding Connections, 1–2 (1992), 151–68, Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, , accessed 26 July 2012. 13. See P. C. Ray, A History of Hindu Chemistry and Narlikar, The Scientific Edge. 14. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘A Critique of Postcolonial Reason [Can the Subaltern Speak?]’, in Vincent B. Leitch (ed.), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: Norton, 2001), pp. 2197–2208, at p. 2197. 15. In The Scientific Edge, the eminent astrophysicist Narlikar gives a scathing criticism of this type of claim, while highlighting the evidentially proven ancient scientific achievements.

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16. Ülo Valk, ‘Eyes of Legend: Thoughts About Genres of Belief’, Indian Folklife, 25 (2007), 12–14, at 13. 17. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 18. Uppinder Mehan, ‘The Domestication of Technology in Indian Science Fiction Short Stories’, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, 74 (1998), 54–66, at 55. 19. Bal Phondke, ‘Preface’, in B. Phondke (ed.), It Happened Tomorrow (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2001), pp. ix–xxii, at pp. xvi–xvii. 20. Mehan, ‘Domestication’, 64. 21. I use the terms ‘Hindu science’ and ‘Vedic science’ interchangeably. 22. Suparno Banerjee, ‘The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Silence, Slippage and Subversion’, in Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal (eds), Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World: Essays on Postcolonial Literature and Film (Jefferson: McFarland, 2010), pp. 50–64. 23. Claire Chambers, ‘Postcolonial Science Fiction: Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 38/1 (2003), 57–72. 24. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973), p. 25. 25. Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 25 26. Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Enquiry into the Limits of the Possible (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 36. 27. See for example such popular SF/weird films as Rama Narayanan’s Kutti Pisasu (Tamil, 2011), which seamlessly and without any sense of irony merges ghosts, gods, superstitions and robots in its narrative and visual effects. 28. Hans Harder, ‘Indian and International: Some Examples of Marathi Science Fiction Writing’, South Asia Research, 21/1 (2001), 105–19. 29. Meera Nanda, Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003). Nanda questions the scientificity of Vedic science by citing Subhash Kak and Rammohan Roy’s tendency to project Vedic passages as a coded form of scientific language. She further questions the scientific methodology of the ancient sages and indicates that the scientific tradition of Indian thought, which Hindu nationalists refer to, rather evolved from rationalist, sceptical and naturalist strands of Hindu philosophy to which Vedic tradition was mostly opposed. In other

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30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

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words, Nanda tries to evaluate claims of scientificity of a non-western tradition through the methodology of western rationalism. See Vinay Lal, ‘The Tragi-Comedy of the New Indian Enlightenment: An Essay on the Jingoism of Science and the Pathology of Rationality’, Social Epistemology, 19/1 (2005), 77–91. Lal accuses Nanda of inflexibility and inaccuracy in her analysis of Hindutva, which is clearly different from Hinduism. Lal sees her book as rigid and Eurocentric. However, despite his differences with Nanda, Lal too sees the rising fervour of Hindutva as something to be concerned about and agrees that the religious fundamentalists may at times twist the words of the proponents of an alternative epistemological tradition to suit their own purposes. Vishnu, in his Vamana avatar, deceived the pious Asura king Bali to give up his control of the three cosmic realms to the Gods. Vamana (dwarf in Sanskrit) appeared to Bali as a mendicant Brahmin asking for land that encompasses his three steps. When Bali agreed to the humble Brahmin’s request, Vamana expanded to his cosmic proportions covering heaven and earth with his first step and earth to the netherworld with his second. Being true to his words, Bali asked Vamana to place the third step on Bali’s own head. See Tabassum Bamagarwala, ‘Indian Science Congress: Real Science Ignored, Say Sceintists’, The Indian Express (8 January 2015), , accessed 11  May 2019. Also see Nikita Mehta, ‘Lord Shiva at the Indian Science Congress’, Livemint.com (3  June 2016), , accessed 20 June 2019. Yet Narlikar’s later fiction depicts a shift from this position. The stories collected in the 2005 book Tales of the Future repeatedly present a selfcritical postcolonial stance. A. H. Kumar Yadav et al., ‘A Study and Brief Investigation on Invisibility of Aircrafts (Vimanas)’, International Journal of Engineering Research and Applications, 5/1 (2015), 37–44. Jataka refers to a large body of tales that narrates the past lives of the Buddha. According to various sources this tradition contains about 500 to 547 tales. For more details see C. B. Varma’s ‘Introduction’, in C. B. Varma (ed.), The Illustrated Jataka and Other Stories of the Buddha, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts Digital Library, , accessed 20 December 2019. 36. The Tripitaka consists of three different ‘pitaka’ or collections, Sutta-Piataka, Vinaya-Pitaka and Abhidhamma-Pitaka, collected in fifth-century BCE India and written down around the first century BCE. See Varma, ‘Introduction’ for further explanation. 37. According to Jataka Atthakatha the twenty-five Buddhas are Dipankara, Kondanna, Mangala, Sumana, Revata, Sobhita, Anomadassi, Paduma, Narada, Paduma Uttara, Sumedha, Sujata, Piyadassi, Atthadassi, Dhammadassi, Siddhattha, Tissa, Phussa, Vipassi, Sikhi, Vessabhu, Kakusandha, Konagamana, Kassapa, Gotama.

Chapter 3: Other Times: Alternative Histories, Imagining the Future and Non-linear Temporalities 1. Michael Rothberg, ‘Remembering Back: Cultural Memory, Colonial Legacies, and Postcolonial Studies’, in Graham Huggan (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 359–79. 2. Rothberg, ‘Remembering Back’, p. 360. 3. Rothberg, ‘Remembering Back’, p. 365. 4. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1968), p. 210. 5. Ali Behdad, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). 6. Kriplani is a Brahmin name, signifying Hindu caste hierarchy, a clear indicator of Hindu conservatism. 7. See Erich von Daniken’s popular book Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past (New York: Putnam, 1970) for claims about ancient aliens, which were rejected by the academic mainstream. 8. Peter Heehs, ‘Shades of Orientalism: Paradoxes and Problems in Indian Historiography’, History and Theory, 42 (May 2003),169–95. 9. Heehs, ‘Shades of Orientalism’, 175–6. 10. Rothberg, ‘Remembering Back’, p. 366. 11. Rothberg, ‘Remembering Back’, p. 366. 12. Amar Jiban (My Life, 1876). 13. Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, in Gaurav Desai and Supriya Nair (ed.), Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), pp. 403–9.

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14. See Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887) and Doyle’s ‘The Ring of Thoth’ (1890) for example. 15. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005), pp. 286–7. 16. Jameson, Archaeologies, p. 288. 17. Uppinder Mehan, ‘Final Thoughts’, in Uppinder Mehan and Nalo Hopkinson (eds), So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004), pp. 269–70. 18. Peter Hallward, ‘Response: Towards an Anti-Colonial Future’, in Graham Huggan (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 289–95. 19. Some parts of this chapter were previously published in Suparno Banerjee, ‘India, Geopolitics, and Future Wars’, in Isiah Lavender, III (ed.), Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), pp. 218–31. 20. John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008). 21. I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War, 1763–1984 (London: Oxford University Press, 1966). 22. David Seed, Future Wars: The Anticipations and the Fears (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012). 23. Thomas B. Macaulay, ‘Minute on Indian Education, February 2, 1835’, in Gaurav Gajanan Desai and Supriya Nair (eds.), Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), pp. 121–31. 24. See Himadri Lahiri, ‘Kylus Chunder Dutt, a Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945’, Asiatic, 8/2 (2014), 229–33. Lahiri mentions that the work was considered seditious and disappeared from public circulation for a long time. 25. Vincent Arthur Smith and Thomas George Percival Spear, The Oxford History of India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 641–4. 26. See Kathleen Gough, ‘Indian Peasant Uprisings’, Economic and Political Weekly , 9/32/34 (1974), 1391–1412. Gough discusses various peasant rebellions in India including the Santhal insurrection of 1855–6. 27. See D. R. Sardesai, India: The Definitive History (Boulder: Westview Press, 2008), pp. 239–40 and Burton Stein and David Arnold, A History of India (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 222.

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28. ‘Barrackpore Massacre – Burmese War – and Present State of the Native Army in Bengal’, The Oriental Herald and Journal of General Literature, 5/16 (1825), 13–33. 29. Alaka Atreya Chudal, A Freethinking Cultural Nationalist: A Life History of Rahul Sankrityayan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 120. 30. Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009). According to Orsini similar speculations about the future can be seen in Raghpati Firaq’s ‘Ab se Sau Sal Baad’. 31. Uppinder Mehan, ‘The Domestication of Technology in Indian Science Fiction Short Stories’, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, 74 (1998), 64. 32. Richard J. Norton, ‘Through a Mirror Darkly: The Face of Future War, 1871–2005’, Naval War College Review, 62/1 (2009), 125. 33. Norton, ‘Through a Mirror Darkly’, 125. 34. See Kweku Ampiah, The Political and Moral Imperatives of the Bandung Conference of 1955: The Reactions of the US, UK and Japan (Folkestone, UK: Global Oriental, 2007). Also see Rémy Herrera, ‘Fifty Years after the Bandung Conference: Towards a Revival of the Solidarity between the Peoples of the South? Interview with Samir Amin’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 6/4 (2005), 546–56. 35. Ampiah, The Political and Moral Imperatives, p. 8. 36. Shri Ram Sharma, India–China Relations 1947–1971: Friendship Goes with Power, Part  1 (New Delhi: Discovery Publishing House, 1999), pp. 18–19. 37. See P. R. Chari, ‘Indo-Soviet Military Cooperation: A Review’, Asian Survey, 19/3 (1979), 230–44 and Jeremiah Wishon, ‘Soviet Globalization: Indo-Soviet Public Diplomacy and Cold War Cultural Spheres’, Global Studies Journal, 5/2 (2013), 103–14. 38. For a detailed discussion of Laugh as a dystopian work, see Suparno Banerjee, ‘Dystopia and the Postcolonial Nation’, in Masood A. Raja, Jason W. Ellis and Swaralipi Nandi (eds), The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics and Science Fiction (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2011), pp. 125–37. 39. Several sources support this assertion. Bose’s own account of India’s freedom struggle in The Indian Struggle, 1920–1942 (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1964) as well as most of his biographers mention his propensity to authoritarianism, rule of discipline and lack of faith in the

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40.

41.

