Author’s Note
The following is a reworked excerpt taken from Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction, University of Wales Press, 2021)
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The Indianness of the science fiction in this country [India] is not dependent on its geographical origin but rather on the cultural and social ambience which gives it its soul.
– Bal Phondke, It Happened Tomorrow (xviii)
I
ndia awoke – and wanted space. There used to be a time when popular ‘western’ narratives depicted hapless Indians praying to the Taj Mahal whenever Earth was in mortal peril – at least when they were not sacrificing humans to gods (as in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom).[i] However, by 2020, India had joined the space race (Space Force); soon, a joint international mission to Mars would feature an Indian astronaut, Group Captain Ram Arya (as in Away)–and solar-powered drones of the Indian Air Force (IAF) would fly across the globe over the next few decades, their coding executed in classical Sanskrit (Interstellar). We live in such days of mechanical djinns in New Delhi.[ii]
To explicate these morphoses within India’s popular (SF) imagination, I propose the ‘IN situ Model’, which traverses the realms of space, time and being. It has been constructed to map SF texts in specific networks and its generic design advances three nodes. First: the ‘transMIT thesis’ evidences how Indian SF (and, therefore, ISFE, specifically) exists across the intersecting domains of technology, materiality/politics/ideology and mythology within the emergent genre space of a developing country. Through its body, not only does ISFE transmit to its readers (emergent) technology, (sedimented) mythology and (mutating) ideology (in terms of its functionality), but, even more importantly, the basic operations of its texts operate across/beyond the three sets. The thesis is explicated in Star Warriors of the Modern Raj.
Second: the ‘antekaal thesis’ approaches the ruptured temporality of SF by interrogating how ISFE’s semantics and syntax simultaneously exist at multiple spatio-temporal locations evidenced by a golden past that projects tales of technological wonder to diffused – yet specific – moments in India’s (Vedic) past. The antekaal is generated by quantum interplay between before time (Latin ‘ante’), against time (Greek ‘anti’), the end of time (Sanskritised/Urduesque ‘ant-e-kaal’) and all-time/eternity (Hindi ‘anantkaal’). Within SF narratives, the antekaal becomes a temporal-ideatic extension that is simultaneously tethered to a past, present and a future (though not always in that order) and generates a cycle/spiral of its own that links future histories, quantum temporality, geopolitics, and religious fundamentalism.
Third: the ‘neoMONSTERS thesis’ studies otherisation, marginalisation, demonisation and ‘monsterisation’ within SF vis-à-vis its geoeconomics and geopolitics. It assesses how/why the others – ‘breaker[s] of category’ for Cohen – are created and interrogated within new tomorrows, and locates the spatial subversions and temporal divergences created in/by India’s SF others, or as they appear, as neoMONSTERS. It interrogates the metaphorical reimaginings of the ‘other’ and studies the portrayal(s) of alterity vis-a-vis specific material realities. It maps alternate presents and fictional futures in contemporary India’s popular imagination and hunts for the aforementioned neoMONSTERS: Mutating and Mutagenic Ontological Narratives in Space-Time Echoing Realistic Situations.
I now explore Indian SF in an attempt to explain how and where the three theses grow out of.
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Scotch is Scottish; Bourbon is American. Does the heady cocktail of Science Fiction (SF) also boast of a GI (‘Government Issue’ and ‘Geographical Indication’) tag? Not a long time ago in a galaxy not-so-far-away, a US corporation caused a minor diplomatic crisis by patenting basmati rice as its own. Farmers’ groups and environmental lobbies went up in arms: their response to this violation accentuated that ‘the distinct aroma and the texture of basmati comes from the Indian soil irrigated by waters from the Himalayan rivers … and insisted that the appellation should be reserved for rice grown in a specific region in India’ (Rai, ‘India–US Fight’). Ultimately, in 2001, the patent awarded to RiceTec was withdrawn and replaced by one concerning just three strains of basmati rice: the corporation realised that despite the actual location of production, the characteristics of Indian basmati would always determine what was regarded as the basmati rice. Is the existence of SF congruent to the conundrum of basmati rice, that is, would SF always be considered a ‘western’ product despite the actual location of its production?
