From Partition To Present: The Evolution Of South Asian Science Fiction Literature

What do you think of when you think of South Asian science fiction?

Growing up in the suburbs of Kolkata, my first foray into the highly imaginative genre was through Satyajit Ray’s ‘Professor Shonku’s Adventures’. The eponymous Professor Shonku invented fantastic drugs, gadgets, gizmos, and Macguffins that helped him against great adversaries on his exciting and thrilling adventures. But the exceptional polymath Ray wasn’t such an exception among Indian writers. Long before Ray introduced Professor Shonku on the pages of the Sandesh magazine in 1961, many Indian writers were already writing stories we now consider proto-science-fiction.

A Brief History of South Asian Science Fiction

The early history of Indian science fiction goes back to the late-1800s. Hemlal Dutta’s ‘Rahasya’ (Mystery) was published in Vigyan Darpan in 1882, Pandit Ambika Dutt Vyas’s ‘Ascharya Vrittant’ (Incredible Chronicles) was published in Piyush Pravaha in 1884, Jagadananda Ray’s ‘Shukra Bhraman’ (The Venus Trip) was published in 1892, Jagadish Chandra Bose’s ‘Palatak Toofan’ (The Runaway Cyclone) was published in Avyakta in 1896, and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s proto-feminist, proto-sci-fi short story ‘Sultana’s Dream’ was published in The Indian Ladies Magazine in 1905.

Although 'science fiction' as a distinct, recognisable genre only came together in the early 19th century, these pioneering Indian writers were already engaging and employing many of the tropes and ideas — like teleportation, space travel, great technological advancements, world-ending wars, and aliens —  that would come to define the genre. Bengali, Urdu, and Tamil were among the earliest languages of genre fiction in British India, with writers and publishers centred in the major cities Calcutta, Lucknow, and Madras respectively. The earliest works were horror, crime, mystery, thriller, folklore, fairy tales, and sensational stories much like the Penny Dreadfuls being written, published, and widely read in England at the time.

South Asian Sci-Fi From Partition To The Present

The British Indian Empire was partitioned into India and the two Pakistans in 1947 with further splits and splinters in the following decade. Sri Lanka became an independent nation in 1948, and Bangladesh was further separated from Pakistan in 1971. As a result, the rich Bengali, Urdu, and Tamil literary traditions, too, were split between countries ideologically and culturally disparate from each other. The Urdu literary scene in Lucknow diminished after Independence as Urdu fell out of favour as a literary language in India, and a more Sanskrit-ised Hindi gained prominence. On the eastern front, Calcutta continued to be the epicentre of the Bengali literary scene, while Dhaka’s literary scene developed independently from the 1970s onwards.

As Western science fiction entered its golden age in the early 20th century with the advent of popular pulp magazines like Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories and William L. Crawford’s Marvel Tales and Unusual Stories, Bengali writers were heavily influenced by the speculative imagination of the genre. Every Bengali author since then has engaged with speculative elements in their work in some way at some point in their career — be it through hard SF and horror like Anish Deb, Adrish Bardhan, and Satyajit Ray, or literary works with speculative elements like Leela Majumdar, Premendra Mitra, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, and Syed Mustafa Siraj.

Meanwhile, Tamil authors like Ramanichandran, Subha, Indra Soundar Rajan, Vidya Subramaniam, and Tamilvanan based in Madras (now Chennai); Urdu authors like Ibn-e-Safi, Mazhar Kaleem, M.A. Rahat, Mohiuddin Nawab, and Khalidah Asghar based in Lahore; and Bangladeshi authors like Humayun Ahmed based in Dhaka all engaged with speculative ideas and used SF tropes in their work.

The New Millennium — 2000s To Now

The turn of the 21st century introduced modernist and new-wave ideas to South Asian SF. Authors moved away from the pulp sensationalism of the 70s and 80s. They engaged with more socio-political questions in their work, drawing from the violent histories of colonialism and slavery to imagine and reclaim new, non-white science fiction futures for the region. 

South Asian SF authors in the 21st century steered the genre more towards decolonised 'Desi' futures, drawing from the more established speculative genre of 'Afrofuturism', which expresses notions of Black identity, agency and freedom through art, creative works, and activism that envision liberated futures for Black communities. This gave rise to 'Desifuturism', originally an underground art movement that imagined decolonised 'Desi' or South Asian futures through the mediums of literature, film, music, theatre, and visual art without catering to a colonial gaze.

This new age of South Asian SF began with Amitav Ghosh’s 1995 novel ‘The Calcutta Chromosome’, and is experiencing a renaissance today. With authors like Tashan Mehta (Mad Sisters of Esi), Siddhartha Deb (The Light at the End of the World), Vauhini Vara (The Immortal King Rao), Lavanya Lakshminarayan (The Ten Percent Thief), Vajra Chandrasekara (The Saint of Bright Doors and Rakesfall), and Usman T. Malik writing speculative fiction with a decidedly South Asian bent, Desifuturism has well and truly come of age.

"This is a cataclysmic moment, in India and in the planet as a whole, with capitalism and right-wing ideologies dominating a world wracked by inequality, violence, and climate collapse. Desi futurism, like most futurisms, is responding to that ruined present of ours," says Siddhartha Deb, the author of 'The Light at the End of the World'.

It is easy, however, Deb points out, for futurism to channel and cheer on the violence. "We see that in the influence of speculative fiction on technocrats like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel as well their influence on the war machines of the empires big and small. Roberto Bolaño captured these trends wonderfully in his fiction collection 'Nazi Literature in the Americas'".

"My hope is that the best Desi futurist writers will write against these dominant trends and choose instead to intersect with the more revolutionary futurist writers like Ursula K Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and China Mievelle," the 2012 PEN/Open Book Award-winning author says.

Follow Tashan Mehta here.

Follow Siddhartha Deb here.

Learn more about South Asian artists, writers, and musicians engaging with futurism in their work here.

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