42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

weakness of democracy. Anton Pelinka and Renée Schell, Democracy Indian Style: Subhas Chandra Bose and the Creation of India’s Political Culture (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2003) and Leonard A. Gordon, Brothers against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990) provide accounts of Bose’s life and career. The Indian Struggle, 1920–1942, compiled by the Netaji Research Bureau, includes a collection of letters, speeches and other documents covering the years 1935 to 1940 as well as the original manuscript of The Indian Struggle, 1920–1934. Some parts of this chapter were previously published in Suparno Banerjee, ‘Ruptured Bodies and Invaded Grains: Biotechnology as Bioviolence in Indian Science Fiction’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 26/1 (2015), 58–74. Jill Didur, ‘Re-embodying Technoscientific Fantasies: Posthumanism, Genetically Modified Foods, and the Colonization of Life’, Cultural Critique, 53/1 (2003), 98–115. See Vandana Shiva, ‘Bioethics: A Third World Issue’ (2011), , accessed 27 July 2012, and also ‘Bioprospecting as Sophisticated Biopiracy’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 32/2 (2007), 307–13. Graham Huggan, ‘The Colonial Present: Introduction’, in Graham Huggan (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 170–8. Huggan, ‘The Colonial Present’, p. 170. Huggan, ‘The Colonial Present’, pp. 170–1. Salik Shah, ‘Notes on Indian Science Fiction: The Parallel Worlds of Jayant Narlikar and Vandana Singh’, Mithila Review, 9 (2016), , accessed 3 November 2017.

Chapter 4: Other Spaces: Utopian Discourses and Non-Expansionist Journeys 1. Shoshee Chunder Dutt, ‘The Republic of Orissa: A Page from the Annals of the Twentieth Century’, in Bengaliana: A Dish of Rice, and Curry, and Other Indigestible Ingredients (Calcutta: Thacker, Spik and Co., 1878), p. 347. 2. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005), p. 15. 3. Robert T. Tally, Spatiality (New York: Routledge, 2013).

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4. Phillip E. Wegner, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 5. Jameson, Archaeologies, p. 24. 6. Jameson, Archaeologies, p. 15. 7. Jameson, Archaeologies, p. 23. 8. Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (New York: Methuen, 1986). 9. Ralph Pordzik, The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia: A Comparative Introduction to the Utopian Novel in the New English Literatures (New York: Peter Lang, 2001). 10. Moylan, Demand, pp. 1–12. 11. Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000). 12. Pordzik, The Quest, p. 5. 13. Jameson, Archaeologies, pp. 36–7. 14. Jonathan Rutherford and Homi Bhabha, ‘The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha’, in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), pp. 207–21. 15. Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). 16. Keith Breen and Shane O’Neill, After the Nation? Critical Reflections on Nationalism and Postnationalism (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 1–7. 17. Moylan, Scraps, p. xi. 18. Moylan, Scraps, p. xii. 19. Moylan, Scraps, p. 190. 20. The publication of this story is sandwiched between the Indo-Chinese war in 1962 and the Indo-Pakistani war in 1965. 21. Masood A. Raja and Swaralipi Nandi, ‘Introduction’, in Masood Ashraf Raja, Jason W. Ellis and Swaralipi Nandi (eds), The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics and Science Fiction (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2011), p. 8. 22. Some parts of this chapter were published in Suparno Banerjee, ‘Alternative Dystopia: Science, Power, and Fundamentalism in Rimi B. Chatterjee’s Signal Red’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 20/1 (2009), 24–155. 23. See Arshia Sattar’s interesting take on ideological manipulation about history and fiction regarding Alauddin Khalji’s historical siege of Chittor and the legend of Rani Padmini in ‘Padmavati Row over a Fictional

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24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

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Queen Is a Move from “Post-Truth” to “Alternative Facts”’, India Today (13 February 2017), 15. Philip Oldenburg, ‘Sex Ratio, Son Preference and Violence in India: A Research Note’, Economic and Political Weekly, 27/49/50 (1992), pp. 2657–62. The same conclusion can be seen in many other studies as well, such as in Dube et al, ‘Women without Choice: Female Infanticide and the Rhetoric of Overpopulation in Postcolonial India’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 27/1/2 (1999), 73–86 and Christophe Z. Guilmoto, ‘Characteristics of Sex-Ratio Imbalance in India, and Future Scenarios’, 4th  Asia Pacific Conference on Reproductive and Sexual Health and Rights (Hyderabad: UNFPA, 2007). ‘Sex Ratio’, Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, 2011, , accessed 4 July 2019. For a detailed discussion of Escape, see my essay ‘No Country for Women: Gender Dystopias in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape and Manish Jha’s Matrubhoomi’, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, 16/2 (2010), 111–25. P. R. Chari, ‘Indo-Soviet Military Cooperation: A Review’, Asian Survey, 19/3 (1979), 230–44. Ajay Kamalakaran, ‘41 Years after the Indo-Soviet Friendship Treaty’, Russia Beyond (9  August 2012), , accessed 1 June 2015. John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), p. 7. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 2003). Pramod K. Nayar, Colonial Voices: The Discourses of Empire (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), pp. 12–54. Julie F. Codell, ‘Reversing the Grand Tour: Guest Discourse in Indian Travel Narratives’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 70/1 (2007), 173–89. Anupama Arora, ‘“This Is a Civilized Nation, and a Man from the East Has No Right to Criticize It”: Indian Visitors at the 1893 Columbian Exposition’, Journeys, 1 (2014), 23–47. Dr Zakir Ali Rajnish, ‘Vijnana Katha Ke Sau Saal: Jahan Se Chale They, Wahin Par Khare Hein’, Jansandesh Times (25 December 2011), , accessed 30 June 2019.

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Chapter 5: The Others: Aliens, Robots, Cyborgs and Other Others 1. Elazar Barkan, ‘Post-Anti-Colonial Histories: Representing the Other in Imperial Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 33/2 (1994), 180. 2. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 2003), p. 1. 3. Said, Orientalism, p. 3. 4. Pramod K. Nayar, Colonial Voices: The Discourses of Empire (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). 5. Runa Das, ‘Encountering Hindutva, Interrogating Religious Nationalism and (En)Gendering a Hindu Patriarchy in India’s Nuclear Policies’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 8/3 (2006), 370–93. 6. Runa Das, ‘Encountering Hindutva’, 374. 7. Runa Das, ‘Encountering Hindutva’, 374. 8. Runa Das, ‘Encountering Hindutva’, 375. 9. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Sarah Harasym, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 390. 10. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005), pp. 107–41. 11. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). 12. Michelle Reid, ‘Postcolonial Science Fiction’, Science Fiction Foundation (2005), , accessed 19 April 2008. 13. John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008). 14. Darko R. Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). 15. Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal, Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World: Essays on Postcolonial Literature and Film (Jefferson: McFarland, 2010). 16. Masood A. Raja and Swaralipi Nandi, ‘Introduction’, in Masood Ashraf Raja, Jason W. Ellis and Swaralipi Nandi (eds), The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics and Science Fiction (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2011), pp. 5–14. 17. Jessica Langer, Postcolonialism and Science Fiction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 18. Hoagland and Sarwal, Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World, p. 6. 19. Raja and Nandi, ‘Introduction’, p. 9.

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20. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 52–3. 21. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004). 22. Some parts of this chapter were published in Suparno Banerjee, ‘An Alien Nation: Postcoloniality and the Alienated Subject in Vandana Singh’s Science Fiction’, Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 53/3 (2012), 283–306. 23. Pal Ahluwalia, ‘When Does a Settler Become a Native? Citizenship and Identity in a Settler Society’, in Gaurav Desai and Supriya Nair (eds), Postcolonialisms (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), pp. 500–13. 24. Ahluwalia, ‘When Does a Settler Become a Native?’, p. 507. 25. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, pp. 9–10. 26. Simon Gikandi, ‘Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality’, in Gaurav Gajanan Desai and Supriya Nair (eds), Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism (Oxford: Berg, 2005), p. 614. 27. Stuart Hall, ‘Thinking the Diaspora: Home-Thoughts from Abroad’, in Gaurav Gajanan Desai and Supriya Nair (eds), Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), p. 544. 28. Hall, ‘Thinking the Diaspora’, p. 544. 29. Vandana Singh, Of Love and Other Monsters (Seattle: Aqueduct Press, 2007), p. 42. 30. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 131. 31. Langer, Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, p. 148. 32. One notable exception is N. A. Ansari’s Hindi movie Wahan Ke Log (People from There, 1967), in which China creates a false ‘Martian scare’ in India. 33. Alastair Bonnett, The Idea of the West: Culture, Politics, and History (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 34. Avishai Margalit and Ian Buruma, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (New York: Penguin, 2004). 35. Natalia Bloch, ‘Barbarians in India: Tourism as Moral Contamination’, Annals of Tourism Research, 62 (2017), 64–77. 36. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘A Non-Occidentalist West? Learned Ignorance and Ecology of Knowledge’, Theory, Culture & Society, 26/7–8 (2009), 103–25.

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37. Alastair Bonnett, ‘Occidentalism’, History Today, 54/11 (2004), 40–1. 38. Alastair Bonnett, ‘The Critical Traditionalism of Ashis Nandy: Occidentalism and the Dilemmas of Innocence’, Theory, Culture & Society, 29/1 (2012), 138–57. 39. Merryl W. Davies, Ashis Nandy and Ziauddin Sardar, Barbaric Others: A Manifesto on Western Racism (London: Pluto Press, 1993). 40. Swami Vivekananda, The East and the West (Swami Vivekananda Quotes, 2014). 41. Mahatma Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1994). 42. Rabindranath Tagore, Greater India (Madras: S. Ganeshan, 1921). 43. HAL, the AI in 2001, tries to eliminate the human crew for the success of the mission and is shut down by a male astronaut. 44. Uppinder Mehan, ‘The Domestication of Technology in Indian Science Fiction Short Stories’, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, 74 (1998), 64. 45. Bonnett, The Idea of the West, p. 123. 46. Bonnett, The Idea of the West, p. 143. 47. Similarity with the Alien franchisee can be seen in the original story as well in the complex genetic interconnectedness between the humans, the Engineers and the alien ‘creature’ as presented in Prometheus (2012). 48. For a detailed discussion of Enthiran see Suparno Banerjee, ‘Melodrama, Mimicry, and Menace: Reinventing Hollywood in Indian Science Fiction Films’, South Asian Popular Culture, 12/1 (2014), 15–28. 49. See my article on Indian cyberpunk, ‘India’, in Anna McFarlane, Graham J. Murphy and Lars Schmeink (eds), The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture (New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 408–45. 50. Bonnett, The Idea of the West, pp. 144–4. 51. For an excellent discussion on alien encounters and different types of alterity depicted in SF see Carl D. Malmgren, ‘Self and Other in SF: Alien Encounters’, Science Fiction Studies, 20/1 (1993), 15–33.

Conclusion: Close Encounters 1. Bonnie Zare and Nalini Iyer, ‘Introduction: Problematizing Indian Literary Canons’, in Bonnie Zare and Nalini Iyer (eds), Other Tongues: Rethinking the Language Debates in India (Amsterdam: Brill/Rodopi, 2009), pp. ix–xxxvii. 2. Zare and Iyer, ‘Introduction’, pp. xx–xxii.