The question whether SF is a recent import to India or it has a long history of adoption and adaptation that pre-dates its currently presumed ‘westernised’ avatar ravels more strands than it unravels (‘Red Alert’). To locate an unbiased evolutionary history of Indian SF, one has to be equidistant from two separate approaches, both of which vary in their political outlooks (hinted at in the first conversation of this book). The first perceives Indian SF as a recently imported form that has started to be used by our writers of late, a form that merely imitates western SF (for example, viewing Roshan’s Koi … Mil Gaya as a copy of Spielberg’s ET without being aware of Ray’s unfinished ‘Alien’).[i] The second regards SF as a fairly old mode in India, one that can be found in Indian classical/mythological texts (the approach that sees brahmastras – divine weapons of Hindu mythology – as nuclear weapons). I differ from both approaches – and the viewpoints they espouse and emanate from.
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The first approach can be countered by the simple fact that there exists more than a century of ‘modern’ Indian SF. Indian SF is not merely borrowed: it is indigenous. To scan through just three languages (India has twenty-two ‘scheduled’ ones alone): Hindi boasts of Pandit Ambika Dutt Vyas’s ‘Ascharya Vrittant’ published in Piyush Pravaha (1884), Babu Keshav Prasad’s ‘Chandra Lok Ki Yatra’ published in Saraswati (1900). Bengali has Hemlal Datta’s ‘Rahasya’ published in Vigyan Darpan (1882), Jagadananda Ray’s ‘Shukra Bhraman’ (1892), and Jagadish Chandra Bose’s ‘Palatak Toofan’ published in Avyakta (1896). Even Indian English features Kylas Chunder Dutt’s anti-imperial ‘A journal of forty-eight hours of the year 1945’ published in The Calcutta Literary Gazette (1835), Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s ‘The Republic of Orissa: A Page from the Annals of the 20th Century’ (1845), and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s 1905 story ‘Sultana’s Dream’ published in Indian Ladies’ Magazine (‘Bengal’).[ii] Indian languages have carried forward this legacy, and most scholars regard SF to have been available in articulation for some time now.[iii] Moreover, I mention these texts but I agree with Paul Kincaid’s idea that ‘there is no starting point for science fiction … because there is no ancestral text that could possibly contain, even in its nascent form, all that we have come to identify as science fiction’ (409). These ‘ancestral’ texts do not – and cannot – contain everything we see as Indian SF today. This is why the Butterfly Effect explained why ancestral SF texts – conditioned by initial conditions and deterministic chaos – can later mutate into something that does not contain ‘what we regard as SF’ even in a ‘nascent’ form. I simply view these texts as manifestations of SF in India’s literary history.
To counter the second approach, one that believes classical Indian literature is primarily SF (rather than fantasy or mythology) one needs to understand the ‘golden past’ narrative. According to Luckhurst, ‘if the projection back, as a fantasy of non-origin, is SF’s past, its complement in the future is the fantasy of non-being. This is the circular detour back into the mainstream where the fantasy of non-origin had situated it before the interregnum of the generic’ (‘Many Deaths’, 43). The argument can be reworked for India: the disrupted facticity of non-origin and the subversive transcendence of non-being hybridise when the ‘golden age’ of SF reincarnates itself as and through the ‘golden past’ of Indian SF. While for Patrick Sharp and Pawel Frelik SF is ‘a global storytelling form of technoscientific modernity’ (‘Series Preface’), a lot of Indian SF is equally about a protoscientific antiquity that zeroes in on an origin (usually in the Vedic times) but simultaneously diffuses specific (arche) moments across the time-period by considering the actual origin as forgotten, inaccessible and/or repressed. It also reinforces the non-being of ‘western’ SF by regarding science itself to be quintessentially Indian (more on this in ‘Mythology’). This can be accessed through Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay’s mythologerm, which represents a ‘tendency to continually rework the history of science through the use of the mythic, or to use the mythic as a source of alternative or unknown or advanced science, or to use the mythic as a hinge to elaborate a difference between one kind of sf and another’ (‘Mythologerm’, 437).
