Introduction

What makes the thing that we call SFF possible in non-Anglophone, vernacular worlds? In places like South Asia, my intellectual and actual home, I find that this question rakes in strands of literary, social, and intellectual history that bind the colonial world, coloniser and colonised alike, in several different ways. We start, then, with the burdens that colonialism brought to bear on science and the ways in which this burden was braided with questions of language and literature. Here, in the interstices of a social and intellectual world reordered by colonialism, the faultlines of colonialism point us towards questions of genre and form that underpin the mainstream Anglophone SFF tradition as much as vernacular SFF traditions. The story, or the strand of this story that I can uncover best, is a South Asian one, but the logic of colonialism that frames this story, we may well find, is universal.

To think about the place of SF in a non-western literary tradition is to think about science in translation, in intellectual and social worlds that think through what science does for the human condition without the word-concept or intellectual frame of “science,” as it has been historically conceptualised in the west. Across the colonised world, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science not only provided the infrastructure of imperialism (electricity, railways, and so forth) but also produced ideas of racial difference like eugenics and material or bodily violence (for instance, extractivism and mine workers) that served as the intellectual, moral, and material scaffolding of imperialism. What did a tradition of science look like, outside the west? Did colonised people have a claim to "science” of their own? This was a problem of ideas at least as much as a question of politics, and in thinking through that, it strikes me that the history of scientific traditions can also be told as a history of translations.

The Story of Science that we inherit was burnished in the European Renaissance and it starts, of course, with the wisdom of the ancient Greeks and Romans as the fount of a universal body of literary, scientific, and philosophical knowledge.^[1] Or, as the eminent nineteenth-century Urdu poet Altaf Hussain ‘Hali’ once remarked, “the opinions of the ancient Greeks are engraved upon our minds, now if the truth were revealed from heaven, we would not believe it.”^[2] This story then takes us, sometimes and only briefly, to the translation movements that preserved Greco-Roman intellectual traditions in the medieval Arab world, where Plato and Aristotle were foundational intellectual influences. Usually, we are simply and somewhat providentially catapulted past the Arab world to the European stations that ushered modernity into the world. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the scientific revolution (Copernicus, Newton, Linnaeus), the Industrial Revolution, and the Enlightenment stretched on from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries and this, not coincidentally, is also the period that marks the expansion of European imperialism in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

I will always remember the jolt of recognition I felt when I walked into a cold church crypt in Florence and saw a folio of the Hortus Malabaricus, Latin for Garden of Malabar, a seventeenth-century botanical treatise that was on display in the exhibits of the Basilica di San Lorenzo. The book is a profile of the medicinal uses of plants in Malabar, the southwestern coast of India, and it served as an important source of information for Carl Linnaeus, who described nearly a hundred plant species based on the book in his botanical taxonomy that we still use today. The book was the brainchild of Hendrik van Rheede, the Dutch Governor of Malabar, and it was published in Amsterdam between 1678 and 1693 in twelve volumes totaling nearly six thousand pages and 784 copperplate engravings. A whole host of Europeans and “native” informants, from clergymen, company officials, botanists, and physicians to scribes, illustrators, editors, and engravers worked for years to produce the tome.^[3]

To call the book Latin or European is to obscure the fact that the knowledge it contained not only came from indigenous communities but was indigenous knowledge translated. As a historian notes, the names of plants in the Hortus come from South Asian languages and as many as four different South Asian scripts are used in the book. Then, there is also the fact that “indigenous” knowledge itself was a contested terrain within colonised societies. In the first volume of the Hortus, we find a testimonial from a “Malabari Doctor” named Itty Achudan, an Ezhava physician who swore to the honesty of the information he had passed on to his Dutch interlocutors. The Ezhavas are an oppressed caste and considered untouchable within the traditional caste hierarchy. In 2003, a botanist from the community named K. S. Manilal published an English translation of the Hortus that has become a rallying point of Ezhava assertions to knowledge and dignity.^[4]

In the colonial encounter, then, the movement of science across different intellectual worlds and places was fraught with the question of power in an unprecedented way. It was not simply that colonised societies needed to take science back, as the master’s tool, but that colonised societies needed to first think about the possibility of science within non-Anglophone intellectual traditions in a social world that was altered by the colonial encounter in several inescapable ways. There was, to start with, the idea that the vernacular was incapable or, at best, inadequate to modern science, which found expression in imperial technologies of rule such as education and language. English or European languages, in other words, claimed to be universal and ideal vehicles of science and as historians of colonial India have shown us, the ability of a language to express science became one of the markers of a modern language, braiding language and science together into the colonial logic.