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3. Amiya Dev, ‘Comparative Literature in India’, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal (December 2000), , accessed 13 April 2006. 4. Dev, ‘Comparative Literature in India’. 5. Dev, ‘Comparative Literature in India’. 6. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), p. 250. 7. Amartya Sen, ‘Tagore and His India’, in Anders Hallengren (ed.), Nobel Laureates in Search of Identity and Integrity: Voices of Different Cultures (Singapore: World Scientific, 2004), pp. 177–213. 8. See Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (London: Macmillan and Co., 1918). 9. W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Translator Translated (Interview with Cultural Theorist Homi Bhabha)’, Artforum, 33/7 (1995), 80–4.

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Index A

Advaita Vedanta, 77, 157 adventure, 14, 18, 23, 28–30, 33–5, 40–2, 70, 75–6, 93, 107–8, 125, 150–4, 159, 181, 196 Africa, 116, 119, 152 Africanism, 99 Ahluwalia, Pal, 168 Ahmad, Aijaz, 46, 194 Ahuja, Vivek, 118, 144 AI, 18, 90–1, 99–100, 115, 124, 156, 166, 173, 176–80, 184–5, 196; see also computer aiyari, 29, 69, 78; see also tilism Alibaba, 93, 107 alien, 13, 18–19, 21, 28, 40, 56, 69, 77, 83–4, 92, 122, 124–5, 127, 144–5, 148, 150, 154, 156, 158, 161–7, 169–83, 185–9, 196–7; see also Other, the alienation, 3, 18, 105, 127, 165–7, 170–1, 184, 189, 196 allegory, 85, 157, 187–8 alliance, 117–18, 138–9, 145 Alpha, 139; see also Ramkrishnan alterity, 5–7, 13, 33, 42, 127–8, 163–4, 189, 195 Ambai, 90, 176, 179; see also Tamil ‘Vamanan’, 90, 176, 179–80 Ampiah, Kweku, 117 Ananda Publisher, 47 Anandamath, 29 Ancient Interstellar, 102, 154 Anderson, Benedict, 9–10 Andromeda Nebula, 114, 135; see also Yefremov, Ivan Anglo, 102, 113, 138, 174, 177, 181 Antarkar, Anant, 39, 54; see also Naval anthropologist, 11, 70, 154 anthropology, 3, 43 anticolonialism, 110, 113, 121; see also colonialism; postcolonialism apaya, 84 apocalypse, 106, 118, 139–41, 146–7 archaeology, 27, 127

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Ardhanarishwar, 167; see also transgender Aristotle, 13 Arora, Anupama, 152 artefact, 83, 88, 99–102, 124–5 Aryabhatta, 66 Aryan, 108, 140 Ashok, Jamuna Dutt Vaishnav, 37, 86 Asia, 12, 55, 113, 116, 118, 140–1, 144–5, 147, 191 Assamese, 13–14, 16, 23, 31, 36, 38, 44, 53, 71, 73, 99, 115, 123, 156, 193 assemblage, 16, 65 assimilation, 168, 172–3 astrologer, 68, 105 astronaut, 156 astronomy, 28, 44, 66, 70 astrophysics, 5, 38, 44 Atharvaveda, 67 atheist, 83, 124 Attebery, Brian, 4 Atwood, Margaret, 139 augmentation, 99, 164, 178, 180, 185; see also AI; computer; robot avatar, 56, 88, 90–1, 210; see also Vishnu, Lord Ayurveda, 76

B

Bali, Asura King, 88, 210 Bandung, 116–17; see also non-alignment Bandyopadhyay, Bibhutibhushan, 29, 152 Banerjee, Anadidhan, 203 Banerjee, Anindita, 1 Banerjee, Suparno, 1, 200, 209, 212–15, 218–19 Bangla, 5, 10, 13–19, 22–3, 25, 28–9, 31, 34–7, 39–41, 44–5, 47, 52–6, 58, 69–71, 74, 78, 87, 99, 105, 107, 114–17, 122, 125, 136, 139, 141, 147–8, 150, 152, 154, 165, 172, 176–9, 182, 184, 189, 191–3; see also Bengal; Bengali

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242 INDE X

Banker, Ashok, 50–1, 86 Bantul the Great, 115; see also comics Bardhan, Adrish, 5–6, 8, 15, 17, 36–7, 39, 44, 50, 54, 76–7, 99, 102, 107–8, 125, 182; see also Bangla ‘Atlantic Lemuriar Rohosyo’, 107–8 ‘Atlantiser Sandhane’, 107–8 ‘Kalochayar Karal Kahini’, 76, 182 Barkan, Elazar, 161–3, 173 Basu, Anustup, 57, 207 Basu, Rajshekhar, 37, 41, 136, 203 Basu, Samit, 18, 49–51, 126, 144, 166, 172–4; see also English Gameworld trilogy, 50–1 Turbulence, 18, 49, 126, 144, 166, 172–3 Behdad, Ali, 98 Bellamy, Edward, 31, 33, 114, 135 benevolence, 19, 134, 163, 174, 176–80, 184–5, 189, 196 Bengal, 26–8, 45, 70, 93, 124, 129, 146 Bengali, 5, 24, 26–7, 29, 34–5, 42, 54, 58, 67, 77, 82–3, 125, 148, 155, 179, 181, 187 Berke, William, 40 Bhabha, Homi, 47, 51, 57, 137, 166, 171, 197 Bhagavad-Gita, 87 Bhagvat Singh Jee, 152 Bhagwat, B. R., 38 Bharat, 113 Bharatiya Vijnana Kathayen, 29, 192 bhasa, 19, 191–4 Bhatia, Gautam, 49, 54 Bhoosnormath, Rajshekhar, 39, 166, 177 bigyan, 5, 29, 39, 71; see also vijnana; science binary, 6–7, 27, 42–3, 100, 137, 166–1, 183, 186, 197 biology, 14, 23, 42, 73–4, 115, 118–20, 140, 142 bioprospecting, 120 biotechnology, 72, 119–20 bioviolence, 120 Bloch, Natalia, 132, 175 Bolshevism, 32, 113, 135, 188; see also communism Bonnett, Alastair, 18, 175, 180–2, 185 Bora, Lakshmi Nandan, 44, 78, 99, 101; see also Assamese Kayakalpa, 99, 101–2 Borthakur, Kumudeshwar, 38

ISF.indd 242

Bose, Jagadish Chandra, 14, 16, 28, 31, 67, 69–70, 148; see also Bangla ‘Niruddesher Kahini’, 14, 16, 28–9, 70, 148 ‘Palatak Tufan’, 28, 70 Bould, Mark, 4, 82 Brahmin, 26, 32, 74, 81, 89, 109, 136 Brahmo, 27 Breaking the Bow, 16, 49, 90–1; see also Menon, Anil; Singh, Vandana Brecht, Bertolt, 3–4 Breen, Keith, 137 Buddha, 94–5, 109, 152 Buddhavamsa, 94 Buddhism, 94–5, 108 Buddhist, 6, 32, 44, 62, 66, 94–5, 108–9, 162 Jataka, 94–5, 109 Bukatman, Scott, 17, 137 Bulgarin, Faddei, 21 Buruma, Ian, 175

C

Cabral, Amilcar, 98 Calcutta, 23, 26–7, 113, 134 canon, 97–8 Capek, Karel, 164 capitalism, 76, 92, 118–19, 121, 131–2, 136, 141, 148, 166, 181, 183, 185 Caribbean, 11, 169 cartography, 129, 131 Cassandran, 116–19 caste, 32–3, 47, 81, 89–90, 94, 105, 113–14, 135, 140, 142, 152, 161, 163, 182 catastrophe, 44, 118–19, 146–7, 155; see also apocalypse caution, 100, 116, 118, 133; see also Cassandran Chabria, Priya Sarukkai, 17, 50, 52–4, 90–2, 94, 107–8, 139–140, 172, 180; see also English Generation 14, 17, 50, 53, 94–5, 107–9, 139–40, 143, 172, 180 Chacha Chaudhary, 38, 115; see also comics; Pran Chakraborty, Dipesh, 67 Chaliha, Saurav Kumar, 38, 156; see also Assamese ‘Marudyan’, 156 Chander Pahar, 29, 152 Chandrakanta, 29, 51, 69, 78

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Index 243

Charaka, 66–7, 76; see also Ayurveda Chatterjee, Rimi B., 47, 49, 51–3, 116, 118, 139, 141–2; see also English Signal Red, 49, 51, 53, 116, 118, 139, 141–3 Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva, 1, 6–7, 19, 94, 116, 192 Chattopadhyay, Sandipan, 54, 116 Chattyopadhyay, Bankim Chandra, 27, 29, 67, 192 Chattyopadhyay, Enakshi, 15, 48, 53 Chimera, 118, 144–5 Choudhury, Abhijit, 55 Chowdhury, Upendrakishore Ray, 35 Chudal, Alaka Atreya, 32–3, 113 cinema, 40, 57 Achena Bandhu, 56, 178; see also Bangla Alien, 40–1, 148, 155, 177, 183 Antariksham 9000 KMPH, 55–6; see also Tamil Chand Par Chadayee, 40; see also Hindi Dashavatharam, 56; see also Tamil E.T., 40, 56, 177–8 Enthiran, 55–7, 177, 184–5; see also Tamil Joker, 178; see also Hindi Kalai Arasi, 40; see also Tamil Karutha Rathrikal, 40 Koi Mil Gaya (KMG), 19, 55–6, 178, 180; see also Hindi Krrish, 56; see also Hindi Matrubhoomi, 55–6, 141; see also dystopia; Hindi Nagin, 41; see also Hindi PK, 55–6; see also Hindi Ra.One, 55–7, 177, 184–6; see also Hindi Sabujdwiper Raja, 41; see also Bangla Terminator, 56 Tron, 56 citizens, 9, 12, 162–3 civilisation, 10–11, 19, 44, 63–4, 67–8, 72, 77, 79, 88, 99–100, 102, 108, 140, 154, 156, 161–2, 165, 175–6, 179, 194 Clarke, Arthur C., 44, 83, 86, 156, 178, 205 Clarke, I. F., 111 climate, 121, 141

