The Insectesimal tall tale: Historical catachresis and ethics in the science fiction of Premendra Mitra

Abstract

This article examines how the young adult Bengali science fiction (SF) of Premendra Mitra (1904–88) presents an alternative model of colonial science and history which is routed through the genre of the tall tale. Mitra’s works are located within the history of science fiction writings in Bengal and the article proposes that his tales can be analysed as instances of “historical catachresis” – a stretching of historical time and place. It examines the tall tale as an attempt to reformulate the national-regional binary of earlier Bengali SF into a cosmopolitan world-space by constructing an ethics of writing that operates within the dual framework of the tall tale’s “non-believability” and the positivist-scientific thrust of SF. The article concludes that the genre of SF, when blended with that of the tall tale, inaugurates the reclaiming of a postcolonial narrative space by recognizing the “other” within a framework of ethics.

Keywords:

• Bengali science fiction
• colonial science
• tall tale
• historical catachresis
• ethics

Notes

1. 19th-century Bengali literature witnessed a curious amalgamation of narrative forms. For instance, hagiography (known as carita) amalgamated with history (in the colonial mode) and fables (purana-itihasa) with biography, in a tradition that is further carried forward in the early SF genre.

2. All translations of Mitra’s stories cited here are our own.

3. Tarinicharan Chattopadhyay (1878), for example, in his Bharatbarsher Itihas (History of India), does not make a definitive distinction between India-as-a-nation and Bengal-as-a-nation.

4. Though this was often in contestation with a “territorial, nativist vision of statehood” that emerged in the 19th century and continues today (see Goswami 2004).

5. Since its inception, SF and the tall tale seem to go hand in hand with the “young adult” genre, as evinced in publications of such stories in magazines like Sandesh (started 1913), Ramdhanu (started 1927) and Rangmashal (1937–46). Mitra himself published some of his stories in these magazines.

6. Robert A. Heinlein (1907–88), a prolific American SF writer, posited in his YASF, popularly known as the “Heinlein juveniles”, a coming-of-age (generally male) hero who would deal with the angst of growing up by being transported to an imaginary space and emerging at the end of the narrative as a “man”.