Speculative fiction as “decolonial option”: Towards a “vulnerable reading” of Ali Mirdrekvandi’s No Heaven for Gunga Din (1965)

ABSTRACT

Ali Mirdrekvandi’s No Heaven for Gunga Din (1965) is an Iranian novel in English, a speculative fiction written during the Allied occupation of Iran in World War II. In it, Mirdrekvandi, a migrant labourer who served a platoon of British and American soldiers stationed in Tehran, depicts the aftermath of World War III in the year 2084, when a regiment of Anglo American soldiers, followed by their servant Gunga Din, searches for Heaven across the Milky Way. Mirdrekvandi’s speculative vision, and deconstructive mode of anglophone writing, envision an alternative to the coloniality of being. Following Mignolo’s conception of the “decolonial option”, and Singh’s method of “vulnerable reading”, this article argues that Mirdrekvandi’s title-character assumes a self-reflective position of precarity – ultimately, in Hell – as a marginal vantage point through which to unlearn the language of post/colonial mastery in the imagined, as well as the real, world of the narrative.

KEYWORDS:

• Ali Mirdrekvandi
• No Heaven for Gunga Din
• speculative fiction
• decoloniality
• vulnerable reading
• post/colonial mastery

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my student Mehrshad Dadgar for rediscovering Ali Mirdrekvandi; and our friend Milad Rezaei (1986–2020), who shared Gunga Din’s defiant vulnerability.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Amirhossein Vafa

Amirhossein Vafa is assistant professor of English Literature at Shiraz University, Iran. He is the author of Recasting American and Persian Literatures (2016), and the co-editor of Persian Literature as World Literature (2021). His research interests include decoloniality in the context of Iranian modernity, and the literary representations of marginality.