Indian SF, therefore, may not be as old as the Indian classics, but it is also not as new; it is not a global import to India in the twenty-first century. It is not merely a reflection (or refraction) of its western counterpart, nor is it a direct import from the west. Thomas M. Disch believes that SF ‘is one of the few American industries that have never been transplanted abroad with any success’ since SF always bears a ‘made in America’ label and ‘the future represented by SF writers continues to be an American future’ (The Stuff, 2). I differ from all these statements – on different accounts. SF is not an American industry (as evidenced by its history and popularity in Indian languages) and its futures – at least in India – are far from American; they might also be India’s pasts (refer to the antekaal thesis). Today, even the ‘made in America’ label that Disch prides SF on is now being made in India (or China). However, India’s SF is not an insulated tradition: as of now, the topoi, mechanics and elements of ‘American’ SF (if there is one stable tradition that can be so called) are successfully being appropriated. Indian SF in English’s (ISFE’s) First Contact(s) with three alien species in recent releases – the ‘Morons’ in Karthik Laxman’s (satirical) Unreal Aliens (2016), the Qa’haQ in my own Aliens in Delhi (2017) and the KifrWyss in Kumar’s Earth to Centauri (2018) – celebrate similar notions of American pulp that characterises a lot of ‘golden age’ SF.
In his blog, Samit Basu locates the ‘origins of speculative fiction in India’ in ‘the incredible wealth of mythical, historical and folklore traditions’ and in ‘the incredibly popular genres of science fiction and fantasy in both literature and film in the west’ (‘Trousers of Time’). He finds it surprising that even with these traditions, and within a ‘nation as culturally predisposed to the fantastic’, India’s ‘contemporary speculative fiction’ is ‘marginal at best, at least in literary terms’. Basu laments that, despite being culturally predisposed towards non-realist modes of representation, Indian SpecFic often lacks ‘literary punch’, for which he holds market conditions and literary prejudices responsible. Basu revisits his statement in 2019, and conveys that today ‘art and science both run the risk of being seen through extremely narrow prisms, of national interest or utility’. This means that ‘creating a work of science fiction that does not toe the line of some sort of nationalist, majoritarian or apolitical commercial agenda is both pragmatically risky and socially courageous’ (Facebook Conversation).[iv]
What holds for SpecFic might also hold true for SF––and the lack of ‘literariness’ in Indian SF can be explained by Bal Phondke’s four stages of the evolution of global SF (‘Preface’, xiii). The first stage of the birth and evolution of SF, Phondke opines, is one of ‘proto-SF’, and begins with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The leitmotif here is adventure and SF builds on exploratory adventure tales. The second stage of SF – spearheaded by Hugo Gernsback and John Campbell – has ‘science’ as the primary component of SF and provides the reader/writer with a ‘quasi-scientific’ framework on which the writing/reading depends. The second stage is, say, when the pulp magazines take the US by storm and pave the way for the ‘golden age of Science Fiction’. The third stage of SF’s evolution begins post the Second World War; the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki jolt the readers out of their scientific-romances. Science (and SF) is no longer a Caesar that could not do any wrong – it becomes a double-edged sword. With this realisation, SF becomes aware of society and politics more than ever before, and starts exploring the ramifications of science on humanity. The fourth stage signals another shift: from SF for social purposes, where content is supreme, to a strain of SF that pays utmost attention to its form and style. This roughly corresponds to New Wave SF, and represents the rise of ‘literary’ SF. Phondke finds most of contemporary Indian SF as worthy of being categorised into the second and third stages of SF’s global evolution (xvii). Since Indian SF may not have reached the fourth stage (where stylistics became as important as the content), it can suffer a literary disadvantage that Basu seems to be referring to. However, Phondke’s essay was written more than two decades ago. With Vandana Singh and Priya Sarukkai Chabria, to name just two writers, ISFE has already entered the fourth stage.
Indian Science Fiction has had its own history which – while drawing from and interacting with ‘western SF’ quite occasionally – charts out its own course and has its own distinctly unique operating logic.[v] Indian SF is not labelled thus merely because it is produced in India but because of its ‘soul’, which is a material, gestalten whole of India’s socio-cultural and political milieu (Phondke, viii).[vi]
SF in India can be said to have a buzzing scene: less resplendent than the fans want but surely more robust than its detractors think, as Jessica Langer points out: ‘untranslated literature is not unread literature’ (Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, 2). SF’s production/consumption may not have increased in the same proportion as the apparent ‘scientification’ of India (with the growing technical expertise and acumen of human resources in science and technology), yet a genre, or mode, is slowly coming of age. However, one must not confuse Indian SF in regional languages (in which much has been done, and on which much has been written) with English-language SF in/from India, which lacks, or rather, lacked, a similar critical mass (at least until the 2000s).
