Science fiction in India
Subtitle: Parallel worlds and postcolonial paradigms
By: edited by Shweta Khilnani
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Bloomsbury India
Published: 2022
Place of publication: New Delhi
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9789354356742
Subjects: Post-colonial literature; Literary theory; Literature & literary studies
Description: Indian Science Fiction has evolved over the years and can be seen making a mark for itself on the global scene. Dalit speculative fiction writer and editor Mimi Mondal is the first SF writer from India to have been nominated for the prestigious Hugo award. In fact, Indian SF addresses themes such as global climate change. Debates around G.C.C are not just limited to science fiction but also permeate in critical discussions on SF.  This volume seeks to examine the different ways by which Indian SF narratives construct possible national futures. For this looking forward necessarily germinates from the current positional concerns of the nation. While some work has been done on Indian SF, there is still a perceptible lack of an academic rigor invested into the genre; primarily, perhaps, because of not only its relative unpopularity in India, but also its employment of futuristic sights. Towards the same, among other things, it proposes to study the growth and evolution of science fiction in India as a literary genre which accommodates the duality of the national consciousness as it simultaneously gazes ahead towards the future and glances back at the past. In other words, the book will explore how the tensions generated by the seemingly conflicting forces of tradition and modernity within the Indian historical landscape are realized through characteristic tropes of SF storytelling. It also intends to look at the interplay between the spatio-temporal coordinates of the nation and the SF narratives produced within to see, firstly, how one bears upon the other and, secondly, how processes of governance find relational structures with such narratives. Through these, the volume wishes to interrogate how postcolonial futures promise to articulate a more representative and nuanced picture of a contemporary reality that is rooted in a distinct cultural and colonial past..
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Table of contents: title: Introduction by Shweta Khilnani and Ritwick Bhattacharjee  Three Prolegomena by Shweta Khilnani, Ritwick Bhattacharjee and Saikat Ghosh  <b>Book I: Paradigms</b> Chapter 1: Steampunk Probes: Parody and the Allegorical Retrieval of History in Sumit Bardhan's Arthatrishna by Saikat Ghosh Chapter 2: Parallel 'Discoveries': (Re-) Constructing the 'Scientific' Enterprise in The Calcutta Chromosome by Jaya Yadav Chapter 3: Decolonising Encounters of the Indian Kind: Reading the Postcolonial 'Other' in Vandana Singh's The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories by Devapriya Sanyal Chapter 4: Green Men: Power, Dystopia and the Politics of Genre in Bengali Postcolonial SF by Subhadeep Ray Chapter 5: E Pur Si Muove: Towards a Decolonial Scholarship of Kalpavigyan Literature by Rajarshi Roy Chapter 6: Actor-Network Theory and the Postcolonial: A Reading of Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome by Sayan Parial <b>Book II: Worlds</b> Chapter 7: The Day After Tomorrow in Bengaluru: Environment, Global Climate Change and Dystopia(s) by Sami Ahmad Khan  Chapter 8: 'The Sea Eats People': Capitalocenic Dystopia in Rimi B. Chatterjee's 'Arisudan' by Indrani Das Gupta and Shraddha A. Singh  Chapter 9: Spectral Cities and Spectral Selves in Shockwave and Other Cyber Stories by Sanam Khanna  Chapter 10: An Alternative Vision of Science: Intersections of Science, Sustainability and Feminism in Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's Sultana's Dream by Anu Susan Abraham and Antara Chatterjee Chapter 11: Women Who Think They Are Planets and Other Bodies: Feminist Interventions in Indian SF by Saloni Sharma  Chapter 12: Who's Afraid of Postcolonial Dystopia? Reflections on Contemporary Science Fiction in India by Shikha Vats Chapter 13: Remembering/Dismembering: Tenuous Utopic Formulations in Nur Nasreen Ibrahim's and Mimi Mondal's Short Stories by Srinjoyee Dutta Chapter 14: Futurism in Indian Cinema: A Case Study of Anukul by Jigyasa H. Sondhi Chapter 15: 'The White City Turns Remaining Humans into Machines': Urban Dystopia and Posthumanism in Appupen's The Snake and the Lotus: A Halahala Adventure by Tanushree Ghosh Chapter 16: Taking (Back) Control: Surveillance and Power Politics in Prayaag Akbar's Leila and Samit Basu's Chosen Spirits by Anik Sarkar  About the Editors About the Contributors .