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Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity

2023; Penn State University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/utopianstudies.34.3.0586

2154-9648

Barnita Bagchi,

Gothic Literature and Media Analysis

Suparno Banerjee’s monograph examines science fiction (henceforth SF) from India, a country that has a rich and fascinating tradition of SF. This is a book that will be of interest and value to scholars and students in higher education of utopia, dystopia, and speculative fiction, and to readers across disciplines interested in SF as a mode. It is quite clear today that Darko Suvin’s canonical definition of SF as cognitive estrangement, an interplay between the familiar and the strange, and its emphasis on the novum that is created in SF, has been enriched with further attention to context, including postcolonial contexts. Whose familiarity in cognition are we speaking about, and what happens when contexts are not necessarily hegemonic Anglo-American or Western ones? Indeed, even in Western contexts, science is not a given, but an element that always has political, historical, and ideological overtones. The novum, too, as with the term utopia, is moored in the contexts of the text.Banerjee’s book is one among several excellent monographs on Indian SF that have been published in the 2020s: Sami Ahmad Khan’s Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction (2021) and Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s Final Frontiers: Science Fiction and Techno-Science in Non-Aligned India (2020) come to mind. Khan adopts a refreshing fan’s guide to Indian SF register in his monograph, discussing mythology, materiality, ideology, and technology, and he coins the abbreviation TransMIT to capture his approach. Mukherjee’s book examines how Indian SF syncs with or questions the technological and scientific paradigms of India under Nehru and the Non-Aligned Movement; arguing that Indian SF needs to be seen as semiperipheral, the book also applies concepts from energy humanities to Indian SF in an arresting way. Suparno Banerjee’s monograph is a solidly grounded work in its clearly explained choice of corpus, and a methodology that elicits particularly generative insights in a number of areas, including the epistemological status of science in Indian SF, the importance of SF written in bhasha or non-English Indian languages, the interplay between past and future in Indian SF, analysis of how Indian SF imaginatively represents the Other, and attention to Indian women writers of SF.Banerjee offers a lucid and useful chronology of Indian SF in four historical periods: 1835–1905, 1905–47, 1947–95, and 1995–2019. The period from 1835 to 1905 offers the first specimens of Indian SF, primarily in the form of future histories that question colonialism, in the utopian mode, and adventure tales and stories with scientific and technological elements. The establishment of a British education system, starting in the 1820s, gave an impetus to the birth of Indian SF. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” was published in 1905, a year that heralds the second period lasting until Indian independence. In this period, SF starts appearing not just in the English, Bengali, and Hindi languages, as in the first period, but also in a number of other Indian languages, such as Assamese, Marathi, and Tamil. Children’s and youth magazines develop from the 1920s, spaces where science writing and SF both appear. Nationalist, anticolonial stances emerge, challenging western hegemony, in the 1940s. In the early post-Independence period, the nationalistic elements become even stronger, and SF interacts quite strongly with older forms of fantastic writing such as myths, fairytales, and ghost stories. This third period, Banerjee argues, is the golden age of bhasha SF. From the 1990s English-language SF again becomes very prominent in India and its diaspora, though SF in bhashas continues to flourish.Banerjee examines fiction not just from post-Independence India, but also from colonial British India, and diasporic Indian writing. SF written primarily in Bengali, English, Hindi, and Marathi is examined and, when possible, the book also brings into its ambit of analysis SF written in the languages Assamese, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada. Reflexivity about the corpus of texts, with special attention to remedying a bias for English or the researcher’s own first language, is one of the virtues of this book. Banerjee analyzes texts in a greater number of bhashas or vernacular Indian languages than are discussed in any comparable monograph; at the same time, he is uncomplacent, and alerts us to how much of a tip of an iceberg this is, with India having twenty-two official languages recognized by the Sahitya Akademi, the apex national literary recognition body. SF is published in all of these languages.In his chapter on temporalities, Banerjee makes us insightfully aware that SF reconstitutes cultural memory and history, through its imagination of the colonial and precolonial past, and its ability to see possible futures in the present. Such imagination of temporalities has often gone against the grain of British colonial ideologies, while Indian SF has also sometimes imagined a past golden age in India. Banerjee adduces and briefly analyzes multiple works, such as by writer-filmmaker Satyajit Ray in Bengali, by scientist and SF writer Jayant Narlikar in Marathi, and by Assamese writer Lakshmi Nandan Bora, which posit golden ages in the past, often of India, in ways that invoke the richness of older Indian scientific and inventive traditions, and that challenge Western colonial hegemonic marginalization of the precolonial past. In contemporary times, with right-wing majoritarian nationalist ideologies also deploying such models of golden ages heavily, the SF Banerjee examines in this regard is especially intriguing, even if figures such as Narlikar or Ray were not votaries of exclusivist, majoritarian ultranationalism. What kinds of nostalgically invoked utopia might be detected in such texts is an object for