ISF.indd 243

clone, 18, 72, 94–5, 140, 143, 172, 180, 196 Codell, Julie, 152 cognition, 2–4, 6, 8, 16, 21–2, 26, 33, 42–3, 50–1, 61–7, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77–9, 81, 83, 85, 87, 89, 91, 93, 95, 125, 195 colonialism, 1, 7, 18, 33, 56–7, 97–8, 110–11, 114, 118, 121, 131, 148, 159, 161, 165, 182, 196 colonial, 1, 6–7, 9, 17–18, 21–4, 26, 28–9, 33, 42–3, 46–7, 57, 65–7, 72–7, 79–81, 97–9, 101–6, 109–1, 120–2, 124, 127–35, 138, 149–55, 158–9, 162–6, 168, 173–5, 188–9, 191, 194–6 coloniser, 6, 9, 16, 24, 27, 57, 97–8, 105, 112, 154, 156, 166, 169–70, 178 colony, 129, 155, 168, 188 expansion, 17–18, 129, 131, 150, 159 colonisation, 18, 25, 98, 110, 119, 133, 136, 150, 155–6, 164–9 comedy, 35, 70, 76, 82, 89 comics, 38, 41, 51, 115, 172, 174, 204 communal, 32, 65, 119, 162, 188 communism, 33, 113–14, 117, 135, 175, 181, 188 computer, 56, 72, 91, 100, 115, 170, 185 internet, 49, 88 software, 185 conquer, 18, 107, 151, 154, 156–7, 168, 170; see also colonialism consciousness, 9, 28, 47, 57, 72, 106 contamination, 140, 143, 168 corporation, 92, 118–19, 136, 157; see also capitalism corruption, 17, 99, 101, 116, 131, 147 cosmology, 3, 85–6, 88, 92–3, 115, 158 countermemory, 103 creature, 18, 28, 35, 88, 155, 169, 180, 187–8 cryogenic, 84, 89 Cuarón, Alfonso, 56 cult, 80–1, 103 culture, 1, 6–7, 9, 11–12, 14–15, 19, 22, 30–1, 33, 35–40, 47, 51–2, 55, 58, 66–7, 78, 81–2, 85, 91, 94, 98–9, 102–4, 110–11, 132, 136–7, 151, 161–2, 165–6, 168–9, 172, 177, 182–3, 185, 193–6

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244 INDE X

current, 2, 9, 11, 19, 25, 27, 64, 99, 104, 116, 121, 138, 140, 144, 201 cyberpunk, 57, 185 cyberspace, 57, 137; see also computer cyborg, 18, 88, 120, 149, 161, 163–5, 167, 169–75, 177, 179, 181, 183, 185, 187, 189; see also AI; robot cyclical time, 95, 128

D

Dabholkar, Dattaprasad, 87 Dalvi, Meghashree, 38, 53 Daniken, Erich von, 102, 211 Dante, 4 darsana, 6; see also philosophy Das, Indra, 50 Das, Runa, 50, 162–3, 186 Dasgupta, Surajit, 205 Datta, Akshay Kumar, 26, 28 Datta, Sukanya, 52–3, 71, 78–9, 120, 146, 148; see also English ‘Little Learning, A’, 79–80 ‘Severed Link’, 78–9 Deb, Anish, 54, 141, 147, 172, 192; see also Bangla ‘Ghaser Shish Nei’, 147 Debnath, Narayan, 115; see also Bantul the Great deconstruction, 43, 50, 69, 81, 103, 109, 159, 162, 175 defamiliarisation, 3, 61, 83, 109–10 definition, 2–6, 8–10, 12, 61, 65, 82, 133, 163–4 degradation, 121, 146, 151; see also capitalism; colonialism dehumanisation, 142, 185, 189; see also capitalism; colonialism deities, 76, 196 Delany, Samuel, 132 democracy, 10, 99, 113, 135, 175, 180 demon, 79–80, 119, 157 Derozio, Henry Louis Vivien, 27 Derrida, Jacques, 89, 161 Desai, Boman, 45, 47, 103 Deshmukh, Chintamani, 19, 44, 78, 87, 182 detective fiction, 30, 33–4, 36, 40 Dev, Amiya, 46, 193–4 development, 2–4, 13–15, 19, 21–3, 25, 38, 46–9, 52, 54, 58, 64–5, 68, 71–2, 100, 106, 110–12, 114–17, 121–2, 134, 143, 146, 179, 183

ISF.indd 244

Devi, 51; see also comics Dey, Sauresh, 87, 89; see also Bangla ‘Dr. Chattaraj o Ashwatthama’, 87, 89 Dhar, Mainak, 186–7; see also English Zombiestan, 186 dharma, 6, 67; see also religion dialectic, 2, 4, 31, 51, 104, 159, 189, 197 diaspora, 11–12, 18, 49, 52, 55, 58, 151, 157, 166, 168–71, 173, 191–2; see also postcolonialism; transnational Didur, Jill, 120 Dispossessed, The, 132, 137 dissent, 26, 112–13, 142 diversity, 10–11, 97, 109, 193 divine, 22, 57, 72, 77, 81, 84, 136, 180 Divya, S. B., 49, 54, 115, 121, 137, 149 doctrine, 87, 181, 187 domination, 94–5, 98, 102, 109, 118–20, 126–7, 131, 141, 143, 154, 156, 158, 162, 169, 173, 177; see also colonialism dominion, 129–30, 156; see also colonialism Doyle, Arthur Conan, 29–30, 33, 35, 40, 107, 150–1 Doyle, Kenneth, 121 Draupadi, 91 dualism, 52 Durga, 34, 119 Dutt, Kylas Chunder, 13–14, 17, 21, 23, 31, 111, 133–4, 200; see also English ‘Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945, A’, 13–14, 17, 21, 23–6, 29, 32, 111–12, 133–4, 200, 212 Dutt, Shoshee Chunder, 25, 31, 111, 129–30, 133; see also English ‘Republic of Orissa, The’, 25–6, 29, 32, 112, 129–30, 132–4 Dutta, Hemlal, 28, 31, 69, 122, 124; see also Bangla ‘Rahasya’, 28–9, 34, 39, 69, 71, 122, 124, 148, 153 dystopia, 15, 17–18, 48, 51–2, 56, 110–11, 116, 118, 128–33, 138–44, 146–7, 165, 180–2, 186, 195; see also capitalism; dehumanisation; domination; utopianism

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Index 245

E

earthling, 153–4, 164, 172 ecology, 47, 80, 105, 138, 143–4, 158 education, 14, 21–4, 26, 28–9, 31–2, 37, 53, 66–7, 71–2, 77, 98, 111, 114, 135, 194 elite, 24–6, 33, 66–7, 77, 80, 82, 98, 104–6, 112, 134, 142–3, 149, 163, 175, 180, 188, 191 emancipation, 31–3, 113 empathy, 90, 184–5 empire, 10, 12, 25, 65, 108, 111–12, 114, 126, 129, 158, 161–2, 165, 173; see also colonialism; dominion empiricism, 43, 65, 83 empowerment, 80, 173 enemy, 31, 141–2, 173, 184, 188–9 energy, 73, 77, 123 English, 5, 9–10, 13–16, 19, 22–6, 29, 31–3, 36, 40, 44–55, 58, 66, 71, 75–7, 81, 111, 124, 133, 153, 191–4 Enlightenment, 3, 5, 7, 61, 65, 74, 76, 87, 94–5, 120 egalitarian, 113–14; see also democracy; utopianism equality, 69, 77–8, 94, 110, 116, 124, 131, 143, 165, 167, 176, 192 entity, 12, 41, 72, 81, 91–2, 117, 149, 156–7, 163–4, 170, 172, 174, 179, 185–6 environment, 118, 121, 136, 146–7, 149, 170, 184, 187–8 episteme, 13, 34, 41, 43–4, 56, 59, 61–2, 64–9, 74–5, 77–8, 80, 82–5, 90, 101 epistemology, 8, 15–16, 22, 26, 45, 61–3, 66, 68, 74, 76–8, 81–2, 84–5, 87, 95–6, 189, 195 essentialism, 32, 94, 99, 102, 109, 151, 165, 174 estrangement, 2–4, 8, 16, 18, 22, 25–6, 29, 33, 42–3, 50–1, 61–2, 71, 74, 78, 83, 85, 93, 113, 116, 121–7, 135, 153, 165–7, 169, 196; see also defamiliarisation ethics, 45, 102, 120, 150 ethnography, 12, 151–2, 155 evolution, 13, 16, 19, 21, 70, 108–9, 153, 155, 181, 183, 188 exclusion, 5, 9, 15, 35–6, 39, 51, 87, 140, 168, 171, 174

ISF.indd 245

exotic, 47, 94, 107, 151, 154, 157, 162, 189, 197 experimental, 30, 36, 76, 84, 114, 116 exploitation, 27, 41, 62, 86, 112, 116, 118, 120–1, 136, 138, 150, 158, 168, 176, 187 exploration, 18–19, 35, 40, 67, 70, 75, 79, 88–9, 131–2, 146, 150, 152–7, 159; see also colonialism extrapolation, 7, 22, 25, 74, 97, 109, 115–16, 144

F

fairy, 14, 37, 50, 69, 78–9 faith, 22, 83, 92, 121, 163; see also religion Fanon, Frantz, 98 fantasy, 2, 4–8, 14, 21, 30–1, 33–4, 37, 39–42, 50–2, 55, 61, 63, 69–71, 75, 77–9, 82–3, 86, 91, 93, 107, 125–6, 130, 137, 151, 153–4, 165, 173, 180–1 feminism, 14, 30–1, 45, 48, 90, 120, 134, 139, 142–4; see also gender cyberfeminism, 120 gynophobia, 182 Ferreira, Rachel Heywood, 1 feudalism, 26, 112, 134–5, 148 folk, 22, 51, 62, 64, 66, 69, 74, 79, 81–2, 85 folklore, 45, 68–9, 103 foreigner, 19, 79, 124, 196 forking paths, 17, 121–4 Formalist, 3–4 formula, 6, 9, 41, 57, 66, 109, 111, 133, 161, 163, 194, 197 Foucault, Michel, 66, 103, 132, 165 Foundation, 117, 150 Frankenstein, 21, 88, 187 Freedman, Carl H., 3–6, 8, 43 Freud, Sigmund, 98 fundamentalism, 87–8, 116, 119, 141; see also religion future, 13, 16, 23, 25, 55, 57, 61–2, 86–7, 109–12, 116–17, 121, 125, 129, 149 future history, 14, 23, 25, 129

G

gadget, 33, 43, 69, 123–5 Gandhi, Mahatma, 10–11, 27, 33, 94, 114, 176, 194

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246 INDE X

Gava, Gabriele, 65 gender, 15, 31–3, 47–8, 52–3, 56, 73, 89, 105–6, 123, 127, 131, 134–5, 138, 141–2, 144, 158, 161, 163, 165–7; see also feminism; sexuality androgynous, 167 transgender, 167 genetic, 42, 47, 94–5, 120, 143, 172, 180, 183 genocide, 117, 138, 143, 145, 168 geography, 2, 11–12, 121, 131, 137, 139–40, 144, 147–8, 161–2, 177, 196 geopolitics, 11, 17, 116–18, 141, 145, 151 Ghanada, 17, 41–3, 125; see also Mitra, Premendra Ghosh, Amitav, 15–17, 48–9, 52–3, 58, 78, 80–2, 93, 103, 152, 189; see also English Calcutta Chromosome, The, 15–17, 48–50, 52–3, 78, 80–2, 93, 103, 189 Ghosh, Aurobindo, 11, 102 Ghosh, Bishnupriya, 17 Ghosh, Ranen, 54, 203 Ghosh, Siddhartha, 34, 203 ghost, 14, 21, 37, 45, 56, 69, 77–8, 82–4, 103, 124 Gikandi, Simon, 168 Gillman, Charlotte Perkins, 31 Ginway, Elizabeth, 1 globalisation, 15, 48–9, 52, 55, 152, 168, 173; see also capitalism glory, 17, 99–100, 102, 104, 106, 153 Gnosticism, 93 Godzilla, 187 Goethe, 194 Golden Age, 14, 27, 36, 99–100, 102, 106, 109 Golding, William, 139 Gore, Manish Mohan, 37, 202 Goswami, Dinesh Chandra, 16, 71, 73, 115, 122–3; see also Assamese ‘Bedroom Energy’, 73, 123 Hair Timer, The, 16, 73, 204 ‘Indifferent’, 73 ‘Portable Smell Absorber, The’, 73, 123 Goyal, Harish, 54, 71, 182, 202, 204 Guha, Buddhadeb, 152

