[In this interview, Will Shaw speaks to Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, the World Fantasy Award-winning SF critic and translator, about his latest project, The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Collection of Bengali Science Fiction (MIT Press 2024), a part of MIT Press' Radium Age series. This interview is a companion piece to Will's review of the book, published by Strange Horizons, and available here.]
Will Shaw: You’ve talked in previous interviews about the selection process for this anthology, and how it spun out from your translation work as part of your PhD thesis. What is your history with the original Bangla versions of these texts? How have your feelings about them developed since you first encountered them, and in the process of translation?
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay: My history with these texts is trying to locate them in the first place! Doing archival work on Bangla science fiction is quite hard because locating these texts is hard. They are generally buried as isolated examples in general Bangla language journals and magazines. The variety of these magazines offers special challenges. Some are for adults, some are for children. Some are specifically focused on science, some geography, some history, some religion, some medicine, some politics, some literature. And in many magazines all these disciplines or interest areas have just all been randomly thrown together. You often can’t ascertain from the title alone whether a piece is a story or an article. A lot of pieces look like fiction but are meant to be creative non-fiction, and vice versa. And when it is fiction you can’t tell if it’s science fiction or fantasy or realist fiction. You often can’t determine who the writers are as people, or whether they had other professions, since there is no biographical info (especially for writers who wrote short stories). Half the pages of the journals might be illegible. You often don’t have clear circulation numbers or audience reception. Stories themselves might fall between two or more issues of the magazines, and if you miss one issue the story is incomplete. Publication history is murky.
My feelings about these stories have definitely changed in the decade plus since I first read them. This is because the landscape of science fiction and speculative writing more broadly have dramatically changed in the last decade. On the one hand there’s a strong archival push towards the roots of the genre. When I did my PhD, such work was rare. There was no space for “global science fiction” either, since most writers and critics were working with older assumptions about Anglophone and European (primarily Francophone) science fiction. There were only a handful of books in Anglophone criticism on the 19th century global scene, for instance Anindita Banerjee’s work on early Russian SF, We Modern People (2012) and Rachel Haywood’s The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction (2011) and so on. These were also two works I learnt a lot from. This was the background for the “Recentering Science Fiction And The Fantastic: What Would A Non-Anglocentric Understanding Of Science Fiction And Fantasy Look Like?” manifesto that I first presented as my doctoral lecture, which was later published in Strange Horizons.
But in the last decade research has revealed early science fiction to be a global phenomenon, and also located the movement of ideas and tropes between literary and cultural traditions. So there is active interest in translations, and seeking out science fiction—or similar literature—from other parts of the world. Rachel Cordasco’s SF in Translation project is a great resource for tracking this shift. On the other hand is the interest now in contemporary global futurisms and SF traditions, whether that’s Indigenous Futurisms or Arabfuturisms or Latinxfuturisms or Africanfuturisms or Chinese SF or Indian SF or Asian SF etc. So these older histories are connecting to trends in contemporary science fiction. My own feelings are thus connected also to my work in the field over the last two decades. As I lead a project on the contemporary global scene, I look at these works in a new light, including their key importance in the shared story of who we are as a future thinking species, irrespective of geography, culture, or ethnicity.
WS: The first chapter of ‘The Inhumans’ interpolates two lengthy extracts from a real near-contemporary memoir, Kill or Be Killed: The Rambling Reminiscences of an Amateur Hunter by W. Robert Foran. What do you think of that as a structural choice by Hemendrakumar Roy? Should we read it in light of his wider work as a translator? What do you think it does for the novella overall?
BC: It’s quite fascinating to see the nesting of narratives in the novella overall, and also adds to the point I was making earlier about the blend of genres — and the difficulty in ascertaining whether a piece is fiction at all. Now Foran’s text is supposed to be “real,” but put into the same space as fiction, it enhances the fictionality of Foran’s adventure just as it enhances the realism of Roy’s text. Everything in the text is meant to heighten the reality effect, including the geographical and ecological markers, and also the diary that the narrator discovers is itself meant to heighten the sense of revealed truth. This is actually fairly standard in early SF. But I think there’s a deeper point to it too, which a lot of early SF was deeply concerned with, and that is the re-enchantment of a world that was fast losing its magic to the domain of science. Arcane knowledge and futuristic knowledge in early speculative fiction sought to reclaim the territories lost to science, and the former transmuted to fantasy and the latter to SF.
WS: Aside from the Foran extract, a lot of these stories have a strong epistolary or metafictional element. The back half of ‘The Inhumans’ is a diary, the resolution to ‘The Mystery of the Giant’ comes in a letter, and major characters in that story and ‘Voyage to Venus’ are explicitly fiction writers. How typical is this of Bengali science fiction generally? Did you consciously decide to group together stories with these documentary elements? If so, why?
BC: That was one key reason why I chose these particular stories! SF is interesting to me—the reason why I find these works I translated to be SF rather than fantasy is because SF tries to keep its fantasies grounded in reality, and uses all kinds of what I have called “orienting components” to enhance these effects. The use of “reportage” is one of those key components, and one finds it in much colonial era fiction, including SF, as well as non-fiction. Anthropological documentation, for instance, presenting “true stories” about “lost tribes” and the like, were deeply fictional accounts, but maintained sufficient scientific packaging to be considered credible knowledge. Most biases and stereotypes about the colonized were fiction masquerading as real knowledge and truth. And reportage gave plausible deniability without removing the epistemic claim: it was just what was seen and heard rather than what was claimed as true, but it was probably true nonetheless.
The metafictional elements are thus a commentary on the nature of the genre itself, including its evolutionary roots in the premises of anthropology and scientific knowledge making, and its close connection to fiction.
