New Horizons Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Foreword

  SPICE-SHIP TO INFINITY

  Manjula Padmanabhan

  Introduction

  SF MATTERS: SOUTH ASIAN FUTURES TO COME

  Tarun K. Saint

  1. PLANET OF TERROR

  Adrish Bardhan

  Translated by Arunava Sinha

  2. INSPECTOR MATADEEN ON THE MOON

  Harishankar Parsai

  Translated by C.M. Naim

  3. STEALING THE SEA

  Asif Aslam Farrukhi

  Translated by Syed Saeed Naqvi

  4. CHERNOBYL

  Somendra Singh Kharola

  5. THE SEA SINGS AT NIGHT

  Mimi Mondal

  6. THE TWENTY-SECOND CENTURY

  Rahul Sankrityayan

  Translated by Maya Joshi

  7. SHIT FLOWER

  Anil Menon

  8. THE MAN WHO TURNED INTO GANDHI

  Shovon Chowdhury

  9. SEVENTY YEARS AFTER SEVENTY YEARS AFTER PARTITION

  Kaiser Haq

  10. MOKSHA

  Sumita Sharma

  11. A VISIT TO PARTITION WORLD

  Tarun K. Saint

  12. DREAMING OF THE COOL GREEN RIVER

  Priya Sarukkai Chabria

  13. MIRROR-RORRIM

  Clark Prasad

  14. FLEXI-TIME

  Manjula Padmanabhan

  15. THE OTHER SIDE

  Payal Dhar

  16. 15004

  Sami Ahmad Khan

  17. WHY THE WAR ENDED

  Premendra Mitra

  Translated by Arunava Sinha

  18. WERE IT NOT FOR

  Arjun Rajendran

  19. THE BENEFICIENT BRAHMA

  Chandrashekhar Sastry

  20. THE GODDESS PROJECT

  Giti Chandra

  21. THE LAST TIGER

  Mohammad Salman

  22. A NIGHT WITH THE JOKING CLOWN

  Rimi B. Chatterjee

  23. THE DREAM

  Muhammed Zafar Iqbal

  Translated by Arunava Sinha

  24. ANANDNA

  Rukmini Bhaya Nair

  25. WE WERE NEVER HERE

  Nur Nasreen Ibrahim

  26. THE NARRATIVE OF NAUSHIRWAN SHAVAKSHA SHEIKH CHILLI

  Keki N. Daruwalla

  27. LOOKING UP

  S.B. Divya

  28. REUNION

  Vandana Singh

  List of Contributors

  Copyright Acknowledgements

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  FOREWORD

  SPICE-SHIP TO INFINITY

  1

  In 1835, an eighteen-year-old Bengali student named Kylas Chunder Dutt wrote a far-sighted fantasy in English called ‘A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945’. In it, he described an uprising against the British led by a company of idealistic and beautifully attired people belonging to ‘Indostan’. We might smile at that young man’s fond hopes and patriotic vision. Still. It was a daring exercise in literary invention in an era when the term ‘science fiction’ had not yet been coined.

  In the United Kingdom, in Europe and the United States the genre would over the next centuries come to take firm root. It would attempt to stretch the boundaries of standard fiction to include other worlds, other times, other dimensions. One wonders whether this was perhaps an extension of the colonial urge. Was it an attempt at populating other time zones and planets with Anglo-European adventurers even as the colonial world was collapsing upon itself? The explorers who set out to conquer Mars or to subdue dinosaurs in hidden pockets of time were nearly all men, and certainly all white. They had Christian names and civilizing agendas that always favoured our own species. To this day, the flags they planted in the farthest corners of the star-spangled multiverse remain firmly in place.

  In India, however, Kylas Dutt’s brave path did not become a highway. A scattering of authors, particularly in Bengali and in Marathi, took up the challenge of looking beyond the confines of everyday realism, but the audience for such works was limited, particularly in English. Many otherwise sophisticated Indian readers regard science fiction – now known by such variations as SF, sci-fi, speculative fiction, spec-fic – with a mixture of embarrassment and irritation. Even those who have read and enjoyed such classics as Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Clockwork Orange and The Handmaid’s Tale claim to despise the genre.