My focus now is on Indian SF in English (ISFE), a genre/mode/language intersection that changed in the new millennium, when multiple SF novels and short stories were published in English; the consolidation of ISFE has been spurred by ‘the country’s rapid industrialization and technoscientific modernization in the last quarter of the twentieth century’ (‘Other Tomorrows’, 203). ISFE presently blooms in an India where technical education is flourishing, literacy in the global idiom of English is increasing, science is beginning to permeate life, people are willing to experiment in modes/methods of entertainment, and a language appropriated from the erstwhile colonisers is no longer encumbered with the postcolonial angst of having to ‘write back’ national allegories in it. While some work has been already done in the area of my present endeavour, there is still a lot of scope for exploration in a territory so rich and yet so new. Though there have been multiple instances where some ISFE texts have been studied, there has not been one combined volume that focuses solely on twenty-first century ISFE, analyses the conditions in which such writing blooms, and locates these texts within mythological, ideological and technological paradigms.
The fact remains: despite massive production in other genres and even a healthy SF tradition in other Indian languages, not many SF texts have been a part of Indian Writing in English (IWE) – which is ironic considering Kylas Chunder Dutt’s ‘A journal of forty-eight hours of the year 1945’, published in 1835, can be read as a work of SF. One wonders why. A dearth of ISFE can be attributed to the slow evolution until reaching a certain ‘SF threshold’ (from which point production picks up considerably), a hybrid national SFF/mythic tradition that cannibalises ancient and modern narratives and topoi, and specific material frameworks generated by transnational capitalism, globalisation, imperialism and indigenous discourses. Let me list some reasons for the relative dearth of ISFE.
First, every genre matures with age in a language – for literature and people are on a constant look-out for something new. This can explain why regional languages (which have had more time to incubate in people’s minds) have a much more advanced SF tradition than the colonial imposition of Indian English (which was assimilated by the common man after a temporal lag). Hindi, Tamil, Urdu, etc. had more time to evolve in India, thereby giving the literatures of these languages more diversity. Also, perhaps indigenous writers were inspired by the (western) ‘scientific’ discourses being fed to the new intelligentsia and wanted to write about them. Maybe they were fascinated by ‘foreign science’ while Indian writers in English – anglophiles bred in colonial colours – took science for granted.
Second, India does not need ISFE since it has robust fantasy and mythic traditions (that cater to the wish-fulfilment of its audiences).[vii] Mariano Paz quotes Argentinean SF writer Angélica Gorodischer while tackling the dearth of SF (films) in Latin America: ‘in a country in which telephones do not work, and where to have a car is a luxury, you cannot go around writing technological science fiction, or explaining the spaceships that travel to the stars, or talking about galactic empires’ (‘South of the future: an overview of Latin American science fiction cinema’, 99). People with empty stomachs do not dream of conquering stars, and prefer the soothing balm of mythology/religion that promises them (at least) a happy afterlife. Luckhurst believes ‘SF is merely a modernised version of the “innately” human need for “mythology” by which to orient experience’ (‘Many Deaths’, 39) – how the Orient orients itself becomes a play on the language/genre/mode of ISFE. Scholes also argues that ‘the desire for narrative, once satisfied by myth, can now be provided by popular forms, given the decadence and abandonment of narrative by the mainstream’ (quoted in ‘Many Deaths’, 40).[viii] A Hari Seldonian representation of how a people approach SpecFic can be thus (‘Bollywood’, 186): (Science Fiction) x (Fantasy) x (Mythology) = Speculative Fiction Constant (C). SF and mythology share an inversely proportional relationship: for one to rise, the other has to fall. Moreover, this mythology-laced SFF tradition ensures that ISFE’s popularity––or the lack of it thereof––was a result of the primacy of the mythic in the Indian imagination.
Third, while fantasy and mythology rely on worldviews that require no objective proof, SF, the manifestation of science and technology, does not fall within a culture’s ‘blind spot’. Hence, any SF not cognisant of contemporary scientific discourses (or its extrapolations) is regarded as illogical, impossible and juvenile, and, hence, can only cater to a specific demographic. While acknowledging the normative-neoteric character of SF (5), Disch claims that ‘the golden age of SF is no longer 12’ in a world where SF permeates life; for a 12-year old, the science fictional is no longer alien but a reality of existence (The Stuff, 1). However, there is sufficient SF in other Indian languages that counters these preceding two claims.