ISF.indd 246

Guha, Ranajit, 106 Gujarati, 15, 23, 36, 39, 52, 118, 193

H

Haggard, Henry Rider, 29, 33, 107, 151–2, 154 King Solomon’s Mines, 151–2, 154 Hall, Stuart, 11, 18, 168–9, 174 Hallward, Peter, 110 ‘Hans Pfaall’, 21, 30, 153 Haraway, Donna, 18, 170 Harder, Hans, 6, 27, 30, 86–7, 153, 192 Havanur, Sanjay, 126 Hawksley, Humphrey, 144 Heehs, Peter, 102 hegemony, 2, 14, 18, 37, 43, 46, 52, 58, 69, 74, 78–80, 89, 91, 94, 96–8, 102–5, 110, 122, 128, 131, 152, 166, 172, 175, 188, 195; see also colonialism; dystopia; empire Heidegger, Martin, 11 heritage, 44, 75, 77, 80, 99–100, 194 hero, 43, 125, 152, 172–4 hierarchy, 66, 68, 73, 80, 82, 103, 105, 114, 123, 128, 132, 151, 163–4, 166, 178, 196 Himalayas, 75–6, 89, 101, 135 Hindi, 5, 10, 13–14, 17, 19, 22–3, 29–31, 33–41, 44, 51–5, 58, 69, 71–2, 78, 85, 87, 99, 113, 115, 133, 136, 141, 148, 150, 153–5, 176–8, 182, 191–4 Hindu, 6, 14, 16–17, 26–8, 30, 33–4, 37, 41, 43–4, 51–2, 62, 64, 66–8, 74–6, 78–9, 81–2, 85–91, 93–5, 99, 101–2, 106, 108–9, 113, 119, 124, 135, 139, 141–3, 152, 155, 157, 162–3, 171, 174–5, 180, 182, 186, 196 Hindutva, 18, 87, 99–100, 162 Hirani, Rajkumar, 55 history, 1–2, 4, 8, 10–14, 19, 23, 29–30, 47, 58, 67, 82, 93–5, 97, 102, 104, 106–8, 114, 118–19, 121–2, 124, 126, 133, 152, 169, 174, 194–7 historian, 11, 98, 161 historiography, 106, 161 Hoagland, Jessica, 1, 164 Hollywood, 15, 37, 40, 48, 56–7 homeland, 149, 163, 168–9, 174

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Index 247

homogeneity, 162, 168, 193–4 horror, 34, 36, 39, 50, 55, 61, 78, 82, 107 hostile, 154–5, 175, 181–2 Hoyle, Fred, 44 Huggan, Graham, 121–2 Hugo Award, 49 humanity, 77, 82, 95, 114, 120, 138, 155, 167, 169, 172, 177, 179–85, 187–9 humanoid, 70, 170–1, 180, 184 Husserl, 161 hybridity, 7, 15–16, 43, 47–8, 51–2, 58, 62, 75, 82, 84, 87, 111, 115, 121, 137, 167, 170, 183, 186, 189, 195

I

IASFS, 46 identity, 8–12, 15, 17–19, 23–4, 47–8, 52, 58–9, 87, 99, 111, 136–7, 141, 148, 158–9, 161–76, 180, 183–6, 189 ideology, 4–5, 10, 18, 21, 24, 29, 31, 62, 64, 67, 87–8, 92–6, 98–100, 102, 107, 109–11, 113, 116–19, 121, 128–38, 140–2, 144, 146–9, 151, 156–8, 168–9, 174, 176, 187–8, 191, 194–7 idol, 81, 88, 123, 125, 148–9 imagination, 3, 6–7, 9–10, 12, 17, 21, 24, 27, 43, 50, 56, 58, 78, 87, 92, 97, 101–2, 110–11, 125, 128, 130, 132, 138, 147, 166, 195–7 imitation, 30, 58, 159, 195 immigration, 18, 49, 148–9, 159, 166–8, 170–1, 173 immortality, 81, 89 imperialism, 7, 17–18, 66, 111, 159, 161–2, 186, 196; see also colonialism; empire incarnation, 40, 94–5, 185 indigenous, 5, 14–15, 18, 24, 29, 31, 36, 40–1, 43, 46, 48, 50–4, 58, 61, 66, 68, 76–8, 80, 85, 87, 96, 100–1, 103–4, 106, 108, 110, 119, 124, 131, 163, 166, 168, 178, 186, 191, 195 indigenism, 51–2, 86–7, 93, 111, 186 Indus Valley, 108 industrial, 18, 22, 47, 57, 65, 68, 97, 100, 111–12, 120, 122, 166, 176, 183, 185; see also capitalism

ISF.indd 247

influence, 11, 13–15, 21–3, 27, 29–1, 33–5, 37, 40–1, 47, 57, 62, 64, 69, 75, 81, 84, 91, 93–4, 98, 102, 106, 111, 122, 126–7, 135, 139, 152–3, 177–8, 184, 186, 197 inhuman, 34, 179, 186 innovation, 15, 28, 48, 100, 122–4, 166, 180, 186 institution, 38, 72–4, 151 intellect, 24, 26–7, 76, 84, 102 intelligence, 42, 47, 90, 100, 125, 145, 156, 179, 185 internationalism, 113, 176 intersection, 30, 34, 47–8, 95, 111, 163, 175, 196 interstitial, 19, 195–7 intuition, 63, 65–6, 76–7, 80, 137, 171, 179 invasion, 19, 80, 92, 99, 101–2, 112, 126, 142, 145, 158, 163, 181–3, 188, 196 invention, 33, 75, 84, 148–9, 153, 162 inventor, 73, 124–5, 154, 186 ironic, 23–4, 32, 34, 43, 52, 111, 167, 173, 178 ISFS, 54 ISFWA, 46, 54 Islam, 51, 62, 78, 95, 99, 101, 104, 108, 119, 135, 145, 175, 181, 183, 186–7 Islamism, 181, 186 Islamist, 183 Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, 26, 66 It Happened Tomorrow, 45–9, 52, 71–2, 191, 193; see also Phondke, Bal Iyer, Nalini, 191–2

J

Jainism, 66, 94 Jameson, Fredric, 17, 62, 109–1, 116, 130–1, 133, 163 Jawadekar, Subodh, 18, 38, 47, 146; see also Marathi ‘Journey into Darkness, A’, 18, 47, 146 Jha, Manish, 55, 141 jnana, 6–7 Joshi, Ruchir, 18, 49, 52, 90, 103, 116, 118–19, 141, 144; see also English

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248 INDE X

journey, 17–18, 21, 30, 36, 47, 57, 69–70, 90–2, 105, 127, 129, 131, 135–6, 143–4, 146, 149–59, 168, 178, 196; see also travel

K

Kaadu/Jungle, 40, 82, 148 Kalki, 90–1 kalpabigyan, 5–6, 8, 23, 192 Kannada, 13, 15, 23, 36, 39, 53, 166, 177, 193 Kant, Immanuel, 65 Kapur, Shekhar, 51 Kasilingam, 40 Kerslake, Patricia, 1, 7 Khan, Sami Ahmad, 1, 19, 144, 177, 182–4, 186–7, 192; see also English Aliens in Delhi, 19, 144–5, 177, 182–3, 186 Red Jihad, 144–5, 186 Khanar Bachan, 66 Khanna, Mukesh, 51 Khatri, Devaki Nandan, 29, 34, 51, 69, 78 Kipling, Rudyard, 27 knowledge, 3, 5–6, 13, 16, 24, 26–7, 32, 43–4, 46, 51–2, 56, 61–70, 74, 76–82, 84–5, 87–9, 93, 95–6, 100–5, 113–14, 119, 122, 148–9, 151, 171, 195 Kosinski, Joseph, 56 Kubrick, Stanley, 86, 156, 178 Kuhn, Thomas, 16, 68 Kulshreshtha, Kalpana, 53–4, 58, 71 Kumbh Mela, 72, 155 Kunder, Shirish, 178

L

laboratory, 66, 75–6, 81, 84, 141 Lahiri, Himadri, 212 Lal, Vinay, 210 Langer, Jessica, 1, 7, 164, 171, 192 Le Guin, Ursula K., 132, 136, 150, 171 legend, 21, 51, 62, 79, 84, 93–4, 101, 107–8 Lem, Stanislaw, 82 Levinas, 161 liberalisation, 78, 90, 117, 119, 130, 138, 145 linguistic, 8–11, 42, 46, 51, 193–4 Linz, Juan J., 10–11

ISF.indd 248

literature, 1–5, 8, 16, 18–19, 21–3, 26, 29–30, 33–7, 39–40, 42, 45–7, 49–51, 53–5, 61, 63, 68–9, 72, 85–6, 94, 97, 106, 111, 116, 120, 122, 133, 136, 139, 146, 161–3, 176, 191–4 locale, 12, 79, 84, 93, 131, 148, 153, 174, 178 location, 12, 17, 66, 78, 103, 107, 121, 136, 140, 149, 169, 174, 178 logic, 3, 5, 25, 61, 71, 83, 90, 120, 157, 162, 179, 185 Londhe, Laxman, 19, 38, 44, 71–2, 78, 87, 182 Loomba, Ania, 165, 167–8, 170 Lucas, George, 4 Luckhurst, Roger, 4, 7–8 Lyotard, Jean-François, 163 Lytton, Edward Bulwer, 29

M

Macaulay, Thomas B., 23–4, 111 machine, 7, 27, 58, 72, 75, 77–8, 83, 103, 107, 119, 123–4, 177, 179, 184–5, 189 magazine, 5, 14–15, 30–1, 34–40, 48, 53–5, 88, 155, 182, 192 Anandamela, 39, 54; see also Bangla Anandha Vikatan, 39, 54, 182; see also Tamil Ascharya, 5, 15, 36, 39, 182; see also Bangla Balmitra, 39; see also Marathi Bigyan Darpan, 29; see also Bangla Bishmay, 39, 182; see also Bangla Desh, 39; see also Bangla Dharmayug, 35, 39; see also Hindi Dhrmabhaskar, 39; see also Marathi Fantastic, 39, 182; see also Bangla Kalpabishwa, 53–5, 121, 192; see also Bangla; webzine Kerala Kokil, 36; see also Marathi Kirloskar, 39; see also Marathi Kishore Bharati, 39, 53–4, 182; see also Bangla Kishore Gyan Bigyan, 39; see also Bangla Mithila Review, 54–5; see also English; webzine Mouchak, 35, 39, 182; see also Bangla Naval, 37, 39, 182; see also Marathi