The Language of Science

In an interesting history of colonial geographical knowledge called Terrestrial Lessons, a historian traces the influence of science primers and teaching materials in English and Tamil as well as scientific spatial instruments like maps and globes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She finds, for instance, that the globe travelled to British South Asia not as a dull artefact in staid offices and libraries but as an instrument of colonial assertions of power. In other words, the story of the west’s rationalism, scientificity, and imperialism was embedded within the scientific knowledge it introduced to colonial subjects, in sources such as school science textbooks published by the colonial state and by American and European missionary institutions.^[5] The vernacular was seen as the realm of what one historian terms “translated” science, the kind of scientific knowledge needed to conjure up rational imperial subjects who would use and apply science as engineers, surveyors, revenue collectors, train operators, clerks, policemen, soldiers, and workers of the state.^[6]

But between English or European languages and the vernacular was, in South Asia, that group of classical languages like Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, and some others like Tamil, all of which have ancient intellectual traditions of their own. How was the colonial state to deal with these languages, which were languages of prestige that had cultivated important intellectual, religious, and scientific traditions of their own? While some Orientalists involved in science translation such as James Robert Ballantyne, head of the Benares Sanskrit College from 1846-61, held that English technical terms of chemistry and the like should be rendered into Sanskrit, others like Felix Boutros, head of the Delhi College from 1841-45, felt that vernaculars such as Urdu, which had a long history of borrowing from other languages such as Persian and Arabic, were most suitable as the recipient language for scientific knowledge in English. Both, however, felt that English terms should not just be imported or transliterated directly but suitable equivalents or translations should be found instead.^[7]

So, as native intellectual traditions of science were distorted, translated, or cast aside to imperial ends or the interests of native elites, the colonial state in South Asia instituted English as the language of science education and research at the university level and in the state’s own scientific institutions. The story of science, in some ways, is a classic story of colonial rupture, where the old and the new are impossible to disentangle since both have been irrevocably altered by their encounter with each other. But while actual vernacular or “indigenous” traditions of science were compelled to respond to the colonial moment in their own ways, a whole parallel set of fundamental transformations in language, literature, and print were needed to set the stage for a vernacular SF or speculative fiction tradition to emerge. Translations needed to be commissioned, lexicons needed to be modernised and expanded, scientific literature needed to be popularised in the print and book market, and writers, editors, and publishing houses needed to create a readership for science.

In different parts of South Asia, language movements and scientific societies undertook the task of producing scientific lexicons and dictionaries as well as science magazines and books, some of which featured what we may think of as early experiments in South Asian SF. In the major centers of colonial rule, associations like the Calcutta School-Book Society (1817), the Madras School-Book Society (1820), and the Vernacular Translation Society (1843) founded in Delhi played an important role in producing translations of western science for the benefit of vernacular audiences, from Euclid’s geometry to texts of “natural philosophy.” This was also the period of science “popularisers,” Anglophone natives who had encountered or received a western education but also participated in vernacular intellectual and social worlds in important ways, the ranks of which included figures such as Master Ramachandra and Ruchi Ram Sahni in Punjab, Munshi Zakaullah in Delhi, and Rajendralal Mitra and S. N. Bose in Bengal.^[8]