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Fourth, Carl Freedman finds that ‘if the Third World has no SF – i.e., no work explicitly and self-consciously in the SF tradition – it is because the Third World has no need of SF’; he bases his argument on how the ‘First World commodity structure[s]’ that penetrate the ‘social field’ of the Third World ‘must seem as radically different and estranging as the imagined planets and futures of SF seem to readers in the west’, thereby making ‘Third World realism itself is, as it were, naturally SF’ (198). However, while today’s (proletarian) Third World – and India, specifically – may share the same relationship with a bourgeois west (to use Freedman’s analogy), this India (and its popular imagination) also impinges on spaces originally meant for the First World. With its changing mechanics of play and power, of reclaiming and converting, and of appropriating and celebrating, SF is no longer the ‘Third World literature of the First/Second World’ (199) because a variant of it, ISFE, through its semantics/syntax, often becomes the ‘First World literature of the Third World’ even when at its dystopian best. This is why one can predict that this dearth of ISFE would not exist for long, especially when the SF market in India, that too in English, is on the verge of ‘going public’.
However, if the material realities were the same, then how come India has SF in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, and other ‘native’ languages but not to that extent in English? This paradox can only be resolved by the proposition that the ‘postcolonial’ national allegory sort (a la Jameson, 69), or social-realistic sort of writing, takes over IWE only around the 1930s, and eclipses this ‘original’ mode of IWE. The current re-emergence of genre fiction (such as SF) in IWE, a movement back to the gutters, is a sign of maturity more than anything else – for ISFE has finally grown out of the shadow of the (anti)hegemonic, postcolonial agenda, which had usurped its original pulp self earlier, and now finally has the confidence to own up to its ‘lowly’ roots. This is, again, a circular movement back to its roots, where non-being and non-origin coalesce.
ISFE has Hindu Gods, Islamic Angels, Indian clone Generals, Taliban Zombies and Al Qaeda terrorists; it has time-travel, aliens, faster-than-light travel, bio-engineered superhumans, and totalitarian dystopias, but also god-fearing citizens, frustrated engineers, mind-controlling slugs, rogue AI and mythological beings. A bent towards SFF implies Indian writers borrow from different mega-texts, fuse various traditions and experiment with different modes. ISFE caters to a framework where science is not antithetical to divinity and portrays a universe where science complements religion. For example, Sita becomes a time-traveller (in Kishore), an AI (in Das), and an alien (in Saket). ISFE appears in a continuum between the literary and pulp, mimetic and non-mimetic art, and commercial and establishment writing. If ‘classical’ SF in the western hemisphere is a public transport bus that goes from point A to point B via a pre-specified route, then Indian SF – and ISFE, in particular –represents the passengers who board this bus. They get on at different locations for different purposes, disembark at different stops and then proceed to their individual destinations. ISFE utilises the semantic elements of SF (since they do travel in the SF bus), but a local flavour always creeps in. Kincaid argues: ‘what constitutes the warp and weft of science fiction, therefore, is endlessly subtle and intricate, made up at times of more things than we can readily identify. Which is why what makes science fiction is so hard to pin down, but what is science fiction is so easy to recognise’ (417). By the time a ‘Science Fiction Airlines’ Boeing 747, having taken off from LAX, executes pre-landing checks at DEL, the craft has already evolved into a newer form of Pushpaka-Boeing, an ancient craft of a modern tale, caught between two worlds and their frameworks. This aerial vehicle now constitutes a newer sub-genre/type/mode (of global SF), one that bears a ‘weapon’ in the style of Arrival (2016): a new language (and thus a new semantic/syntactical mode of thought and experience) that would irrevocably change the fundamental nature of the SF mega-text once uploaded. ISFE might have all the ‘semantic elements’ of SF (aliens, spaceships), but they are arranged in a ‘syntax’ that is not always regarded as SF (for faith/belief/divinity in many ISFE texts is always as important as science). To transpose Carl Sagan and Rick Altman onto my study: the beauty of ISFE is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.
The next question that arises is why should one read post–2000 Indian SF in English? Apart from the instantaneous response that it intrigues me like nothing else, one can refer to Mark Poster’s ideas about cultural history, which ‘might then be understood as the study of the construction of the subject, the extent to which and the mechanisms through which individuals are attached to identities, [and] the shape and characteristics of those identities’ (quoted in Luckhurst, Science Fiction, 2). Now, while not specifically engaging with cultural history, I read ISFE for the following reasons.