  The volume in your hands represents, therefore, a fresh safari into a literary dimension that has been largely overlooked in the region that I call home. This time, our guides have names such as Matadeen and Mahua, our picnic basket may contain mango pickle and our kitbag surely includes a collapsible lota rather than toilet paper. Editor Tarun Saint chose the term ‘South Asian Science Fiction’ with the aim of softening, at least through literature and fantastical invention, the political divisions that have fractured its vast ethno-linguistic family. The result is a bouquet of styles and voices that are endearingly – perhaps even irritatingly! – local.

  In his Introduction, Saint provides an excellent foundation for thoughts on the subject of science fiction in general and the South Asian variant in particular. He introduces us to the stories and poems that fill these pages, while providing some answers as to the ‘why’ of the genre: why it has earned its place in literature and why it should be of interest to the general reader. The inclusion principle has been intuitive rather than rigid. Pieces that suited the mood of the collection as a whole have stayed in. Those that used science fiction as a prop in genres such as romance or mystery were left out.

  While on the subject of inclusion, I think it’s worth noting that the ratio of men to women in this collection, including translators and poets, is roughly 2:1. The domain of science fiction has been largely dismissive towards women, both as creators and as characters within the writing. Some of the best-known names in women’s SF – Mary Shelley, Doris Lessing and the late Ursula K. Le Guin – were also, until recently, amongst the very few women working within the genre. This makes it all the more remarkable that Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain of what is now Bangladesh, published Sultana’s Dream, a novella about a futuristic feminist utopia, in 1905.

  Only a handful of tales in this volume might be considered ‘hard’ science fiction, whirring with new technology or swarming with alien life forms. The majority of stories in this book are about ideas and ideals that might be of interest to anyone anywhere, expressed through the perspectives of those who have so far been presented as ‘exotics’ in science fiction. If, for instance, a character called Arjuna saves the planet from plundering extra-terrestrials, his cultural DNA will only be recognized by fellow South Asians. If a character removes her space suit to reveal a mirror-work dupatta beneath it, that detail will be an insider reference, aimed towards those who know that the embroidery belongs to Rajasthan, Gujarat and neighbouring regions of Pakistan. If the Partition riots are referred to in an international collection of science fiction the context has to be spelled out. But if we use names from Star Wars or Lord of the Rings a much broader ethnicity of readers across the planet will recognize the peg.

  The issue of localized naming and referencing presents a familiar dilemma for the modern writer. Translators must always tread a delicate path between being true to the writer’s intention versus the average reader’s awareness. But the problem acquires an extra flourish in the context of science fiction. By limiting ourselves to names and references that suit international readers, South Asia’s own flavours, costumes, languages and customs vanish from the record – not just from the literary present but from the future as well. By choosing to avoid the arena of science fiction as writers and imagineers, we South Asians have effectively doomed ourselves to bein
g the turbaned and/or sari-clad bit-players in the future-fictions of others.

  For example, in the television serial Lost in Space (Netflix), a family bearing recognizably South Asian names, makes an appearance in mid-season. They speak in the accents of modern-day Britons. Why? Because in today’s world, a tandoori-accent in a serial that’s not about South Asians could result in the producers being accused of racial type-casting. So it follows that, in a space drama about a group of multi-ethnic future humans, ‘we’ are assigned the accents of our British colonizers in order to avoid being transformed into caricatures of ourselves!

  While thinking about caricatures, cultural stereotypes, reference palettes and the rich tradition of South Asian mythology, four cross-linked ideas occurred to me in quick succession.

  The first was that South Asian mythology includes many types of fantastical inventions and monsters, but very few clearly identifiable chimaeras. The great myth cycles of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana contain descriptions of unnaturally large and ferocious creatures, terrifying demons and gods endowed with powerful weapons, but there do not appear to be clearly identifiable creature combinations, such as the centaur, the minotaur or the griffon of the Graeco-Roman world.