In 1906, a Hindi Scientific Glossary was published by the Nagari Pracharini Sabha, known as a literary society that led the cause for Hindi nationalism in the twentieth century and is still in existence today. Projects such as these, historians have noted, were rooted in a new belief in universal translatability, or the notion that “anything that could be said in one language could be said equally effectively (if not as elegantly) in any other language,” which arose in the late colonial period.^[9] At the root of this was the fact that quite apart from braiding language and science together, the colonial encounter altered one fundamental aspect of language use and multilingualism in South Asia: the shift from a task-based view of language—that is, the notion that language is something you have and use for specific functions, with each language being appropriate to the functions it performs—towards an emotion-based view of language—that is, the notion that language inheres in peoples and places and acts like a personify-able thing with a tell-able history of its own.^[10]

The Hindi Scientific Glossary that was eventually published was embedded thoroughly in the colonial intellectual edifice out of which it came, in ways that illustrate the colonial rupture very well. The Glossary, for instance, provided prose definition for terms and organised the text alphabetically, following the preference and influence of British colonial culture, while premodern South Asian dictionaries, lexicons, and grammars were often written in verse and ordered by theme or some other system other than the alphabet. Most importantly, though, the Glossary included a conditional clause which stated that in the event a scientific term was unavailable in Hindi, other vernaculars (specifically, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, and Urdu) were to be the next port of call and if this did not turn up any word, Sanskrit or a direct English import would be the last resort.^[11] Science, in other words, cleaved the vernacular from the classical and reordered the linguistic hierarchies of colonised worlds in important ways.

Of Fantasy and Speculation

The problem of colonial rupture, as we wade into the late-nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, is also one of genre and form, which are questions that similarly mark an important preoccupation in the mainstream genealogy of Anglophone SF in interesting ways. An old essay titled “Towards a Definition of Science Fantasy” in a 1988 issue of Science Fiction Studies, the principal academic journal for SFF scholarship in English, notes that “SF deals with the known and the unknown, fantasy with the real and unreal.”^[12] The task, for any history of non-Anglophone SF, is to retrace non-Anglophone traditions of imagination, speculation, science, fantasy, and literature which eventually led to the self-consciously defined SFF literature of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a world fundamentally reordered by the colonial experience. The problems of genre and form, in other words, take on a historical burden.

In a fascinating intellectual history called More Than Real, a historian of south Indian literature reads Sanskrit theories of imagination and their reflection in south Indian poetry in vernaculars such as Tamil and Telugu between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The book finds that there were several modes of imaginative thinking from the medieval Sanskrit canon, based on the essential principle that “the mind … can imagine a world into being, complete in all its parts; it can also articulate the structure and components of that world in language.”^[13] But from the fifteenth century onwards, the imagination (bhavana) acquired a radical autonomy within south Indian literary traditions, becoming a causal force generating worlds much like the material world was itself understood as owing its existence to an act of divine imagination. This conception, the book shows us, stands in contrast to the more passive and ambivalent theories of imagination and the mind deployed by Plato, Aristotle, and Renaissance intellectuals such as Montaigne in the European tradition.^[14]

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. An earlier issue of Strange Horizons featured a review of the English translation of Tilism-i Hoshruba (The Magical Realm of Hoshruba), a section of a longer Urdu epic called Hamzanama or Dastan-i Amir Hamza (The Adventures of Amir Hamza). The Arabic-derived Urdu word tilism, from which the English word “talisman” is derived, initially alluded to a magical artefact, but later on, it also came to refer to a magical realm that the hero of the story needed to overcome and escape in his adventurous peregrinations. The review notes that “magic in Hoshruba is sometimes indistinguishable from advanced technology” and that its claim to being the “first magical epic fantasy” is somewhat dubious.

What interests me, in the growing body of work on the Dastan-i Amir Hamza, is that it gestures towards a history where oral traditions of epic and fantasy literature set in prose or verse gave way to an intellectual world in which prose forms like the novel and the short story, embedded in print formats like the book and the newspaper or periodical, became the dominant vehicle of SFF and spec-fic in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The dastan is a verbal art, closely related to other Persian or Arabic oral narrative traditions like the qissa in which performers called dastangos or qissa-khvans narrated epic stories about an adventurous and virtuous hero who conquers his enemies. More importantly, the Dastan-i Amir Hamza in Urdu is itself a translation of an older Persian dastan of the same name, which first came to South Asia with the spread of Turkic and Persianate courtly cultures in the wake of the Mongol invasions. In the nineteenth century, oral narrative traditions in the vernacular were first committed to print under the influence of colonial rule in ways that open up important questions of form and genre for non-Anglophone SFF.