First, studying the ‘paraliterature’ of a language is not only an exercise that constitutes an organic linkage between the canon and the margins, but one that simultaneously comprises a contiguous historical process where the margins inch towards the centre and vice versa; understanding this movement can be enlightening. Taking a stand against relegating paraliterature to the background, Darko Suvin writes in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction that ‘a discipline which refuses to take into account 90 percent or more of what constitutes its domain seems to me not only to have large zones of blindness but also to run serious risks of distorted vision in the small zone it focuses on (so-called high lit)’ (vii). However, apart from studying the five to ten per cent of non-perishable ISFE, this undertaking celebrates pulp ISFE – since it mirrors popular prejudices and presents a cross-section of how a society responds to ‘change’, whether technological or social. Roger Luckhurst further argues in Science Fiction that since ‘SF is typically regarded as a very low literary form’, it is more often than not ‘ignored or edged to the margins of literary study or intellectual history as rather juvenile’ (2). His choice of study, a cultural history, however, ‘tries not to prejudge its evidence, and thus finds itself open to the immensely rich resources that a genre like SF offers to anyone interested in the key aspects of the culture and history of the West in the last 120 years’ (2). Luckhurst uses this approach to question the ‘historicity’ and ‘imposed values’ of the west; and I attempt to engage with India by looking at ISFE of the twenty-first century.
Second, SF is regarded as a popular, pulp and ‘low’ genre in the west – but ISFE’s subversion of the pulp/popular notion merits a closer study.[ix] Luckhurst avers that ‘SF is dying; but then SF has always been dying, it has been dying from the very moment of its constitution’; this is because SF wants to be less of SF, and more of ‘literature’, and is ‘ecstatic at the prospect of its own death and desires nothing else’ (‘Many Deaths’, 36). Just as Harry Potter needs to die once to neutralise the horcrux of Voldemort within, and Alex Murphy has to die to become RoboCop, SF too has to kill a part of itself to get what it wants: ‘longing for (re)entry to the “mainstream” is the enduring central element of SF criticism’ (‘Many Deaths’, 37). Perhaps not in India: the politics of language and genre entangle within ISFE since English still occupies a culturally superior pedigree in India and this creates an interesting paradox. The hybrid strain of Indian SF is at once highbrow and lowbrow, simultaneously literary and pulp. This is a by-product of how an English speaker in India is categorised as an upwardly-mobile, upper-caste and upper-class person worthy of respect – courtesy of British colonialism, foreign direct investment (with its lingua franca, English) and Indian middle-class aspirations. Therefore, the act of reading a ‘pulp/low’ genre (that is not ‘popular’ in a market dominated by romance/mythology) written in an ‘elite/high’ language presents multiple challenges – and incorporates different perspectives.[x] ISFE is further complicated by its positioning in India’s socio-political and literary history. Pulp is not the same as popular; low and high are not absolutes; and the language in which ISFE appears (English) – and the scientific framework that shapes it – makes it high, though it is low/pulp in terms of (most of) its content. ISFE becomes a niche genre meant primarily for more discerning audiences, and is not popular in India in the way SF is popular in the UK or the US.[xi] However, the Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin and Octavia Butler reading Indian elites often view ISFE as nothing short of market-oriented reductive pulp at best, or an escapist genre full of gimmicks and cheap imitations of the west at worst. Thus, shunned by pundits and mass-readers alike, ISFE tries to cater to both – and embodies tangential, vastly different narratives. This makes my quarry a Schrodinger’s Cat, which at once yearns to live and die. This ‘quantum superposition’ is a part of ISFE’s soul, where ‘highbrow’ and ‘pulp’, ‘art’ and ‘market’, ‘science’ and ‘fiction’, ‘reality’ and ‘mythology’, and ‘past’ and ‘future’ slug it out. When does ISFE as a system stop existing ‘as a superposition of states’ (quite often antithetical) and become ‘one or the other’ (if at all)? Foucault declares in The Order of Things that ‘man is a recent invention’ and ‘one perhaps reaching its end’ (386–7), since ‘it is the language and “discourse” about humanity that actually produces the “thing” itself, which we then erroneously take to be real’ (quoted in Berlatsky, 4–5). ISFE produces its own discourses for and of a new India, a new reader, and a new genre/mode as it approaches the event horizon of the Indian society and market post-2000. This semiotic no man’s land and semantic demilitarised zone is where market forces, genre conventions, fandom feedback and publishing/production companies step in. SF, for Renault, ‘strongly combines the fantasy ‘escapist’ restorative function of mass culture with the instructive function of high culture’, which makes it ‘entertaining’ and ‘thought provoking’ at the same time (137).
