New Horizons Page 3
The more all-encompassing term, speculative fiction, may be more appropriate for narratives which often blur generic boundaries (the term speculative non-fiction has now come into play as well), and seem to be more influenced by debates in the social sciences and the humanities,84 even though scientist-writers like Vandana Singh and Anil Menon do continue to bring in hard science/technology-based allusions, albeit with a critical understanding of the limits to technology-driven progress.85 The sub-genre of speculative poetry is included here as well, a form of poetic expression exploring various facets of human experience through a speculative lens.86 This anthology, however, restricts its ambit by not including retold mythology, mytho-fantasy and out-and-out fantasy (in which anything can happen and no set rules apply).87
The genesis of this anthology was not so much the imperative to anthologize the work of earlier writers (though some samples of early SF are provided here), or to further explore the antinomies of postcolonial discourse (including postcolonial SF; see Hopkinson and Mehan, eds., So Long Been Dreaming).88 Rather, a sense of disturbance with the situation in contemporary South Asia led to the composition of the concept note which was sent out to both established and younger subcontinental writers in English. If not quite a competition to write a ghost story, the idea was to impel contemporary writers to engage with the present and future, using an SF lens, in this seventy-second year of Independence and the Partition. What might the subcontinent look like, about, seventy years from now?
For the subcontinent, and India in particular, has been rocked by such a number of crises in the last few years that it has often seemed we are living out the plot of a SF novel on a daily basis.89 The annus horribilis 1984 was, for many, a shock, almost living up to Orwellian predictions in the subcontinent. The anti-Sikh pogrom in Delhi that year led to intensive introspection among many about how such large-scale, state-abetted collective violence could occur in India’s democracy, while the Bhopal industrial disaster the same year reminded us of the appalling consequences of reckless and unchecked proliferation of technology in the name of profit. In recent years, the continuing degradation of the environment, the basis for survival for marginalized communities, the threat to freedom of speech with growing intolerance in society across South Asia, the multiplication of incidents featuring violence reminiscent of the Partition (now including videotaped vigilante actions by mobs) with the added complication of mediatized forms of politics and the emergence of social media-based trolls and WhatsApp pressure groups, as well as the targeted killing of authors and journalists, has posed new challenges for commentators and writers.
The stories and poems sent in by writers of three countries of South Asia in response to the concept note (not all of those who were approached did so), often feature world-building and dystopian realities eerily reminiscent of the present, sometimes presented in a satirical light, with elements of black humour. It is the tension between the implicit utopian imaginings of alternative South Asian futures and the representation of stark dystopias that makes these thought experiments in the SF mode so interesting.90
This anthology also includes selected sample stories in translation from some major regional languages, written during the twentieth century. We have, for instance, Arunava Sinha’s translation from Bengali of Adrish Bardhan’s ‘Planet of Terror’, written in the style reminiscent of Golden Era SF, and Harishankar Parsai’s ‘Inspector Matadeen on the Moon’, a satirical oddity with SF elements, in a revised translation from Hindi by C.M. Naim. The newer stories appear in a range of styles and voices. Some follow a ‘literary’ model of storytelling, while others experiment with form and structure, and a few stories follow the conventions of pulp fiction. This set opens with Asif Farrukhi’s Naiyer Masud-like meditation (translated from Urdu) on the uncanny effects of the sea disappearing off the coast of Karachi. Next, Chernobyl becomes a metaphor for the decline of civilization in Somendra Singh Kharola’s speculative poem. This is followed by Mimi Mondal’s tale exploring boundary altering manifestations of identity and difference in Mumbai. The passages in translation by Maya Joshi from Rahul Sankrityayan’s futuristic fiction Baisvin Sadi (1924) give a sense of the direction utopian imagining was taking in the early twentieth century in India, in the wake of the Russian revolution in 1917, in contrast to the rather dark visions generated in the contemporary moment. The next story features Anil Menon’s jagged reflections in cyberpunk style, set in a future Mumbai overrun by human waste, while in a story by Shovon Chowdhury, with more than a touch of irony, Gandhi is reborn in contemporary times. Kaiser Haq’s witty and poetic projection of selfhood seventy years into the future provides an ironic counterpoint to the futurologist’s hubris. Also included is a speculative poem by Sumita Sharma which ironically updates the notion of moksha for the post-human, digital era. In my own story about timelines past, present and future, a family visits a new theme park called Partition World in 2047 with unforeseen consequences.
In a bleak yet intense tale by Priya Sarukkai Chabria, a dream of cool green rivers unfolds in intolerant times when censorship is rampant, while Suraj Prasad deploys the thriller’s conventions as a Bhumandala couple seek to unravel a mystery about time lapses and identity. Manjula Padmanabhan’s thought-provoking tale addresses the dilemmas humanity might face with the advent of aliens who exist partly outside the human temporal plane, while in Payal Dhar’s moving story a young girl uncovers a dark secret history in an authoritarian future. In Sami Ahmad Khan’s pulp-style narrative, aliens with an agenda of homogenization descend on a railway station in Uttar Pradesh. Next, Premendra Mitra’s ‘How the World War Ended’ has been translated by Arunava Sinha from Bengali, a language in which SF has found a special niche.