  The second was that a number of playful and fanciful chimaeras began to appear in the whimsical cartoons and stories of nineteenth-century Bengal. The best known of these sprang from the pen of Sukumar Ray, the poet, author and illustrator whose son was the illustrious film-maker, author and illustrator Satyajit Ray.

  The third thought was that, perhaps the intellectual melding of two very different cultures, Britain and Bengal, acted as a catalyst for chimaera creation. Whereas earlier invaders approached India with war and commerce, in Bengal, a process of cultural data transfer was initiated over time. In order to create the giant chimaera of British India, Indians were drafted into service as clerks and accountants. British ideas of civil society took root. And hybrids of the imagination began to sprout in the literature of the times.

  The fourth and final thought was this: We are today experiencing an era of unprecedented contact between cultures that are different in every possible way. Diverse languages, cuisines, socio-cultural values and religions are being brought into contact, sometimes willingly, sometimes forcibly, in a more extreme form than ever before. The chimaeras of Graeco-Roman mythology were mostly infertile, one-of-a-kind freaks. But in our world today, we’re seeing the continuous cross-fertilization of tribes and races, ideas and technologies.

  Could that be one reason for the current blooming of South Asian science fiction?

  After all, we live in an era when only a whisper-thin membrane separates science fiction from science fact. Some of us are living in the digital OtherWorlds of our parents’ nightmares. Some of us are fighting wars at the pixelated boundaries of countries we can no longer name. Some of us are being treated by virtual doctors who visit us on our smartphones. Others are finding love in the glow of laptop screens.

  And, while some of us read about these alternative realities in fear or in wonder, a small handful of us is writing about these hopes, these journeys, these fictions, these truths.

  Manjula Padmanabhan

  New Delhi, January 2019

  INTRODUCTION

  SF MATTERS: SOUTH ASIAN FUTURES TO COME

  TARUN K. SAINT

  New Horizons: The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction is one of the first collections of contemporary (and historic) science fiction (SF) from the subcontinent to appear in the twenty-first century. In this introduction, I hope to highlight the genre’s significance, as well as elaborate on the basis for the compilation of this omnibus at this moment.

  Just about two hundred years ago, Frankenstein (1818, revised ed. 1831), Mary Shelley’s novel about the ethical dilemmas untrammelled scientific exploration might usher in, inaugurated the genre of modern SF.1 During a visit to Europe in June 1816, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron and John William Polidori were forced to remain indoors one day as a storm raged outside their villa near Lake Geneva.2 In the evening, they had an animated conversation about ghosts, upon which Byron suggested a ghost-story writing competition (Polidori was the only one to complete his story). That night, a dream occurred to Mary Shelley about a strange phantasm stirring with vital life, beside whom his human creator kneeled. As a result, she began writing a story – a Gothic exploration of the consequences of scientist Victor Frankenstein’s obsession with reanimating corpses through the use of electro-galvanism3 – at the age of eighteen, which became a novel after two years, carving out space for a new genre. The resulting creature is both monster and victim of his creator’s hubris; the achievement of the task of bringing to life the dead (using scientific as well as alchemical/occult means) became a nineteenth-century version of Faust’s unbridled quest for knowledge. Ever since the publication of Frankenstein, the genre of SF has been concerned with the varied consequences of the arrival of modernity, including the advances of scientific knowledge and technology, and its sometimes horrific outcomes. Furthermore, the interface between science and the occult, and the possibility of breaching the divide between science and the realm of magic and occult philosophy (as seen in Victor Frankenstein’s fascination with the work of occultist Cornelius Agrippa) has been a recurrent theme in SF, right up to Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), steampunk and China Miéville’s oeuvre, testifying to the lasting imprint of Shelley’s concerns.4