The third reason for studying ISFE is its social relevance and hybrid character: Suparno Banerjee finds that ISFE’s ‘position on the borderline of Western and Indian cultures’ bestows on its writers ‘insight into both worlds’ since they ‘belong to both worlds and to none’, thereby giving them the ‘critical distancing’ necessary for ‘effective critique’ (Other Tomorrows, 207). The location of its texts (India/English/twenty-first century) ensures that the ‘zero world’ (Suvin, 11) of the author’s empirical reality intersects with the world of the reader and/or its chief concerns through the world of the text. For Luckhurst again, ‘cultural history will situate SF texts in a broad network of contexts and disciplinary knowledges’ (2), and ‘representative SF works … speak to the concerns of their specific moment in history’ (3). My study exhibits how ISFE responds to India’s specific moments, and how it is not merely ‘escapist’ – on the contrary, it is extremely conscious of immediate social and political realities. After all, not only does SF portray other worlds, it seeks to better the current one. A study of such literary works foregrounds the social and material relevance of ISFE.
Fourth, ISFE (and science writing) seems to denote a scientific awakening – at least ostensibly – and goes hand in hand with the ‘scientific’ model of thought, especially since technical education is slowly becoming the norm in India. Popularising science and promoting scientific temper may not be the sole driving impulses of Indian writers, but it is also true that there are scientists in India whose (SF) narratives clash with superstitious beliefs.For example, Narlikar (in ‘Ice Age Cometh’) and Datta (in ‘Gem of a Story’) often interpolate mythic and folklore into their SpecFic narratives, but they do so more to play with such perspectives than to reinforce them.
Fifth, since ISFE is a product of – and leads to – literary experimentation, any focus on ISFE, whether creative or critical, is bound to generate something new. All languages evolve with time, and aim for something new in their literatures, or as much novelty that a material base would allow. The literature of a language can stagnate if it does not find newer ways to reinvent itself in terms of its textual experimentation (vis-à-vis language/genre) and its perception of the world (in terms of its content). India, a nation at the crossroads of an economic resurgence, political upheaval, and a ‘cultural-nationalist’ reassertion, boasts of specific realities which are favourable for the rise of SF. Its narratives are caught between the behavioural, production and consumption patterns precipitated by (global) market forces, local right-wing powers predicated on a religio-cultural reassertion, and a left-liberal resistance to the previous two. This three-body problem shapes ISFE’s orbital mechanics too – which explicates not just the genre/mode but also India’s socio-economic and political realities. ISFE acts as a bridge across spectrums, and provides India with voices that not only celebrate its core but also question it in equal measure. Under Phondke’s fourth stage of SF’s evolution, one can bank on new stories to emerge – and they do.
With rampaging bug-eyed monsters, out-of-control robots and diabolical aliens, SF first emerged as a low-brow, commercial form in the west, which later moved to the realm of the literary. ISFE of the twenty-first century has evolved in the opposite manner. With proponents like Padmanabhan, Singh and Chabria, et al., who are well-versed in the western SpecFic canon, ISFE conjunction with politics, society, philosophy, literature and art is not ‘fortuitous but fundamental’ (to use Freedman’s terminology). However, with time, the shuttlecraft of ISFE now descends to the bustling gallis (streets) of Delhi from the ivory towers at which it had halted briefly. Dawson Varughese finds that ‘India is the second largest English-language book market and it is posited to be the largest within the next twenty years’ (‘Preface’). Whether ISFE can partake of this exponential rise is a question that can be projected using data estimates, a new kind of storytelling has again emerged out of India – one that will continue to evolve. With Chetan Bhagat, English-language romance/campus-fiction in India was the first successful experiment in the twenty-first century; one that made a mass-readership from towns and cities across the country read IWE for pleasure for perhaps the first time in their lives. With Amish Tripathi and Ashwin Sanghi, mythology (laced with the conventions of historical fiction) was the second such genre. Could ISFE follow suit?