WS: You’ve talked elsewhere about the importance of humor, parody, and satire in Bangla science fiction, and about the challenges this presents in translating it. Could you give some examples of such challenges, and how you tackled them in this project?
BC: Humor is always a challenge. I think I tried my best to keep the original lightness of tone where that was the dominant flavor, and the absurd where that dominated instead. In true Indian style, there are songs in the novella, and I had to make a lot of stylistic choices for the songs. They are almost like children’s rhymes, but they are just meant to be funny rather than have any particularly deep meaning.
WS: There’s a kind of jaunty tone to a lot of these stories, especially ‘The Inhumans’ and ‘The Martian Purana.’ How do you think that tonal jollity contributes to these texts’ broader satirical projects?
BC: Farce and satire have a long tradition in the subcontinent, including as oral literature and public theatre. Popular humorous literature in print was widespread in 19th century Bengal where this literature took root, so there were clear aesthetic traditions to draw from.
But there’s more to the farcical tone in a lot of SF written during the colonial period, including in Bengal. There is first of all the challenge to the seriousness of the scientific project, including the claim to objectivity and the claim to knowledge, or the claim to control the world through that knowledge. But the world at the same time continually resists this systematization and knowledge claim: things happen, including absurd things, and people come with their own different belief systems which appear completely hilarious, preposterous, or incredulous. The only way to make sense of it is through humor, satire, and farce. If one looks at the SF of the period, there’s the real kind of adventure fiction that takes itself seriously, because it is trying to invoke a sense of wonder based on the possibility of discovering new knowledge, and then there’s the kind that pokes fun at the scientific enterprise or objectivity itself, or which uses the ridiculous to see how far we would go in our belief in the power of scientific knowledge. So H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain would largely fall in the former category, while Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger would generally fall in the latter category. It’s important to note here that neither of these categories reject science itself, but the ways in which it happens, its processes and so on.
With Bangla SF there’s a further twist here: the modern scientific enterprise, with its professional scientist class, its technical instruments and infrastructure, its claims to reason and objective pure knowledge, is largely seen as a European or colonial import. And it works at times and doesn’t work at others, it’s imperfect and incomplete, so there’s plenty there that’s already suspect despite a claim to objectivity and truth, which is generally a source of amusement. Poking fun at those who take themselves too seriously, or those who are higher in the hierarchy, is a favorite pastime of Bengalis, and part of the aesthetic tradition I mentioned earlier.
At the same time, for the colonized culture especially with rich historical and scientific traditions, it is also the case that belief in the efficacy of indigenous knowledge can often outstrip the reality of such efficacy, which can just as easily be humorous. I have written elsewhere about the “mythologerm,” which is this kind of transformation of myth back into history: where myths are taken to be true, evidence of advanced scientific knowledge etc. So for example, a myth about someone getting a new head after the old one has been cut off is seen as evidence of hyper-advanced surgical knowledge in one’s own tradition. One finds this kind of mendacity in all traditions, and sometimes it is just naïve wish-fulfilment, and other times a source of cultural chauvinism and jingoism.
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.
WS: What are your thoughts on this book in relation to the wider Radium Age series? How do you see your book contributing to this overall project from MIT Press?
BC: The Radium Age is a fantastic project, and I am so glad that The Inhumans is part of the series. I am really quite fond of early science fiction, but I don’t see these works as dated or old, especially when it comes to their relevance. The themes that we find in late 19th and early 20th century science fiction are also the themes of the here and now. Take something like Everett Bleiler’s two fantastic bibliographic studies, Science Fiction: The Early Years, and Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years. Now if you look at Bleiler’s classification of the themes, whether those are outer space adventures or genetic engineering, advanced weapons or robotics, you find it all already in science fiction of the period. We often talk about the “predictive quality” of science fiction, and even if science fiction writers do not necessarily set out to be predictive, the genre has often been remarkably prescient when it comes to technological futurism and epistemological futurism, two concepts that I developed to talk about science fiction’s speculative drive: that is imagining future technological change as well as the change in the underlying knowledge structures driving technological change. Resources like Technovelgy have been documenting things such as this for a while. So there’s one excellent reason to dive into early science fiction in any case.
But what makes the early period more fascinating is not just this kind of prescience, but the way it deals with the embeddedness of the technological in the social, and the social impact of change itself. And all this is written beautifully, and simply — in the mix of genres that does not privilege one register or style of storytelling over another, where making the story intelligible is paramount. Because these stories are a way of sensemaking during a senseless time. The Radium Age is a crazy period, because these technological changes and discoveries are happening at a time of incredible social upheaval. War – and the threat of nuclear war — leading to total annihilation of humanity is the mood. Science fiction captures this devastation, this dystopia, this pessimism, while offering a refreshing possibility of change. Hence the Radium Age books.
We are now living in the same times — if anything somewhat worse. We are 90 seconds to midnight, and we have never been closer. Governments are going back on war footings. Identities that had been ostensibly and forcibly contained within nation state boundaries are showing their embeddedness in intra- and trans-national units. Democratic backsliding defines the politics of our present. And to add to these is climate change, which will get us all. And again people are turning to science fiction, for both the image of despair and the possibility of transformation. This is happening globally, because science fiction — by whatever name we choose to call it — has always been global.
So if we look at the volumes in the Radium Age series, we quickly see how relevant these books are, and continue to be. There’s dystopia, there’s totalitarianism, there’s nuclear war, there’s population control, there’s violent nationalism. But there’s also love, and resistance, and hope and humor. So we are very much in the same space as these books now in our present. And these books, if anything, often tell us more about where we are now in our current societal development compared to contemporary science fiction, which tries to imagine our far tomorrows. The Inhumans definitely tells us something about colonial Bengal and India, but it is also very much a book of the now. I think there are so many things we are yet to understand about early science fiction.