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Index 249

Peeyush Pravah, 30, 35; see also Hindi Rachnakar, 54, 88; see also Hindi; webzine Rahasya Ranjan, 39; see also Marathi Ramdhanu, 35, 39; see also Bangla Rangmashal, 35; see also Bangla Sandesh, 35, 39, 155, 182; see also Bangla; Chowdhury, Upendrakishore Ray; Ray, Satyajit; Ray, Sukumar Saptahik Hindustan, 39; see also Hindi Saraswati, 30, 35; see also Hindi Shuktara, 39; see also Bangla Strange Horizons, 54, 201; see also English Vigyan Katha, 39, 54, 182; see also Hindi Vigyan Pragati, 39; see also Hindi magic, 43, 45, 50–1, 55, 77–8, 83–4, 173 Mahabharata, 62, 75, 85–6, 89–91, 104 Mahesh, 40 Majumdar, Leela, 6, 15, 37, 48, 53, 71, 206 malaria, 80–1, 103 Malayalam, 15, 36, 40, 193 Mande, Arun, 47, 71–2, 115, 165–6, 172, 179; see also Marathi ‘Ruby’, 47, 71, 115, 165, 172, 179–80 Marathi, 5, 13–14, 16, 18–19, 22–3, 29, 31, 35–9, 44, 53, 55, 71–2, 86–7, 115, 123, 146, 148, 166, 179, 182, 192–3, 203, 207 Marathi Vidnyan Parishad, 38 Margalit, Avishai, 175 marginalisation, 5, 19, 46, 87, 168, 173, 177–8, 196 Mars, 75, 154–5, 181, 188, 203 Martian, 40–1, 75, 155, 181–2, 188 marvellous, 8, 82, 102, 177 Marxist, 32, 132, 136 materialism, 22, 27, 67, 102, 176 mathematics, 66, 75, 100, 127, 137, 171 Mathur, Suchitra, 120 matriarchy, 77, 134 Maurya, 10, 108

ISF.indd 249

medicine, 66–7, 76, 79 medieval, 108, 140, 142 Mehan, Uppinder, 1, 71, 110, 115, 120, 127, 179 Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna, 24 memoir, 81, 98 menace, 57–8, 118, 175, 177, 182, 189, 195 Menippean Satire, 138 Menon, Anil, 16–17, 21, 49, 90–1, 116, 120, 136–7; see also English Beast with Nine Billion Feet, The, 17, 49, 116, 120, 130, 136 metafiction, 42–3, 77, 125 Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, 2 metaphor, 79, 85, 92, 95, 137, 139–40, 150, 164–5, 170–1, 180 metaphysics, 13, 22, 63, 103 method, 35, 43, 52, 63, 65, 70, 77, 81, 84, 103, 105, 109, 120, 123, 131, 143, 187–8, 197 methodology, 5, 65–6, 75–7, 80–1 metonym, 148, 151, 180, 186 metropolis, 137, 143, 148, 165, 170, 174 Mewari, Devendra, 115, 176, 179; see also Hindi ‘Goodbye Mr Khanna’, 115, 176, 179 Miéville, China, 4–5, 7, 61 migrant, 9, 151, 158, 168–9, 171 migration, 58, 108, 149, 170 mimetic, 2–3, 8, 50, 61, 63, 82, 85, 111 mimicry, 24, 40–1, 57–8, 111, 166, 168, 184–5, 195; see also Bhabha, Homi; hybridity minority, 19, 169 Mirajkar, Archana, 53 Mishra, Arvind, 37, 44, 72, 78, 115, 155, 176; see also Hindi ‘Annadata’, 115 ‘Antaryami’, 72 Kumbh Ke Mele Me Mangalvasi, 72, 155 Mishra, Naval Bihari, 37, 203 misogyny, 53, 131, 141, 143–4; see also patriarchy Mitra Majumder, Dakshinaranjan, 69

28/09/2020 12:44:15

250 INDE X

Mitra, Premendra, 6, 17, 37, 41–3, 71, 114, 116–17, 121, 125, 139–40, 154, 177, 187–8, 205; see also Bangla ‘Kalapanir Atale’, 42, 154, 187 Mamababu (series), 42 ‘Mangalbairi’, 188 ‘Manu Dwadosh’, 42, 116–17, 121, 139 ‘Manusher Pratidwandi’, 187 ‘Mosha’, 42 Piprey Puran, 42, 117, 139, 177, 187 ‘Shamaner Rang Shada’, 177, 187 Shurjo Jekhane Neel, 42, 114 modernisation, 27, 68, 101, 111, 116, 184 modernity, 7, 26, 31, 47, 57, 66, 74, 77, 87, 121, 148, 175–6, 181, 186–7, 197 Mondal, Mimi, 49 monolithic, 17, 22, 106, 109–10, 194 moon, 29–30, 40, 69–70, 150, 152–3 Mothers of Maya Diip, 17, 45, 134 movie, 4, 41, 55–7, 85, 107, 150, 176, 178, 184–5, 187; see also cinema Moylan, Tom, 17, 132–3, 136–9, 141 Mukherjee, Ashutosh, 26, 28 Mukhopadhyay, Shirshendu, 34, 37, 45, 47, 54, 56, 58, 78, 82–4, 122, 124, 148, 176, 182; see also Bangla Bhuture Ghori, 45, 82–4, 124, 148, 176 Bonny, 45, 148–9 Patalghar, 45, 55–6, 82–4, 122, 148, 182; see also Bangla; cinema Patashgarher Jangale, 45, 82, 148 Mukhopadhyay, Troilokyonath, 34, 203 multinational, 10, 120, 148, 185 mutability, 2, 4 mutant, 18, 164, 166, 172, 174, 180, 184, 187, 196 mutation, 14, 37, 42, 58, 118, 150, 183, 186 Muthuswamy, Padamkumar, 102 mystery, 3, 28, 30, 34, 36, 43, 69, 71, 74–5, 107, 122, 125 mystical, 66, 101 myth, 14, 16, 21, 37, 41, 44, 50–1, 57, 62–4, 69, 74, 85–94, 97, 103, 107, 153, 155, 170–1

ISF.indd 250

N

Naipaul, V. S., 192 Namjoshi, Suniti, 17, 45, 47–9, 134 Nanda, Meera, 87, 209–10 Nandi, Swaralipi, 1, 140, 164–5 Nandy, Ashis, 175 Narlikar, Jayant Vishnu, 5–6, 16, 19, 38, 44–5, 47, 67, 71–3, 87–8, 90, 99–101, 116, 123, 125–7, 146–8, 177, 184; see also Marathi ‘Adventure, The’, 44, 100, 126, 153 Cosmic Explosion, The, 44, 100 ‘Death of a Megapolis’, 45, 116, 146–7 ‘Ice Age Cometh’, 146 ‘Krishna Bibar’, 38, 44 ‘Rare Idol of Ganesha, The’, 123, 125, 148–9 Return of Vaman, The, 16, 44, 47, 87–8, 99–101, 177, 184 ‘Vigyan Yug Me Naradji’, 16 Virus, 45, 72, 148 ‘Yakshanchi Denagi’, 16, 19, 44, 87 Nath Madhav, 67 nationalism, 9–10, 14–17, 24–7, 29–30, 32–3, 37, 43, 48, 52, 62, 67–8, 86, 88–9, 91, 93, 95, 98–102, 104, 106–9, 113, 119, 124, 127–8, 136, 139–43, 147, 158, 162–3, 175, 180, 184, 186, 194 nativism, 44–5, 168, 171 naturalist, 2, 68, 85–6, 91–2 Nayak, Sanjay, 56, 178 Nayar, Pramod K., 18, 151, 162 Negritude, 99 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 10–11, 47, 68, 74–5 Neil, Davidson, 9 neocolonialism, 22, 71, 97, 104, 110–11, 115–16, 118–19, 121–2, 127, 131, 138, 174, 179, 186, 195–6; see also colonialism non-alignment, 117, 145; see also Bandung non-linear time, 13, 16, 97, 121, 127; see also cyclical time; temporality nonconformity, 79, 169

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Index 251

nonmimetic, 74 nonsense verse, 34, 63 norm, 3, 22, 42, 66, 74, 79, 92, 127, 136, 142, 149, 155, 164–6, 168–70, 174–5, 186 Norton, Richard J., 116 nostalgia, 11, 57, 68, 83, 92, 100, 110, 148 novel, 15, 27, 29, 33–4, 42, 44–5, 47–8, 52, 56, 78, 80–1, 86, 94–5, 101, 108, 116, 118–19, 136, 139–41, 143, 145, 152, 156–7, 167, 172–3, 183, 187–8 novella, 31, 82, 137 novum, 3, 18, 25, 42, 72, 78, 107, 122, 148

O

O’Neill, Shane, 137 objectification, 123, 134, 141, 152, 174 Occident, 22, 43, 47, 162, 174–5, 180, 194 Occidentalism, 18, 162, 174–5, 182, 185–6, 189 occult, 77 Oldenburg, Mike, 144 oppositional, 57, 66, 68, 112, 134, 138, 168, 175–6, 182, 186 oppression, 10, 17, 26, 32, 77, 94–5, 102, 105, 112, 114, 127, 131, 134, 138, 141, 143, 163, 167; see also colonialism optimism, 25, 109, 111, 114–15, 120, 132 organic, 119, 170 Orient, 43, 107, 151, 162, 175, 194 Orientalism, 18, 27, 101–2, 107–9, 151, 161–2, 174–5, 195 origin, 3, 9–12, 21, 51, 54, 65, 73, 76, 85, 90–1, 100, 102, 114, 118, 120, 136, 141, 147, 149, 164, 170–1, 174, 180, 183, 186, 189, 192 originality, 15, 37, 55 Oriya, 15, 19, 23, 36, 39, 71, 115, 193 orthodox, 26, 31, 172 Orwellian, 140 ostranienie, 3; see also estrangement Other, the, 109, 151, 159, 161–6, 172, 174–5, 180, 185–7, 189