Arjun Rajendran’s speculative poem presents a prescient ironic reflection about the construction of a mega-statue of Shivaji off the Mumbai coast. Following this is Chandrashekhar Sastry’s R.K. Narayan-esque account of a visit by a beneficent extraterrestrial and Giti Chandra’s vision of a goddess project taking shape in the modern city’s dark interstices. There is a satirical thrust to Mohammad Salman’s portrayal of a conservationist’s discovery of the last surviving tiger in the wild in 2087, once the news becomes public. Rimi B. Chatterjee’s story extends a fictional world already in the making (in the form of a novel to come), in which a clown makes his sinister presence felt in a universe of anti-sense. An intriguing short piece, ‘The Dream’, by Muhammed Zafar Iqbal, the SF writer from Bangladesh who was recently subjected to a vicious physical attack for his rationalist convictions, has been translated by Arunava Sinha. The story by Rukmini Bhaya Nair explores the varied implications of the invention in 2072 of Anandna, an elixir that eliminates pain.
Later, Nur Nasreen Ibrahim, while drawing on cultural and historical memory, grapples in her story with the varied implications of a community of women being established in a remote sanctuary in the future, effectively ironizing the feminist utopian sweep of Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain’s Sultana’s Dream. Keki Daruwalla’s self-reflexive and satirical fable, while grounded in the predicament of the present, describes a strange yet curiously familiar journey by a Parsi to a moon settlement. Next, S.B. Divya’s story brings in a diasporic perspective, as the personal tragedy of a protagonist of South Asian descent finds an unexpected resolution in the wake of her being selected for an expedition to Mars. In conclusion, we have a poignant narrative reflection in the cli-fi mode by Vandana Singh on the likely nightmarish impact of climate change in the years to come.
Taken together, these stories and poems may indicate the direction of alternative South Asian futures to come, as well as the emergence of a subcontinental SF sensibility attuned to socio-cultural nuances and issues that are local as well as global. We can discern here a shared counter-vision, as these writings at their best bear witness to, at times, uncomfortable truths, albeit displaced into ‘other’ timelines and spaces. Such fictive extrapolation provides a cosmopolitan, yet grounded perspective rather different from the futurologists, with an emphasis on the human and culturally specific side of the story.91 The future of subcontinental SF, as evidenced by this volume, thus seems promising indeed, even in the face of grim portents in the socio-cultural domain in the subcontinent and seemingly inexorable transformations of the ecological basis for life that are threatening the very existence of the most vulnerable, not just in South Asia. The hope is that for readers this anthology will provide a prism refracting the vivid and at times contrarian imaginings of contemporary South Asian SF. Sadly, we were unable to reach out to writers from Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, the Maldives or the Tibetan community in exile, since the focus here has been on writing from the partitioned three, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Inshallah, there will be other anthologies to come which will rectify this, given constraints of geography and time.
Notes
1. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818, reprint, New Delhi: Worldview, 2002, ed. with an introduction by Maya Joshi. Also see, Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree, London: Gollancz, 1986, 36–52.
2. ‘Preface’ in Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. Maya Joshi, New Delhi: Worldview, 2002, vi. The frequent storms that year were a result of the eruption of a volcano, Mount Tambora in Indonesia the previous year, which disrupted weather patterns across the world. http://lithub.com/mary-shelley-abandoned-by-her-creator-and-rejected-by-society/ (accessed 28 January 2018).
3. Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree, London: Gollancz, 1986, 36–52.
4. I am indebted to Geeta Patel for this idea. Also see Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818, reprint, New Delhi: Worldview, 2002, ed. Maya Joshi, 29–33, and Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery, New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1996. China Mieville’s work often veers towards science fantasy; see, for instance, the blending of elements of crime fiction, SF, and the fantastical in Miéville, The City and The City, London: Pan, 2009.
5. http://www.planetpublish.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/The_War_of_the_Worlds_NT.pdf (accessed 24 January 2019). See Clarence Brown, ‘Introduction: Zamyatin and the Persian Rooster’ in Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, 1924, new English trans. by Clarence Brown, London: Penguin, 1993, xi–xxvi. Zamyatin went into exile after the controversy and personal attacks following the book’s initial publication outside the Soviet Union – the novel only appeared in his homeland in 1988.
6. George Orwell, 1984, London: Secker and Warburg, 1949.
7. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, New York: Ballantine, 1953. Bradbury’s novel, as literary historian and cultural critic Geeta Patel points out, plays with a kind of Christian Puritanism and its tense relationship with the transformative power of art and literature, manifested in the past most strongly in the case of Girolamo Savonarola, the Florentine monk responsible for the original ‘bonfire of the vanities’ when items of ‘luxury’, including ‘indecent’ books were burned in the public square in Florence in 1497. Personal communication. Also see https://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/execution-florentine-friar-savonarola (accessed 3 May 2018).
8. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, The Doomed City, 1989, tr. Andrew Broomfield, Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2016.
9. I am indebted to Anil Menon for this idea. In contrast, Cory Doctorow’s utopian novel Walkaway (London: Head of Zeus, 2017) presents a future society of dropouts (‘walkaways’) who contest the basis of late-capitalist society through the creation of survivor states, reliant on the creative redeployment of new ‘soft’ technologies like 3D printing, even while refusing to succumb to the surveillance state’s attempts to rope them in using war-propelled ‘hard’ technologies. There has been a conservative backlash to attempts to bring in more diversity and complexity in the American SF awards, the charge led by the so-called Sad (and later Rabid) Puppies. See https://newrepublic.com/article/121554/2015-hugo-awards-and-history-science-fiction-culture-wars (accessed 18 May 2018).
10. See https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/strategic-defense-initiative-reagan-star-wars-jerry-pournelle-larry-niven (accessed 26 December 2017).
11. ‘A Speculative Manifesto’, in The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories, 2008, reprint, New Delhi: Zubaan, 2013, 200–03.
12. Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwaisha Maity, ‘Introduction – Indian Genre Fiction: Languages, Literatures, Classifications’, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bodhisattva_Chattopadhyay/publication/326416187_Indian_genre_fiction_languages_literatures_classifications/links/5b4c6f65a6fdccadaecf70bb/Indian-genre-fiction-languages-literatures-classifications.pdf, (accessed 11 November 2018). As Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay et al argue, SF has never been as ‘popular’ as other mass cultural genres in the subcontinent despite having emerged from the same crucible and mass genre cultural system, including pulps and periodicals. Instead, SF had a perceived ‘supra-educational’ role here, as a genre for children and young adults, unlike in the West, where it is seen as a genre for adults.
13. Speculative fiction is a more general term, according to one definition, ‘a broad literary genre encompassing any fiction with supernatural, fantastical, or futuristic elements’, http://www.dictionary.com/browse/speculative-fiction (accessed 1 February 2018). In Cecilia Mancuso’s terms, speculative fiction was a term used by science fiction avant-gardists to distinguish their ‘serious’ work from pulp fiction featuring ‘monsters and spaceships’ in Margaret Atwood’s phrase, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/10/speculative-or-science-fiction-as-margaret-atwood-shows-there-isnt-much-distinction (accessed 4 February 2018). Similarly, Fredric Jameson differentiates between the European art tradition of H.G. Wells’s ‘scientific romances’ or speculative fiction and the commercially driven American pulp tradition, while referring to the work of Olaf Stapledon. See Jameson’s ‘Introduction’ in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, 2005, reprinted, London: Verso, 2007, fn.5, xiii. Also see the more hopeful conversation about recent Indian speculative fiction at http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/remaking-the-difference-a-discussion-about-indian-speculative-fiction/ (accessed 1 May 2018).
14. Ashok Vajpeyi, India Dissents: 3,000 Years of Difference, Doubt and Argument, New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2017, esp. 16–18, 55, 65–70, 163–68, 403–05, 428–33, 440–44. This recent volume begins with the Vedic era materialist Charvaka, and includes the pre-modern voices of Kabir and the Sufis as well as pieces by modern figures like Ismat Chughtai and Saadat Hasan Manto, an essay by Amartya Sen, as well as social media-based writings by Kiran Nagarkar and Mrinal Pande, among others, mapping the spectrum of dissenting views across history up to the present. SF writers do not, however, figure at all in this volume.
15. Shiv Viswanathan, ‘Foreword’ in Alternative Futures: India Unshackled, eds. Ashish Kothari and K.J. Joy, New Delhi: UpFront Publishing House, 2017, vii–xi, esp. vii. According to social scientist and cultural critic Shiv Viswanathan, SF has not had the same following as detective fiction in the subcontinent partly because our mythology is so replete with aliens, monsters and witches.
16. South Asian futurism may be comparable to an extent to the notion of afrofuturism, as it envisages a different collective and transnational future while invoking SF elements, in the face of often intractable power structures and hierarchies inherited from the past. For more on afrofuturism, see https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/dec/07/afrofuturism-black-identity-future-science-technology (accessed 7 February 2018). I am indebted for this parallel to Ananya Jahanara Kabir. Also see Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay’s reflections at http://momentum9.no/materials/is-science-fiction-still-science-fiction-when-it-is-written-on-saturn-or-aliens-alienation-and-science-fiction/ (accessed 7 February 2018).
17. See Singh’s review essay at http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/the-unthinkability-of-climate-change-thoughts-on-amitav-ghoshs-the-great-derangement/ (accessed 26 December 2017).
18. Manjula Padmanabhan, Harvest, 1997, revised and expanded edition, Gurgaon: Hachette India, 2017.
19. Manjula Padmanabhan, Escape, New Delhi: Picador, 2008, reprinted, Gurgaon: Hachette India, 2015, and The Island of Lost Girls, Gurgaon: Hachette India, 2015.