In colonial south India and in other parts of South Asia, then, there existed established theories of imagination and the mind as well as established literary traditions of fantasy that make the question of the known and unknown, the real and unreal, an impossible one.
Dune: Part II opens with the image of a fetus. It is a CGI rendition of Lady Jessica Atreides’s unborn daughter in the womb, at an undisclosed gestational age but not yet fully formed. In the book, we don’t see Alia until later, as a young child. Yet we see the fetus repeatedly throughout the movie, which is more and more developed in each visual. In the 1970s, feminist scholar Rosalind Petchesky critiqued the use of fetal visuals, such as the Star Child in 2001: A Space Odyssey, for feeding into anti-abortion narratives.[1] In Petchesky’s words, fetal images have “symbolic import” in societies that are hostile towards abortion and reproductive autonomy.[2]
The field of draconic phonetics and phonology has made great strides in the last two decades, and the basic groundwork has at long last been laid, though at great cost.
It’s not difficult to see K and Joi as trans; they are a constructed man and woman whose presence in society is only tolerated as much as they can be used. Their play at the 50s nuclear family seems all the more ridiculous because they’re not “real” people, not “really” a man and woman. Not to mention that it’s revealed later that K is actually a little girl in the memory that defines him. Gender is afoot.
So Bangla SF is trying to balance all these different things: scientific knowledge without scientism, cultural antiquity without jingoism, seriousness of the knowledge without seriousness of the scientist, etc. And the way to get that through is the tonal jollity. The local aesthetic traditions help a lot in shaping the way the stories get told.
Between were-tigers, -panthers and even -reindeer, the metamorphosing, animalistic female figure has a long and winding history behind it. It is a complicated story that can only really be made sense of from an intersectional perspective, recognising the need of patriarchal societies to cast its disruptors in the twin categories of “other,” cultural and sexual. Yet crucially, the very attraction of these stories, their wide appeal among viewers, readers and listeners across times and places, also inevitably opens up space for ambiguous sympathies and counternarratives.
The thing is; I don’t set out to write neurodivergent characters. I write people – fictional people who are drawn from the people around me, the way I experience the world, and my understanding of these experiences. Too bad if other people refuse to afford my experiences as being real or relatable.
Significantly, neither the humans nor the tigers are shown to possess an original or authoritative version of the narrative, and it is only in such collaborative and dialogic encounters that human-animal relations and entanglements can be dis-entangled.