The first printed edition of the Amir Hamza story was published sometime between 1801 and 1803 by the College of Fort William in Calcutta, one of the main centers of British colonial rule in South Asia, when a British official named John Gilchrist arranged for the dastan to be transcribed from the telling of an Urdu dastango named Khalil Ali Khan Ashk, who was hired as an Urdu instructor for colonial officials at the college.^[15] A later, much more famous edition published in forty-six staggering volumes was produced between 1883 and 1908 by the most prolific vernacular press in colonial north India, the Naval Kishore Press in Lucknow, in a project that became the “crowning glory of Urdu dastan literature.”^[16] Think about the form in which the dastan becomes available to us: the Tilism-i Hoshruba is the eighth volume in the Naval Kishore print run of the Dastan-i Amir Hamza. While the Urdu book of the Tilism may still signal to the Urdu reader that they are reading or hearing, in printed words, a story that formed part of an older, fluid oral tradition that still lives on in perilous traces in modern South Asia today, the English reader encounters the Tilism, first and foremost, as a written book and a “fantasy” in the form of a novel.

The Conundrum of Form

Translation, in other words, not only happens at the level of the text or language but it also, often, involves a transfiguration at the level of genre and form. The flattening of the dastan, an oral vernacular genre with a long precolonial history, into the fantasy in novel-as-book form is a literary rupture that parallels the disjunctures produced by colonial rule in native intellectual traditions of science and speculative thinking. Several generations of literary studies scholars, especially in the twentieth century, understood the novel as a fundamentally early modern European form that travelled to colonised contexts like South Asia through translations of early European works such as John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1681), sometimes cited as the first English novel, which then led to derivative vernacular experiments with the novel form in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The derivativeness of the vernacular novel was underscored by the notion that these, at least in places like British South Asia, were considered too fantastical, with mythic time and fantastical characters, settings, and tropes rather than a concern with social reality and fictional realism found in the nineteenth century European novel. So pervasive was this notion that Rabindranath Tagore, the celebrated Bengali poet-writer and the first non-European to have won the Nobel for literature in 1913, remarked that the South Asian conception of the function of the novel was fundamentally different from the European one. In his view, South Asian novels represented an important reworking of South Asian literary traditions of epic and fantasy like the dastan and qissa, and he argued that they were concerned with the “evocation of an atmosphere larger than our ordinary life.”^[17]

What we have here is a remarkable scenario because we see the marginalisation of SFF within the Anglophone intellectual world being refracted in a curious way in the colonial context: vernacular literatures on the whole were considered too fantastical, too speculative in comparison to the aesthetic, literary, and intellectual standards of the bourgeois realist novel in Europe. Nearly a hundred years later, at the turn of the twentieth century, the Argentinian writer Luisa Valenzuela noted in a 2001 interview with The Paris Review: “I always am quite disturbed when American reviewers call my fiction surrealist. I consider it realist in excess. Latin American writers think of reality as having a wider span … we explore the shadow side of it. But the real difference has to do mostly with the origins of language. Spanish grammar is different from English grammar. This means that we have a different approach not only to the world, but to the word.”^[18] The faultlines of the colonial rupture, as always, persist in our time.