  The genre’s ability to foreground alternative perspectives with respect to key cultural and socio-political issues subsequently came to the fore in works such as The War of the Worlds (1897), nineteenth-century master of the scientific romance, H.G. Wells’s allegorical take on colonialism, and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s parable of totalitarianism We (1924, new trans. 1993).5 Zamyatin’s masterpiece was in turn one of the inspirations for British author George Orwell’s better-known 1984 (1949).6 Soon after, the twentieth-century American SF maestro Ray Bradbury’s McCarthy-era novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) depicted a future society where reading was a crime and books were burned, and hence, entire books and works of culture were memorized and shared by members of the resistance group to preserve their contents.7 Later, works of SF by writers in the erstwhile Soviet Union constituted a veritable subculture of dissent. Another SF novel, The Doomed City by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, perhaps the best of the crop of dissident writers to emerge in the twentieth century in Zamyatin’s wake, evoked the tragic failure of a radical utopian experiment. Written in 1975 in a time of censorship and authoritarian rule, the novel was only published in 1989 after perestroika and glasnost (restructuring and openness) had left their imprint.8

  In contrast to this strand of the genre, often critical of science and society, a more conservative strain emerged in the wake of colonialism and imperialism in the late nineteenth century, often with a masculinist thrust, gung-ho for change driven by technology.9 Thus, while the genre has proved enabling for writers seeking to question hegemonic regimes and systems of thought, SF at times has undoubtedly replayed societal stereotypes and rehearsed clichéd notions of identity. For example, much of the pulp SF of the early twentieth century in the United States of America was aimed at an audience of male adolescents or young, often technically trained, men. At its lowest ebb, SF has even served as a propaganda function, as seen in Ronald Reagan’s requisitioning of the services of right-wing-leaning SF writers Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (known for their hard-SF style, featuring a strong basis in recent research in scientific disciplines) as speech-writers during the Cold War to help introduce his Strategic Defence Initiative ‘Star Wars’ defence system to the American public. This space laser initiative was vigorously opposed by leading contemporary SF writers of the time like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke described the proposal as a ‘technological obscenity’, while Asimov called it ‘a John Wayne standoff’.10

  In the context of the subcontinent, SF’s potential to generate alternative visions of the future
has perhaps been insufficiently acknowledged. Despite some innovative and sharply critical SF having appeared in recent years in South Asia, even a speculative fiction manifesto by prominent SF writer Vandana Singh, a contributor in this volume,11 the genre is confined, for the most part, to the children’s section of bookstores, if at all, or placed alongside ‘popular fiction’ genres such as fantasy, barring some regional contexts where it has found a niche.12 It leads one to wonder whether this is the result of SF, or for that matter, speculative fiction,13 not quite having taken in our subcontinental spaces,14 despite the influence of modern scientific thought, industrial development and technological progress, not to mention the recent explosion in the use of social media. Is this lesser, niche status for SF an unwarranted result of the widespread availability and influence of epic and mythological narratives, which may have curtailed the SF impulse?15 Might it be possible to discern in the best SF produced in South Asia in recent times the lineaments of an alternative, perhaps even a South Asian futurism?16 Is it time for Indian/subcontinental SF to step up and make itself heard amidst, what Vandana Singh in her review essay calls, a ‘spiral of silence’17 on a host of issues, ranging from climate change to growing polarization and violence in society, amidst a climate of fear?

  This is the right moment for an adequate appreciation of the genre’s critical role in twenty-first-century South Asia, especially at a time when there is a perceptible drift towards modes of irrationalism and bigotry, often with tacit state sanction. While, in the subcontinent, the genre has not been explicitly associated with social movements or protests, in its own quiet way this ‘minor’ genre has whittled away at dominant societal assumptions. A pioneering effort in the subcontinental context is Manjula Padmanabhan’s SF play Harvest (winner of the Onassis Award in 1997) which, set in Bombay in 2010, envisaged a futuristic scenario of harvesting human organs from the ‘Third World’ for sale to recipients in the ‘First World’.18 Padmanabhan has also addressed growing gender hierarchies and imbalances, and the fragility of attempts at forging resistance to modes of bio-politics in her SF novels Escape (2008) and The Island of Lost Girls (2015).19 In a similar vein, writers of SF and speculative fiction Anil Menon in Half of What I Say (2015) and Shovon Chowdhury in The Competent Authority (2013) and Murder with Bengali Characteristics (2015) have made trenchant fictive critiques, in different ways, of state absolutism. Such writings have created alternative templates for the future to come.20