further study.Banerjee is equally adept in analyzing a countervailing strand in Indian SF in which the past is reinvoked, with counterhegemonic and subaltern knowledges being deployed. The majority of the works he analyzes in this regard are in English: 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), and Vandana Singh’s stories “Delhi” (2004) and “With Fate Conspire” (2018). The present reviewer has published about Singh’s arresting story “Delhi,” which has both utopian and dystopian elements, in which a time-travelling, dispossessed, empathetic male, who has himself been on the brink of suicide, saves other people who are similarly on the brink, while travelling through the many pasts and possible futures of the richly historical megapolis of Delhi.1 Banerjee analyzes the story “With Fate Conspire” compellingly: Gargi is a semi-literate woman from a lower class, situated in a drowning Kolkata, assisting scientists with an experiment in which time-sensitive people can encounter different points of time to avert ecological disasters in the future. Gargi meets the nineteenth-century author Rassundari Devi, a figure known for teaching herself to read and write secretly, and for writing a pioneering autobiography in Bengali. Gargi recognizes affinities, such as being seers and autodidacts, between Rassundari and herself, and the encounter brings her confidence in making her own choices in life.Banerjee also analyzes many bleak futures delineated in Indian SF, including in works like Sujatha’s En Iniya Enthira (My Dear Machine, Tamil; 1980), and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest (1997) and Escape (2008). Dystopian, these works emerge from speculating with the “failure of postcolonial utopianism, corruption, global arms race, geopolitical tensions, religious fundamentalism and neocolonial exploitation” (Banerjee 116) of the SF authors’ now-here.The book under review also makes arresting analysis of works such as Vandana Singh’s “Tetrahedron” (2008), “Infinities” (2008), “Ambiguity Machines” (2017), and Narlikar’s “The Adventure” (1986) in which time is experienced in a radically estranged way by the story’s characters, but with time not moving to the future nor going back to the past in a straight line linearly. Narlikar’s “The Adventure,” for example, posits an academic who is, after a collision with a truck, placed in an alternative present in which the Mughal empire still rules, with Maratha support, in parts of the country.Banerjee also analyzes many different kinds of Others in Indian SF, who often take the form of benefactors or threats. The benefactors are frequently friendly aliens, and one views the benefits of modernity in these aliens. Examples include Satyajit Ray’s wonderful “Bankubabur Bandhu” (Mr Banku’s Friend, Bangla; 1962), and Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s “Bhuture Ghori” (The Spooky Watch, Bangla; 1984). Works such as the feminist writer Ambai’s “Vamanan” (translated from Tamil; 1988) and Sujatha’s “Dilemma” (translated from Tamil; 1993) delineate robots and AI as pathways to the benefits as well as perils of modernity. On the other hand, one finds many works, such as R. N. Sharma’s “The Paper and Cardboard Clothiers” (1994) and Sami Ahmad Khan’s Aliens in Delhi (2017), which show aliens as threats to humanity.Banerjee makes a strong, albeit brief analysis of the classical utopian imagination of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream,” originally written and published in English, in which the spatial representation of the country of Ladyland excises major elements of both feudal patriarchy and colonial oppression. However, given that “Sultana’s Dream” is perhaps the single most canonical piece of Indian utopian fiction and SF, it would have been valuable to examine Hossain’s larger oeuvre, overwhelmingly in Bengali, and analyze the overlaps between the speculative, mythical, science fictional, and fantastic there. Banerjee pays close attention to the gendering of authorship of Indian SF. He lets us know that except for the Bengali writer Leela Majumdar in the 1960s and 1970s, hardly any woman writer was a major figure in Indian SF before the 1980s. From the mid-1990s to now, Indian SF in English has had major women writers practicing the mode, including Vandana Singh, Manjula Padmanabhan, and Priya Sarukkai Chhabria.Banerjee offers persuasive analysis of the work of women writers such as Singh, yet this reviewer thought that Majumdar (1908–2007), most certainly one of the most innovative writers of SF and fantastic fiction from India, deserved in this monograph more than passing mentions and a long biographical footnote. Banerjee, like Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, analyzes some of Premendra Mitra’s oeuvre in detail. Mitra (1904–88), poet, novelist, short-story writer in Bengali, and one of India’s most famous practitioners of SF, was a close friend of Majumdar, who also wrote in a superb variety of genres, such as SF, ghost stories, children’s fiction, memoirs, sketches, and weird fiction. Majumdar translated some of the tall tales told by Mitra’s lanky hero Ghanada, who inhabits a quintessentially Kolkata type of habitation called the mess-bari (a boardinghouse shared as tenants, usually by a number of men), and tells his tales, based in scientific facts, that range all over the world.2 Majumdar’s SF works, exemplified by works like Batash Bari (1974), are also wonderful and deserve analysis, especially from the perspective of environmental humanities: in Batash Bari, for example, children in a mountain village approach a character called the Big Lama, when their mountain streams and river prove to be dead or dying, while the Big Lama tells them of the importance of harnessing alternative energy (from the sun and from wind, notably), given that the resources being dug up from beneath the earth are becoming exhausted.All in all, however, Banerjee’s monograph is a careful, well-researched, methodologically ambitious, and rigorous piece of work that offers pathways into greater knowledge of the immense repertoire and literary innovations of Indian SF published in multiple languages.