But while the vernacular South Asian novel was considered deficient because it lacked “realism” or because it carried traces of premodern South Asian literary traditions, I find that many influential western theorists of the novel from Gyorgy Lukács to Mikhail Bakhtin were also, in fact, concerned with how the European novel was related to the epic and fantasy traditions of premodern Europe. To Lukács, the Hungarian-born Marxist literary critic and philosopher, it was possible to understand history itself “as a unified and meaningful meta-narrative, which can be read along the lines of a realist novel.”^[19] Within this novel-as-history of the world, there were, for Lukács, four important eras: the era of the Homeric epic; the transition from epic-derived texts like Dante’s Inferno (1321) to novels of abstract idealism like Don Quixote (1605-1615); the birth of the bourgeois novels of Goethe and the like; and finally, the post-novel era anticipated by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.^[20]

Even if the Marxist vein of this story is particular to Lukács’s intellectual and political persuasion, we see the same metanarrative we encountered earlier, with the same locations: the shift from ancient Greece to Renaissance and early modern Europe sets the terms on which the novel is born in the world. The question of languages, of the fact that this story actually sutures together texts in Greek, Italian, Spanish, German, and Russian from different historical moments and worlds, is papered over. To construct this kind of literary genealogy for a colonised context like South Asia is, for obvious reasons, a question muddied by the colonial rupture, but really, the birth of the South Asian novel or South Asian SFF is marked by the same developments and contradictions that mark the modern European or western literary tradition since both were shaped by the colonial experience in fundamental, if different, ways. The story of non-Anglophone SFF that arises from a context like this is, in essence, an inverted mirror image of mainstream Anglophone SFF.

Intellectual histories of Anglophone SFF have tracked the ways in which colonial history and ideology established the basic texture of most Anglophone SFF, and they also show how SFF as a genre rose to prominence precisely in the period that witnessed the fervid imperialist expansion of the late-nineteenth century.^[21] This is why, for instance, it is easy to see that if empires or empire-like structures dominated the worlds built by some of the classics of twentieth-century Anglophone SFF, vernacular SFF or speculative fiction became a terrain in which the relationship between vernacular culture, science, and colonialism were worked out, either metadiscursively or explicitly. To produce SFF or any shade of speculative writing under the shadow of colonialism was to write against the hegemony of colonialism and “science” itself.

People, Paper, Places

But between oral, premodern traditions of epic and fantasy and the dominance of prose forms like the novel and short story, there is the fact that the earliest South Asian experiments with SFF or speculative writing owe an important debt to the print market, much like Europe and the west. Print culture, especially vernacular print, truly and properly took over South Asia and other parts of the colonised world in the nineteenth century, and within the world of vernacular print, magazines and periodicals were an immensely important technology of circulation. As an exciting open-resource project called Revolutionary Papers shows, the newspaper or periodical was really the mise-en-scène of the colonial world because its multi-generic form (from essays, poems, news reports, conference proceedings to comics, letters, illustrations, and ads) offers resources to challenge the “canonical, Anglophone, individuated, and top-down” frameworks of thinking that often shadow our view of the colonised world. No wonder then that non-Anglophone SF in places like South Asia, quite apart from the transfiguration of precolonial fantasy or speculative traditions, took on the dominant form of novels (often, serialised) and short stories, enmeshed as this literature was in the business of paper and pulp.

Historians of Bengali SF, which represents one of the well-researched bodies of vernacular SFF in South Asian and also discussed in earlier issues of Strange Horizons (see  here, here, and here), have shown that the earliest SF appeared in science magazines and periodicals from the late-nineteenth century onwards and that they are experiments in literary form, science, and speculative thinking as much as they were nationalist or decolonial projects.^[22] There are, for instance, several Bengali terms for a range of SFF and spec-fic writing that derive from or feature some combination of Sanskrit terms for imagination (kalpana), mystery (rahasya), and, more importantly, science (vigyan), which became the near-universal term for “science” in many South Asian vernaculars and a unifying thread for the many disparate traditions of vernacular South Asian SFF by the twentieth century. Nearly a decade after the Hindi Scientific Glossary was published, for instance, Hindi intellectuals in north India established a new science monthly periodical in 1915, and they chose to call it Vigyan, which was also the name of a vernacular scientific society called Vigyan Parishad.^[23]

Vigyan published some of the earliest experiments in Hindi SFF by little-known writers such as Prem Vallabh Joshi, a small-town science teacher and priest who wrote many experimental pieces, including a serialised dialogue between a school science teacher and a sastri, or traditional Hindu priest, in a fictionalised colonial laboratory, which becomes the stage for an encounter between “western” scientific sensibilities and commitments to sastra or traditional knowledge.^[24] In Joshi’s fictional account, the authority of sastra cohabits experimental methods, pointing to the dilemma that historians of colonialism have shown us: “indigenous thought had to cohabit with western knowledge in order to exceed it.”^[25] Indeed, this “exceeding” was worked out in many different ways, within any one vernacular sphere and between different vernacular spheres.

