Science Fiction and Indian Women Writers: Exploring Radical Potentials

On ethnologue.com (“What countries have the most languages” 2021), a Web site of world languages, India registers fourth (with 456 languages) on a list of ten countries with the most spoken languages. The Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India recognizes twenty-two major spoken languages in the country. A close observation of the 2011 Indian census data reveals that thirteen of these languages register a speaker’s strength of more than 1 percent of the total Indian population (“Language: India, States and Union Territories” 2011). As the production of science fiction as a literary genre is interconnected with the scientific temperament of the community, the sense of being cautious, the potential to imagine the unimaginable, and the spread of education (Berkson 2016), it is not fallacious to consider the speaker’s strength as a marker to separate a denser language group from the scheduled languages. Besides the drastic and almost unbridgeable gaps between the two fundamental language groups, Indo-Aryan and Dravidian, the languages belonging to each category are disparate. Hence, calling any enterprise concerning the critical investigation of a genre-specific, pan-Indian literary production herculean is more than an understatement. There rests Urvashi Kuhad’s triumph. The history of Indian, let alone South Asian, science fiction is too wide to put together. Despite this hurdle, Kuhad took up this ambitious project with seven major Indian languages to trace the genre’s development to create a repository of primary and secondary literature for researchers to come. Her scholarship approached science fiction from the perspective of language to attempt a comparative study and analysis of the influence of several cultures on the genre. The titular reference starts taking shape in chapter 3 as she introduces several women practitioners of the genre with one iconic literary production from each of their repositories. There are four distinct parts to this book: an overview of the history of science fiction in the United States and United Kingdom, an overview of science fiction in India (Pan-Indian), an overview of female science fiction writers, and the traditional use of conjunction (in the broad sense of the term) and the use of conjunction as disjunction. Divided further into five chapters and a concluding segment, this critical work will appeal to readers in more ways than one. This review discusses the preceding attempts at the historical tracings concerning the newly emerging and rapidly flourishing genre of Indian science fiction, a brief overview of the chapters, the addressed crevices of existing scholarship, and the future avenues it opened up for readers and scholars.

Previous holistic approaches to science fiction in India, as read in the prefatory note of It Happened Tomorrow (Phondke 1993), or the introductory section of The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction (Saint 2019), or Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History, and Hybridity (Banerjee 2020), or the article “A Short History of South Asian Speculative Fiction” (Mondal 2018), meet a more condensed take in Kuhad’s narrative. Besides investing the first two chapters in discussing the oeuvre of the genre in world and Indian literature, the author primarily focuses on symptomatic works of science fiction by women writers in English in India. She takes up Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Manjula Padmanabhan, Priya SarukkaiChabria, and Vandana Singh for her textual analysis. The selection of these prominent authors (considering the limited readership and celebration of the genre in general) and their texts hold significance that is discussed later.

One of the most charming aspects of the book is the postmodern approach to the history of this subgenre where multiple truths surface as scholars diverge on the recognition of its points of inception. Kuhad gracefully accommodates a wide range of possibilities, from the utopian accounts of Bacon’s (1627/2009) The New Atlantis, through Swift’s (1726/2001) Gulliver’s Travels to Shelley’s (1818/2008) Frankenstein (pp. 1–5). She even allows space for era-specific literary taste (epics or romantic literature) as components in shaping science fiction. The foregrounding of the Western model of the genre allows her to invoke the South Asian context. Her recognition of eight iconic characteristics—relationship with science, setting, the impact of science, scientific discoveries, aliens, space travel, time travel, and enquiry into sensitive issues—is coupled with a brief overview addressing the defining traits of the genre in the Indian context. This diachronic investigation meets the theoretical model offered by Darko Suvin, Robert Scholes, Damien Broderick, and Samuel Delany to ease out the almost inscrutable and thoroughly convoluted definition(s) of science fiction as a genre in the West. Kuhad consciously bridges the gap between hard and social science fiction narratives as two primary categories of science fiction. Hard science fiction fundamentally invests in the domain of hard sciences or natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, geology, and meteorology) and retains a precise focus on the outcome of the technological advancements, whereas soft or social science fiction exploits terrains of social science disciplines (psychology, sociology, anthropology, and some aspects of archaeology) with a vision for depicting a sociocultural, sociopolitical, or socio-economic shift. She takes liberty with the usage of the phrases science fiction and speculative fiction, as she considers the former as a subgenre of the latter. Although she does not prompt a specific definitive model, she still explains the development of the genre of science fiction from the perspective of the speculative fiction that predated it.