I am sure it will.
****
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Vyas, Ambika Dutt, ‘Ascharya Vrittant’, Rachnakar. URL: https://www.rachanakar.org/2016/10/2016_8.html (accessed 21 October 2018). Walter, Damien, ‘Does God Have a Place in Science Fiction?’ The Guardian, 7 June 2013. URL: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/07/god-in-science-fiction (accessed 30 July 2015). When the Tide Turns’, Once Upon a Blue Moon (Delhi: National Book Trust, 2006), pp. 1–14. **** Acknowledgement: The University of Wales Press [i] For more on how science, myth, time and nationalism meet within Bollywood, see Anustup Basu’s ‘The eternal return and overcoming “Cape Fear”’ (2011). [ii] Is it enough for a story to be set in the future to earn the tag of SF? Not always; however, ‘Sultana’s Dream’ would still be an example of early Anglophonic SF from South Asia. [iii] In ‘Preface’, Phondke finds Marathi to feature significant SF production, thanks to the Marathi Vidnyan Parishad; he gives the examples of S. B. Ranade, Nath Madhav, D. P. Khambete, Narayan Dharap and Jayant Narlikar et al. to support his claims. To read more about how myth, politics and science intertwine in Narlikar’s ‘Ice Age Cometh’, please refer to ‘Winter is Coming’ (2021). [iv] This portends the rise of a new ‘science’ (or perhaps a return to the actual one) – one contingent on a golden past narrative that is at once nationalist, majoritarian, market-friendly, politically palatable and culturally acceptable. [v] With massive quantities of SF being produced in English, French, Russian, etc., SF is certainly not a monolithic discourse but an ocean into which multiple rivers (of languages and literatures) flow. [vi] For more on the soul, see Chapter 3. [vii] The masses in India do not consider science as counter to faith in divinity, but merely an extension to it. As Swaralipi Nandi writes, ‘Critics like Stableford strongly contend that “science fiction stands in a more problematic relationship to religion than any other literary genres” (36). However, the theme of the mystical is not always considered antithetical to scientific fiction’ (76). [viii] The sales figures of ‘mythological’ IWE prove it.Also, I view ‘myth’ as an individual story, ‘mythology’ as a system/collection of such interlinked stories, and the ‘mythic’ as a framework/discourse that results in these stories being viewed as myths. [ix] In their defence, one cannot blame the critics for expressing their distaste at poorly written tales of bug-eyed monsters from outer space trying to conquer this planet. However, to sweep all SF as being literarily inferior to other forms of literature can be fallacious. Moreover, even, nay, especially if SF is pulp, it deserves to be read as it gives us an unbiased glimpse into our times. [x] More information on genre fiction in post-millennial India – especially on mythological fiction – could be found in E. Dawson Varughese’s study (7), which ‘studies the interface of science, Hinduism and itihasa within mythology-inspired fiction in English from India’ through the perspective of ‘Bharati Fantasy’. [xi] This may also explain why the circle of ISFE writers is small, and why the same names keep reappearing – though it is expanding now.
Sami Ahmad Khan is a writer, academic, and documentary producer. His future-war thriller Red Jihad won two awards [NBT India’s National Debut Youth Fiction Award (co-winner) and Muse India Young Writer Award (runners-up)]. His second novel – Aliens in Delhi – garnered rave reviews and was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar. His fiction has been the subject of formal academic research and a part of university syllabi in India and the US. His overview of Indian SF has been translated into Czech and his short story has been translated into Marathi. He is the recipient of a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Fellowship (University of Oslo, Norway), a Fulbright FLTA grant (University of Iowa, USA), and a UGC-MANF Senior Research Fellowship (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India). He holds a PhD in Science Fiction from JNU and has taught at the Indian Institute of Technology (Delhi), Jindal Global University, and GGS Indraprastha University. His creative and critical writings have appeared in leading academic journals (Science Fiction Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture, Foundation), university presses (MIT Press, University of Wales Press), and trade imprints (Gollancz, Hachette, Bloomsbury, Routledge, Rupa, Juggernaut, Niyogi). His latest book is the critically-acclaimed Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction, which was longlisted for the BSFA Award (non-fiction). This excerpt is taken from Star Warriors.
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