In Bengali SF, for instance, historians have noted that the earliest nineteenth-century Bengali prose that can be considered part of canon includes Hemlal Dutt’s Rahasya (Mystery, 1882), a story about technological automation, Jagadananda Roy’s space-adventure story called Shukra Bhraman (A Visit to Venus, 1895), and Niruddesher Kahini (The Tale of an Unknown World, 1896), published later as Palatak Tufan (Runaway Cyclone, 1921) by Jagadish Chandra Bose, often considered the father of Bengali SF.^[26] At this time, the genre was known in Bengali by a variety of terms such as baigyanik rahasya (scientific mystery) or baigyanik kalpakahini (scientific fantasy narratives), and the culture of pulp, especially young adults’ and children’s magazines such as Sandesh (founded 1913), was absolutely central to the rise of some of the classics of the genre, like the diaries of Professor Shonku, a character created by Satyajit Ray (1921-1992). It also shaped Bengali SF’s close association with other exemplar pulp genres such as detective and crime fiction.

By the time the term kalpavigyan (which combines the Sanskrit terms for imagination and science) was popularised by Adrish Bardhan in the early 1960s, the intellectual program of the genre had shifted from the imperatives of the colonial period to decidedly postcolonial concerns. In the context of a newly independent nation-state where the cultivation of a “scientific temper” was central to the political culture established by the Nehruvian state that governed India after British rule, historians have noted that the earliest Bengali SFF features what later kalpavigyan writers and literature would view as obigyan (non-science) or opobigyan (pseudo-science).^[27] Even so, the kalpavigyan of the postcolonial period is marked by a decided allegiance to humanism and scientific rationalism over the mythical and the religious in ways that still make room for fantasy, allowing both native and colonial inheritances to be treated historically and critically, without the burdens of anticolonial assertion or cultural authenticity.^[28]

In addition to the intellectual, social, and political currents of the postcolonial period, the story of vernacular SFF in places like South Asia has also been shaped by the classic technologies of the twentieth century: radio and film. The first SF cine-club in India, for instance, was established in the early 1960s in Bengal by Adrish Bardhan and others who founded the Bengali SF magazine Ashchorjo! in 1963.^[29] In south India, where I was born and partly raised, the first vernacular SF film called Kalai Arasi, Tamil for Art is Queen, was released in the same year, and it featured two aliens who arrive on Earth with the mission of seeking help for their people, who have made great strides in science but find themselves deficient in the performing arts.^[30] An ingenious inversion of the colonial logic, if there ever was one. Later postcolonial Tamil writers, such as Sujata (commonly spelled Sujatha in Indian-English writing), who was known as S. Rangarajan before he took on his wife’s name in a four-decade-long literary career from 1968 until his death in 2008, continued the tradition of writing between literary print, popular journalism, and film, a distinctive feature of modern south Indian society.

En Iniya Iyanthira

Sujata, for instance, co-wrote the screenplay for the hit film, Enthiran, the Robot (2010), based on his earlier SF works such as En Iniya Enthira (My Dear Robot, 1986), a novel that contends with the limits of state and techno-authoritarianism as the robot,  Jeeno, develops sentience and needs to be dismantled in the end.^[31] In the tides of the twentieth and twenty-first century, then, vernacular SFF traditions in places like South Asia bear the mark of the colonial experiences from which they came even if the dilemmas and anxieties of that time have faded away to be replaced by preoccupations closer to our time: climate collapse, post-scarcity societies, futurism. In a growing and exciting body of work on postcolonial South Asian SFF, one volume observes that genre “politicises what is taken for granted” in literature and in the world.^[32] It occurs to me, at last, that the questions of science that confronted colonised societies were, in essence, the unchanging philosophical quandary at the heart of any SFF: are the words and languages we have enough for the worlds we live in and imagine?