The limited available scholarship renders considerable possibilities for archival and critical works to bloom and Kuhad exploits this window to an impressive extent. Despite a sincere attempt at tracing the history of science fiction in India, Kuhad’s focus and citations primarily stand limited to Hindi science fiction. This depicts the coerced limitation of her investment as a scholar and a critic in a multilingual country. The cursory approach to the rest of the untranslated works might be considered a drawback, but it is more an act of compulsion than of deliberate indifference. Delimiting the detailed thematic and linguistic discussions to Hindi or English science fiction in India provides a framework to approach these texts and further invites the possibility of regional and intersectional critical works to grow. Besides Hindi, the author takes up seven scheduled languages (Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Telegu, Odia, and Tamil) from the previously mentioned group of thirteen, but unlike Hindi, she offers a short and desultory tour of science fiction in them. Five major languages spoken in India have been missed (i.e., Malayalam, Punjabi, Assamese, Maithili, and Urdu). It might be reasoned that they have hardly produced works of speculative or science fiction, but with Malayalam, among other languages, that certainly is not the case. The detailed discussion of science fiction in India with extensive examples from several languages enriches the narrative. As the propensity of readership goes, though, every individual (Indian reader) will concentrate on the entry of their native language (if it qualifies to be a part of the selected seven) in particular to evaluate the merit of the book. The subchapter “Science Fiction in Bengali” (pp. 31–32) registers Jagadish Chandra Bose, Hemlal Dutta, R. S. Hossain, Premendra Mitra, Sukumar Ray, and Satyajit Ray. Incidentally, the entire thread of contemporary authorship is absent, including prolific and genre-defining authors like Adrish Bardhan, Anish Deb, Syed Mustafa Siraj, Siddhartha Ghosh, and so on. Undoubtedly, every language-specific entry carries the potential for further improvement, but this work must majorly be defined as groundwork and recognized as one of the earliest stepping stones in conjuring a conceivable model and an archive of the genre with a focus on women authors writing in English.

Unlike Banerjee, Kuhad does not delve much into the thematic or theoretical analysis concerning the development of the genre but instead adopts an inductive method by identifying the traces of elements of science fiction beyond literature in domains of popular culture and other media (film, television, magazines, seminars, symposiums, communities, and more; pp. 36–42). The author presents nine recurrent spaces that usually get explored within the Indian context of the genre: social and environmental issues, cloning, mythology and proto science fiction, gender bias, space travel, technology in science fiction, LGBT themes, love, and spirituality (pp. 42–55). Although it might appear reductionist and constricting, this categorization witnesses Kuhad’s command and expansive reading of Indian speculative fiction. While discussing the emergence of Indian science fiction in English and the surfacing of a global readership, Banerjee writes, “While post-independence SF [science fiction] is mostly found in indigenous languages, often displaying nationalistic concerns, since the 1990s English-language SF started becoming prominent, frequently reflecting more global ambitions” (p. 48). This is where the case studies commence, as Kuhad’s intention had always been to locate the genre in the context of world literature.