ISF.indd 251

outsider, 123, 181–2, 186, 195 overdetermined, 2, 10

P

Padmanabhan, Manjula, 47, 49–50, 52, 54, 116, 120–1, 139, 141, 143–4, 180; see also English Escape, 49–50, 116, 121, 141, 143–4, 146, 180, 216; see also dystopia; feminist Harvest, 49, 116, 120–1, 139, 141; see also dystopia; feminist Pandava, 89 pandemic, 186–7 paradigm, 30, 61, 68–9, 79, 83, 85, 99 paranormal, 83 parasite, 80–1 paraspace, 17, 137; see also Bukatman, Scott Parekh, Bhikhu, 10 parody, 34–5, 159 patriarchy, 16–17, 54, 62, 81–2, 86, 89–92, 134–5, 141–3 pessimism, 109, 111, 115–17; see also dystopia Phalkey, Jahnavi, 208 philosophy, 3, 6, 11, 16, 26, 32, 44, 48, 51, 57, 62–3, 65–6, 68, 83, 95, 101, 106, 115, 156, 161, 171, 176; see also darsana Phondke, Bal, 6, 38–9, 45–7, 50, 54, 71, 193 Phukan, Bandita, 15, 48, 53 physicist, 6, 26, 28, 53, 67, 74, 77 Piercy, Marge, 132, 139 planet, 39, 49–50, 53, 70, 75, 84, 86, 92, 132, 136, 145–6, 148–9, 154–8, 167, 169–71, 177, 183 Poe, Edgar Allan, 21, 30, 153 poems, 34, 63, 85, 95, 106, 179 polarisation, 6, 8, 26–7, 57, 63–4, 67, 143 polity, 10, 29, 136 pollution, 121, 146–7, 152 polytheism, 27 Popper, Karl, 16, 63–4, 85 popular, 34, 36, 38, 55, 69, 78 population, 11, 18, 24–5, 27, 58, 77, 83, 103, 105, 108, 112, 124, 135–6, 141–3, 152, 161, 166, 168–9, 172–3, 177, 183, 189, 196 Pordzik, Ralph, 1, 132–3, 136

28/09/2020 12:44:15

252 INDE X

postcolonialism, 1, 7, 9, 15, 17, 45, 47, 51, 57–8, 67–8, 71–2, 75, 77, 81, 87, 97–9, 110–11, 115–16, 120–1, 129–30, 132–3, 137–8, 140, 145, 147–9, 159, 164–8, 171, 173, 175, 179, 196–7 decolonisation, 98; see also colonialism posthumanism, 119–20; see also postmodernism postindependence, 38, 43 postmodernism, 132, 166, 173 postnational, 127, 137, 139–40, 157; see also postcolonialism Pran, 38, 115; see also Chacha Chaudhary Prasad, Shukdev, 29, 37, 192, 202–4 prediction, 23, 66, 114, 116, 118, 121; see also prophecy prehistoric, 88, 99–100, 107, 180 presentist, 97 preservation, 68, 72, 92, 101, 104 Professor Natboltu Chakra, 17, 74–7, 99, 107–8, 125; see also Bardhan, Adrish Professor Shanku, 16, 41, 43, 74–7, 93, 102, 106–8, 125, 154, 179, 184; see also Ray, Satyajit progressive, 26, 32, 45, 177 projection, 18, 27, 64, 107, 166, 171–4 proletariat, 163 Promethean, 116 prophecy, 23, 26, 50, 80, 112 protagonist, 30, 70, 81, 90–2, 94, 108, 123–7, 140, 142, 147, 149–50, 153–4, 156–8, 166, 170, 172, 177–8, 181–2, 189 Proyas, Alex, 56 psychology, 13, 63, 85, 167 publication, 1, 14, 19, 23, 26, 29–31, 36–9, 44, 47, 54, 112, 191–4 pulp, 3, 36, 181 Punjabi, 10, 15, 36, 144 Purana, 22, 62, 86, 88 purdah, 31–2 purity, 51–2, 102, 171 Pushpaka, 92 pyramids, 107

R

race, 119, 135, 161 radicalisation, 2–3, 8, 22, 26, 110, 113, 126–8, 149, 187, 195 Raghuram, Parvati, 11–12

ISF.indd 252

Raj Comics, 51; see also comics Raja, Masood, 1, 140, 164–5 Rajasthan, 91, 142, 144, 193 Rajnish, Zakir Ali, 35, 153, 203, 205 Rama, 92–3, 157 Ramayana, 16, 50–1, 57, 62, 75, 85–6, 88–9, 91–3, 157 Ramkrishnan, 139 Rashtriya Swayam Sevak, 162 Rassundari Debi, 105–6 rationalism, 5, 27–8, 31–2, 65, 87, 120, 179 Ravana, 91–2 Ray, Prafulla Chandra, 67, 208 Ray, Satyajit, 5–6, 16, 18, 37, 40–1, 43–4, 75, 93, 102, 106–8, 125, 148, 150, 154, 176–7, 179, 184, 206; see also Bangla Abatar, 177 ‘Bankubabur Bandhu’, 18, 148, 176–8 ‘Byom Jatrir Diary’, 18, 43, 75, 150, 154 ‘Professor Shanku O Baghdader Bakso’, 93, 107 ‘Professor Shanku O Egyptio Atanko’, 93, 107 ‘Shanku O Harh’, 75 ‘Swarnaparni’, 75 Ray, Sukumar, 34–5, 37; see also Bangla ‘Heshoram Hushiyarer Diary’, 34–5 reactionary, 26, 45, 102, 109, 112, 151, 179, 181, 197 reader, 6, 15, 40, 42–3, 48, 63, 69, 83, 86, 97, 101, 109–10, 127, 130, 143–4, 151, 156, 165 realism, 5, 50–1, 55–6, 61, 63, 85, 91, 97–8, 111, 122, 130, 137, 173 reality, 3, 5–6, 8, 13, 17, 22, 62–4, 68, 74, 82–3, 85, 91–2, 101, 123–6, 134, 139, 148–49, 169, 174, 195 rebellion, 14, 23–6, 111–12, 119, 134, 179, 182 reclamation, 81, 98–9, 102, 106, 109, 112, 115 reformation, 24, 26–7, 66–7, 94, 114 reframing, 110–11, 153, 173 regional, 16, 45, 62, 71, 98, 100, 118, 141, 145, 148, 174 Reid, Michelle, 164 reincarnation, 95

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Index 253

reinterpretation, 16, 44, 62, 67, 86 relics, 101, 153 religion, 6, 26–7, 57, 63, 74, 85–6, 91–3, 97, 103, 113, 157, 161, 167 representation, 97, 109, 131, 136–7, 139, 141–4, 146, 197 repression, 98, 130, 138, 167; see also oppression resistance, 95, 104, 120, 131, 136, 142–3 retelling, 34, 50, 153 revision, 64, 67, 102, 110 revolution, 14, 23, 25, 32–3, 68–9, 112–13, 121, 132–5, 137, 188 Rieder, John, 1, 4–5, 7–8, 18, 111, 151, 155, 164 Rigveda, 67 rituals, 68, 80–1, 83, 103, 152 robot, 18, 44, 55–6, 72, 75, 88, 91, 99–100, 115, 148, 154, 157, 161, 163–7, 169, 171–7, 179–81, 183–5, 187, 189, 196 rocket, 188 rogue, 149, 175, 184 Rokeya Shakhawat Hossain, 14–15, 17, 30–3, 35, 53, 133–5 romantic, 102–3, 106 Roshan, Rakesh, 19, 55–6, 178 Rothberg, Michael, 98, 103 Roughgarden, Joan, 86 Rowlatt Act, 114 Roy, Hemendra Kumar, 29, 34–5, 37, 154, 176, 181, 184; see also Bangla Adrishya Manush, 34 Maynamatir Mayakanan, 34 Meghduter Marte Agaman, 34, 154, 176–7, 181, 188 Nabajuger Mahadanab, 34, 184 Roy, Jagadananda, 18, 28–9, 31, 69–70, 150, 153, 165, 172, 175; see also Bangla Prakritiki, 29, 70 ‘Shukra Bhraman’, 18, 28–9, 69–70, 150, 153, 165, 172, 175 Roy, Kshitindranaryan, 6 Roy, Prabhat Ranjan, 155 Roy, Rammohan, 11, 24, 26, 66, 209 Roy, Shatabdi, 179 Roychoudhury, Avigyan, 54, 71 Roychudhury, Ambikagiri, 38 Runtime, 49, 115, 137; see also Divya, S. B.

ISF.indd 253

Rushdie, Salman, 45, 47–8, 50–2, 93, 137, 152, 173, 192; see also English Grimus, 45, 50, 93, 137 Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 50 Midnight’s Children, 173

S

Sabu, 38; see also Chacha Chaudhary Saha, Meghnad, 67 Sahoo, Ajaya Kumar, 11–12 Said, Edward, 18, 151, 161 Saint, Tarun, 191–2 Sampurnanand, 37, 71, 154 samudralanghana/kala pani, 152 Sankrityayan, Rahul, 17, 31–3, 113–14, 133–7, 188; see also Hindi Baisvee Sadi, 17, 31–3, 113, 133–4, 188 Soviyet Bhumi, 33 Sanskrit, 5–6, 32–3, 75, 113, 136, 170–1, 193 Santhal, 26, 112 Santos, Boaventura, 175 Sanyal, Narayan, 44, 78, 114, 150, 156; see also Bangla Nakshatraloker Devatma, 114, 150, 156 Saptarshi, 84, 154, 167, 170 Saraswati, Dayanand, 27, 44, 67, 89 Sardar, Ziauddin, 175 Sarwal, Reema, 1, 164 Satapatha Brahmana, 88 satire, 14, 31, 41, 56, 70, 77, 116–18, 123, 136, 138 Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar, 18, 162–3 scholarship, 1, 5, 7, 16, 30, 32, 46, 54, 66–7, 77, 82, 87–8, 98, 111, 120, 164, 175, 193 science, 3, 6, 14, 21–3, 25–1, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41–4, 46–7, 50, 53, 63–4, 88–90, 92, 95–6, 99–102, 105, 115, 120–1, 123, 125, 134, 143, 148, 157, 176, 179–80, 187–8 scientist, 14, 28, 33, 43, 65–7, 70, 72–81, 83–4, 88, 90, 99–101, 105, 108, 123, 125, 127, 141–2, 146, 149, 153, 155, 181, 184–5, 188 Seed, David, 111 Sen, Amartya, 220 Sengupta, Debjani, 1, 28, 36, 192