 ^[1] Moyer, The Intellectual World of Sixteenth-Century Florence: Humanists and Culture in the Age of Cosimo I, chap. 3.

^[2] Quoted in Sehgal, Sangwan, and Mahanti, Uncharted Terrains: Essays on Science Popularisation in Pre-Independence India, 134.

^[3] Menon, “Hortus Indicus Malabaricus: The Eurasian Life of a Seventeenth-Century 'European' Botanical Classic.”

^[4] Menon.

^[5] Ramaswamy, Terrestrial Lessons.

^[6] Singh, “Science and Its Publics in British India,” 224.

^[7] Dodson, “Translating Science, Translating Empire.”

^[8] See Sehgal, Sangwan, and Mahanti, Uncharted Terrains.

^[9] Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue, 160.

^[10] Mitchell, passim.

^[11] Singh, “Science in the Vernacular?”

^[12] Malmgren, “Towards a Definition of Science Fantasy (Vers Une Définition de La Fantaisie Scientifique).” 275.

^[13] Shulman, More Than Real, 13.

^[14] Shulman, 267-87.

^[15] Khan, The Broken Spell Indian Storytelling and the Romance Genre in Persian and Urdu, 50.

^[16] Bilgrāmī, The Romance Tradition in Urdu, 25.

^[17] Quoted in Mukherjee, Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India, 57.

^[18] Lee and Bibija, “Luisa Valenzuela, The Art of Fiction No. 170.”

^[19] Jay, “Fidelity to the Event?”

^[20] Jay, Marxism and Totality, 96.

^[21] Kerslake, Science Fiction and Empire; Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction.

^[22] Bhattacharya and Hiradhar, “Own Maps/Imagined Terrain.”

^[23] Singh, “The Shastri and the Air-Pump.”

^[24] Singh.

^[25] Prakash, Another Reason, 98.

^[26] Roy, “Green Men: Power, Dystopia, and the Politics of Genre in Bengali Postcolonial SF,” 64.

^[27] Roy, “E Pur Si Muove: Towards a Decolonial Scholarship of Kalpavigyan Literature,” 79.

^[28] Roy, “E Pur Si Muove: Towards a Decolonial Scholarship of Kalpavigyan Literature,”

^[29] Roy, “Green Men: Power, Dystopia, and the Politics of Genre in Bengali Postcolonial SF,” 65.

^[30] Pillai, “Enthiran, the Robot: Sujatha, Science Fiction, and Tamil Cinema,” 123.

^[31] Pillai, “Enthiran, the Robot: Sujatha, Science Fiction, and Tamil Cinema,” 120.

^[32] Chattopadhyay, Mandhwani, and Maity, Indian Genre Fiction, 7; See also Mukherjee, Final Frontiers; Kuhad, Science Fiction and Indian Women Writers; Khilnani and Bhattacharjee, Science Fiction in India.

Works Cited

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Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva, Aakriti Mandhwani, and Anwesha Maity. Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories. Taylor & Francis, 2018.

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———. Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas. University of California Press, 1984.

Kerslake, Patricia. Science Fiction and Empire. Liverpool University Press, 2007.

Khan, Pasha. The Broken Spell Indian Storytelling and the Romance Genre in Persian and Urdu. Wayne University Press, 2019.

Khilnani, Shweta, and Ritwick Bhattacharjee. Science Fiction in India: Parallel Worlds and Postcolonial Paradigms. Bloomsbury India, 2022.

Kuhad, Urvashi. Science Fiction and Indian Women Writers: Exploring Radical Potentials. Taylor & Francis, 2021.

Lee, Sarah, and Ksenija Bibija. Luisa Valenzuela, “The Art of Fiction No. 170.” The Paris Review, no. 160 (Winter 2001). https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/449/the-art-of-fiction-no-170-luisa-valenzuela.

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Editor: Gautam Bhatia.

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