Virginia Woolf’s argument which was adapted into, “for most of history, anonymous was a woman” (“Anonymous Was a Woman” 2022), is passionately addressed and reacted to in this work by focusing on select women authors writing science fiction in English in India. Kuhad’s focus on women writers of science fiction in India substantially limits the range of available authors and the cynosure of English as a medium of expression offers a second filtering. Although English does not belong to the group of the scheduled languages spoken in India, still the use of it offers the texts a wider readership. Kuhad’s conscious choice of discussing texts written in English and by women reflects this concern of readership or reception and representation of culturally specific (localized) issues on a global platform. This fragmentation renders her work significant, though, and the only one of its kind. The third chapter of the book deals in detail with the life of the selective authors. Despite the focus on the genre of science fiction, the entry collates other literary activities of the authors against a backdrop of their personal lives and the sociopolitical context in which they belonged. A classic example is the subchapter on Sakhawat Hossain, as essays by and on the author have equal prominence. The four female authors in text-centric discussions offer a variegated range of speculative texts, utopian tales (Sultana’s Dream), dystopian narratives (Escape, Generation 14), and core science fiction (Distance and; Of Love and Other Monsters). The analysis and the reading of these selective works focus principally on the elements of science or speculative fiction as explored in the narrative. The reading experience gets dense as Kuhad hardly reiterates the themes mentioned in previous chapters as a part of the general understanding. Instead, she expands the possibilities. While discussing Singh’s works, the identified tropes list alienation, athmis, hyperspace, love, meta mind, and boundaries (pp. 113–24).

In her essay “A Speculative Manifesto,” Singh (2021) wrote, “No other literature, to my knowledge, has written with so much passion about human beings embroiled in technological and social change, from race and gender issues to nuclear war, to genetic engineering.” The inherent inspiration behind the inception of speculative fiction includes an attempt at envisioning a change in the existing world order or imagining the consequences of a regressive system or the outcome of limitless technical advancement. Be it a desire for a better life or a premonitory tale for the days to come, speculative fiction holds the narrative of change as its crux. The phrase “radical potential” has been used with a sense of elasticity in the book. The nuance of sociopolitical modifications associated with the word radical gets versed in the selective texts for analysis (p. 155). Kuhad notes, “The presence of radical potential in a text is the key factor which instills in the reader the ideas for change and how they can bring about the extreme change, which is necessary to change or model the existing conditions” (p. 155). Some fairly original data interpretation and nontheoretical approaches are observed in chapters 4 and 5. Kuhad uses the linguistic framework of tracking down functional conjunctions in tracing the fusion of either two contradictory ideas or the diffusion of two similar trains of thought. The development of style and the identification of elements through the use of a linguistic tool, “forms used as conjunctions” (p. 131; as at a semantic level it helps the author to connect different ideas) become the point of contention. With textual references, Kuhad depicts how the forms (word, phrase, paragraph, metaphor, simile, subtheme, author’s observation, etc.) identified with the functions of conjunction bring analogous ideas together. The sense of incompleteness and imperfection as reflected through the “drones” in Escape (Padmanabhan 2008) brings the imperfection of Meiji together, although the purpose of their enforced deformity comes from two drastically different objectives. The drones are stunted with a limited emotional response as their purpose was to serve the Generals in the novel, whereas Meiji was forced into the bounds of puberty in the name of her survival. The chapter on disjunction and the generation of alternative narratives creates a simultaneous space of inclusivity and exclusivity, with multiple forms (paragraph, simile, story, etc.; pp. 149–54) used as disjunctions. Kuhad’s conception of implementing radical ideas through infusing analogous or dichotomous ideas concerning our hours of existence in works of science fiction is well established.

In the opening remark of the concluding section, Kuhad reflects, “The present research focused on the ability of the chosen SF texts to sensitize the readers and inspire in them a radical perspective and an acknowledgment of the need for change” (p. 155). Her awareness of her position within the ambit of criticism, the time-consuming aspect of more exhaustive analysis, and the further possibilities of research leave the readers with a humble note. If Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (Barry 1995/2017) is the book recommended for one’s initial exposure to literary criticism or The Romantic Imagination (Bowra 1950/1988) is the book to step into the world of romantic theories, then unequivocally Kuhad’s Science Fiction and Indian Women Writers: Exploring Radical Potentials reflects the potential of being the go-to text for studying science fiction in India.