28/09/2020 12:44:15

254 INDE X

sentient, 92, 179, 187 sentiment, 15, 32, 48, 104, 117, 127, 180 Sepoy Mutiny, 26, 112–13 serial, 35, 39, 72, 155 series, 34, 38, 40–2, 45, 51, 55, 74, 78, 150 settler, 155, 167–8, 170 sexuality, 138; see also gender asexual, 143 bisexual, 167 heterosexual, 92, 143 sexist, 91 sexual, 170, 176 Shah, Salik, 55, 127 Shah, Wajid Ali, 105–6 Shakespeare, William, 29 Shakti, 51, 56; see also Raj Comics Shankar, S., 55, 177, 184 Sharma, R. N., 45, 47, 71, 122, 177, 182; see also English Embroidered Newspaper, The, 45, 47 ‘Paper and Cardboard Clothiers, The’, 122, 177, 182 Shastri, Acharya Chatursen, 44, 203 Shelley, Mary W., 21, 187 Shiva, Lord, 74, 87–8, 90, 167; see also Ardhanarishwar Shiva, Vandana, 120, 144, 208, 214 Shklovsky, Victor, 3 Shulva Sutra, 66 Shusruta, 66–7 Simoqin Prophecy, 50 Singh, Ajay, 19 Singh, Gurnek, 182, 201 Singh, Keshav Prasad, 30, 69, 150, 153; see also Hindi ‘Chandralok Ki Yatra’, 30, 33, 69, 150, 153 Singh, Vandana, 6, 16–18, 21, 47, 49–54, 58, 67, 90–2, 103–4, 120, 126–7, 135–7, 144, 146, 150, 157, 166–71, 174, 176, 178; see also English Ambiguity Machines, 49, 126–7, 137 ‘Delhi’, 49, 103–6, 137 Distances, 49–50, 52, 90, 134–6, 157, 166–7, 169–72 ‘Infinities’, 126, 137, 176, 178 Love and Other Monsters, Of, 18, 49, 52, 137, 157, 166–9, 172

ISF.indd 254

‘Oblivion: A Journey’, 90–3, 150, 157–8 ‘Speculative Manifesto, A’, 6, 47, 50, 133 ‘Tetrahedron, The’, 17, 126–7, 137, 176, 178 ‘With Fate Conspire’, 103–6, 146 Singha, Nilagrib, 125 Singha, Niranjan, 184 Sinha, Anubhav, 55, 177, 184 Sircar, Mahendralal, 26, 28 Sita, 92 slavery, 25, 112, 130, 177; see also colonialism Smith, Eric, 1 socialism, 31–3, 114, 117, 135–6 soldier, 25–6, 112, 114, 134 Soni, Shantilal, 40 sovereign, 9, 17, 103 Soviet, 33, 100, 115, 117, 136, 145, 196 Soyuz, 115 space travel, 18, 21, 75, 102, 149–50, 153, 157, 159, 177, 181, 196; see also travel spaceship, 75, 92, 154, 178, 181 spatial, 97, 124, 128–30, 132–3, 135–7, 140, 142, 147–9, 195–7 Spear, Thomas George Percival, 112, 181 species, 143, 145, 154–5, 167, 169–70, 177, 183, 188–9 speculate, 3, 6, 22, 26, 29, 37, 47–51, 53, 55, 63, 73, 84–6, 97, 112–13, 115–16, 127, 141, 144–5, 178, 188; see also prediction speculative fiction, 5, 48–51, 55, 85 Spielberg, Steven, 40, 56, 177–8 spiritualism, 11, 27, 43, 62, 64, 67–8, 74, 77, 99, 102, 137, 155, 171, 176, 181 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 16, 18, 66, 68, 106, 163 Srinarahari, 204–5 stereotype, 101, 162, 165, 174, 183 Stevenson, R. L., 33, 40 structuralist, 43, 69, 82, 109, 169 subaltern, 16, 18–19, 52, 62, 64, 78–82, 85, 93, 95–6, 98, 102–6, 109, 142, 163, 166, 175, 188–9, 195; see also postcolonialism subcontinent, 12, 97, 108, 126, 140, 194

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Index 255

subtext, 66, 95, 119 subversion, 17, 22, 24, 32, 37, 41–2, 52, 54, 57, 62, 79, 86–7, 89–94, 96–7, 102–4, 106–7, 125–6, 128, 150, 166, 195 Sujatha, 39, 71, 114–16, 141, 176–8, 184; see also Tamil ‘Dilemma’, 114–15, 176–9, 184 En Iniya Iyanthira, 39 Sultana’s Dream, 14, 17, 30–2, 35, 133–4; see also Rokeya Shakhawat Hossain superhero, 38, 126, 166, 172, 174 superhuman, 156, 172–3 supernatural, 8, 22, 29, 40, 45, 55, 61, 65, 70, 77, 82–4, 86, 94, 173 superpowers, 172, 174 superstition, 45, 56, 67, 83–4 supervillain, 126, 186 supplement, 13, 89, 96, 197 Suvin, Darko, 2–5, 8, 42, 61, 64, 82, 109, 164, 195 Swaminathan, Kalpana, 50–1 symbol, 24, 88, 91, 115, 134, 137, 148, 167 syncretic, 64, 84, 86

T

taboo, 152 Tagore, Rabindranath, 11, 27, 176, 194 Tamil, 5, 10, 13–14, 23, 29, 31, 36, 38–40, 55–6, 71, 90, 114, 116, 141, 176–7, 182, 192–3 Tamilamagan, 182 Tantra, 83, 124 taxonomy, 8 technocracy, 141 technology, 3, 6, 14, 16–17, 19, 21, 23, 25–6, 28, 33, 37, 41, 43, 45, 55–7, 62, 64–5, 68–9, 71–3, 75, 77, 83–5, 88, 91–2, 99–100, 111–12, 114–16, 118–25, 136, 143–4, 148–9, 153–5, 158, 170–1, 176–82, 185–7, 196 technoorientalism, 196 Telugu, 13, 15, 23, 36, 39, 55, 193 temporality, 16–17, 25–6, 97–8, 101, 104–5, 109–10, 113–14, 119, 121–2, 124, 126–8, 130, 133–4, 145, 147, 195–7

ISF.indd 255

terminology, 2, 67, 76 territory, 1–2, 4, 9, 140, 144, 192 terror, 93, 117–18, 122, 138, 145, 188 terrorism, 117, 119–20, 175, 183–4, 186–7 terrorist, 117–19, 145, 183 Thakur, Debendranath, 27 Thakurmar Jhuli, 69 Thatte, Nandini, 38, 53 theatre, 3, 49, 142 theory, 5–6, 10, 13, 15, 17, 28, 42, 50, 53, 63–5, 68, 76, 80, 98, 119, 133, 167, 197 thriller, 34, 183 Tidhar, Lavie, 86 tilism, 29, 69; see also aiyari Todorov, Tzvetan, 82–3 Tolkien, J. R. R., 86 totalitarian, 51, 141, 143; see also dystopia tourism, 18, 150–1, 153–5, 175 tradition, 1–3, 5–7, 12–13, 16–17, 19, 21–3, 29, 31, 34, 36, 38, 41, 43–5, 47–8, 51–2, 55–8, 61–2, 64–9, 73–82, 84–5, 87, 92–6, 101, 103, 108, 111, 118–19, 121, 131–2, 134, 139, 142, 153, 162, 168, 171, 175–6, 181, 191, 194–5 transcendence, 5–6, 42, 78, 91, 104, 113, 197 transformation, 31, 35, 47, 57, 68, 88, 127, 132, 139, 154, 156–8, 161, 172–4 translation, 13, 15, 19, 29–30, 33–4, 36–8, 42, 45–6, 48–9, 52–4, 113, 191, 193–4 transnational, 11, 137, 140, 157, 168–9; see also diaspora travel, 43, 75, 150, 152, 154–9, 172; see also journey voyage, 154, 156 travelogue, 33, 149, 151–2 tribalism, 140 tribe, 25–6, 79, 82, 112, 139–40, 163, 181 trilogy, 50–1 Tripathi, Amish, 86 Tripitaka, 94; see also Buddhism

28/09/2020 12:44:16

256 INDE X

tropes, 13, 15–16, 43, 48, 121, 157, 173 Trotsky, Leon, 113 TV, 40, 51, 55, 150 Captain Vyom, 55 Indradhanush, 40 Shaktiman, 51; see also comics Space City Sigma, 41 Star Trek, 41, 150

U

UFO, 43, 75 universe, 3, 8, 16, 18, 22, 42, 45, 61–2, 64, 69, 73–4, 76–7, 79–80, 83–9, 91–2, 95, 114, 122, 125–6, 137, 150, 157–8, 164, 166, 195 Upadhyay, Rajiv Ranjan, 44, 54, 78, 87–9; see also Hindi ‘Shiv ke Sannidhya Mein’, 87–8 Urdu, 10, 15, 23, 36, 39, 191, 193 USSR, 33, 115, 122, 140; see also Soviet; Soviyet Bhumi Utopia, 13–14, 17, 21–2, 25, 30–3, 36, 45, 58, 99, 101, 109–10, 113–14, 116, 121, 128–39, 143, 145, 147, 149, 158–9, 165, 180–1, 195–6 utopianism, 31, 115–16, 136–7, 181, 186; see also dystopia enclave, 130–1, 134–5, 137, 142–4, 147 eutopia, 111, 116, 129–30, 133–4, 137–8, 147 heterotopia, 132–3, 136–8, 148

V

Vagbata Purana, 88; see also Vaishnavism; Vishnu, Lord Vaishnavism, 83, 85, 124 Valentinian Cosmology, 93 Valk, Ülo, 68 Vamana, 88, 90, 210 Varma, C.B., 210–1 Varma, Vinayak, 191 Vedas, 44, 67 Vedic science, 16, 44, 62, 64, 66, 68–9, 74, 77–8, 80–1, 84–5, 87–9, 92, 95–6, 100, 195, 209 vehicle, 24, 33, 46, 88, 134 Venus, 28, 69–70, 150, 153, 165–6, 177

ISF.indd 256

Venusian, 153–4, 172 verfremdungs, 3 verisimilitude, 8 vernacular, 24, 46 Verne, Jules, 5, 21, 29–30, 33, 38, 150, 153 vijnana, 5–8, 22, 37; see also science vimanas, 28 Vint, Sheryl, 4 violence, 66–7, 101–2, 114, 118–20, 138, 141, 143, 145, 188 Virgin Comics, 51; see also comics Vishnu, Lord, 88, 90–1, 210 Vivekananda, 11, 27, 67, 176 Vyasa, Ambika Datta, 30, 35, 99, 153; see also Hindi ‘Ascharya Vrittant’, 30, 33, 35, 99, 153

W

warfare, 26, 32, 47, 89, 112, 118–19, 121, 158, 187 weapon, 31, 75, 88, 118, 134, 142–3, 166, 181, 186, 188 weather, 29, 66, 68, 70 web, 48, 54, 72, 88, 192; see also computer webzine, 121; see also magazine Wegner, Philip, 130 Wells, H. G., 5, 29, 33–4, 38, 40, 70, 150–1, 164 Weltliteratur, 194 westernisation, 175–6, 184–6 wisdom, 7, 76, 100–2 world building, 16, 63–4, 72, 80, 93, 111, 150, 195

X

xenophobia, 165, 181

Y

Yadav, Yogendra, 10–11 Yaksha, 44, 87 Yefremov, Ivan, 114, 135 yogi, 74, 76 youth, 14, 31, 34–5, 101–2, 105, 166

Z

Zaidi, Zeashan, 54, 150, 204 Zare, Bonnie, 191–2 zombie, 164, 180, 186–7

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