Science Fiction in India

Parallel Worlds and Postcolonial Paradigms

• Editorial: Bloomsbury India
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9789354353437
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Letteratura
• Categoría: Critica letteraria asiatica

Nominated, 2023 Teaching Literature Book Award 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.

Chapter 1

STEAMPUNK PROBES: PARODY AND THE ALLEGORICAL RETRIEVAL OF HISTORY IN SUMIT BARDHAN’S ARTHATRISHNA

Saikat Ghosh

INTRODUCTION

By Editors

Even as SF finds its roots within the more scientifically and industrially developed Western nations, the Indian reformulations of the genre have, over the ages, evolved to include not just specificities of Indian realities but also processes of replying to all of West’s colonial incursions—historical or discursive. In fact, by using the very instruments that the colonial West (read the British) has birthed, Indian SF narratives have shown possibilities of existential alterities to ensure inscriptions of renegotiations with the very temporality that has sought to cage it within colonial identities. In a sense then, Indian SF, primarily the postcolonial variant, reworks the formal systems of SF itself to ensure both synchronic and diachronic (re)emergence of the Indian nation outside the frameworks of its erstwhile colonised identity.

The alterity implicit within these narratives is then of an ontological variety that allows for concretely singular and specific national presentations and re-presentations. This is done with an essential re-historicisation: a procedure through which history itself is rethought as something else than what it is. While there are multiple ways by which this happens, and different narratives have used different tropes towards the same, the entanglements with absences within the framework of SF have always ensured even the possibility of such. It is this possibility that Indian SF exploits for the presentation of its existential alterity. Obviously, this alterity is a difference to not only what historically is but also what could have been, for this realises, in ways that real-isations happen, differences of imaginations of the nation and, extending from it, the political reality of the nation itself (Anderson 1983).

Saikat Ghosh’s chapter, through the reading of Sumit Bardhan’s Arthatrishna, speaks about the presentations of one such form of alterity. Not only does Ghosh speak about the possibilities of difference implicit inside the steampunk genre of Arthatrishna but also the changes that Bardhan brings to the conceptualisation of steampunk itself through his novel. What results, then, is the essential re-historicisation of colonial Bengal allowing it to be imagined outside the discursive limits of British and Western conceptualisations.

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To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.

—Walter Benjamin

Stylistic and discursive constructions of the past are always motivated by the present experienced as a crisis. Those who are culturally involved in framing the crisis as a set of questions and attempting solutions are invariably thinking about a future. If the questions lead to aporia or dead ends of the imagination, the tendency to re-territorialise the future with glamorous debris from the past, or to nostalgically wear the present inside out as past, is a compulsive one. In such a case, the crisis continues to underlie anxieties and gets registered in current social conflict as well as political manoeuvring; however, cultural production temporarily detaches itself from the crisis and participates in a commodification of time that results in ‘ersatz nostalgia’ (Appadurai 1996).¹ The peculiarity of this problem has been noticed while analysing fantasies that are at least partly shaped by the fashion-driven mass cultures of late capitalism. Since the 1980s, the appeal of retro-futurism in cinema, literature, art, visual design and advertising has steadily intensified and has even gained currency within youth subcultures from time to time. Retro-futurism encodes Culture as a series of ideological operations through which the present as a crisis is acknowledged and simultaneously evaded within imagined temporalities that continuously enact a journey back to the future by seeking traces of a viable or desirable future in discarded/alternative trajectories of the past.²

At the turn of the century, a steampunk style of explicitly retro-futuristic art and fashion emerged in the West. Citing some of the most advanced mechanistic inventions and risqué emblems of nineteenth-century industrial Europe, Steampunk tried to accomplish an imaginative fusion of the past with futurism borrowed from SF. In fact, the sense of the past itself was derived from literary sources, such as the works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne whose SF novels are seen as precursors to steampunk classics such as Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990). Recent scholarship on the steampunk-inspired literature has indeed noted the ways in which it harks back to a ‘past that never was’ (Taddeo and Miller 2013; Bowser and Croxall 2016). Even so, academic investigations have been blindsided by a lazily Eurocentric assumption that the steampunk assemblage of signs and props that refer to the nascent advance of industrialism in nineteenth-century Europe is utilised by the works in the genre to stage a fantastic recovery of precursory moments in the history of industrialisation that could have yielded an alternative to the present reality. This is perhaps based on the fallacious assumption that industrialisation proceeded along a singular trajectory, governing a unifying set of practices that historically shaped all the impactful consequences in the present reality. In fact, to historically recall that the most zealous advocates of industrialism in the nineteenth century were themselves privy to the colonial policy of dismantling non-European native forces of industry and scientific innovation in the colonies is to also see the clunky, eccentric pageantry of steampunk machines as a parody of a grand narrative that had hoped to direct the technological and productive forces of the nineteenth century towards a world-imperial order. The lens of retro-futurism precludes this double vision because it does not engage seriously with the production of steampunk literature in non-European cultures and languages. Instead, it superficially and fallaciously conflates observable global participation in steampunk creativity with a mass-cultural endorsement of the European theme of retro-futurism and its commodified fantasia of time.

Part of the problem lies with globalisation itself. With globalisation, the West’s logocentric re-arrival in the late twentieth century marks the rhetorical ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama 1992).³ Retro-futurism is its handmaiden in the sense that its key ideological operation consists in the transformation of historical time into aesthetic time. Together, they conjure up a nineteenth-century past for the world in which the temporal topography is undifferentiated, sans dialectical tensions and mechanically governed by Greenwich Mean Time—a ‘homogenous empty time’ of a world immersed in nascent industrialism and forces of modernity unleashed by the West—instead of the historically contested and fraught experience of industrialism in a world wherein the West was not the sole actor or subject.

Diagnosis of the problem does not automatically aid us in freeing steampunk literature from the ideological prison-house of retro-futurism. And yet, the need for a critical reappraisal of this style, beyond its hyperreal signatures in the fashion and advertising sectors, is made rather obvious when we consider the current reinvigoration of steampunk through literature that is being produced away from the West, across postcolonial literary cultures. Steampunk novels have recently appeared in languages that have hitherto served at the vernacular margins of imperial or national imaginaries.⁴ One such example is Sumit Bardhan’s Bengali SF thriller Arthatrishna (2019), a work that is currently being promoted as the first steampunk novel in a language that offers, as legacy, a remarkable range of cultural resonances when we fully consider its relationship of intimate otherness to nineteenth-century European fictions of adventure, crime, scientific speculation and rational conjecture.

It will be my effort to convey, through the course of this chapter, the ways in which Arthatrishna reinscribes the semantic landscape of the steampunk novel with meanings and potentialities that have traditionally constituted the epistemological field for the most rigorous historical fiction, thus freeing steampunk from an indentured association with the reified notion that pasts may be recoverable and reusable through the aura cast by objects that would otherwise be considered obsolete.

FORMULA AND MULTIVALENCE IN
THE PLAY OF GENRES

That Arthatrishna is both a novel experiment as well as a child of Bengal’s colonial past is evidenced in the numerous generic debts it accumulates as its story courses forward. It is set in the period just prior to India’s independence, marked by the insecurities of the Second World War, the worst ravages of famine and unemployment in Bengal, the hollowing out of the colonial metropolis Calcutta where economic opportunities have been reduced to a trickle, a peak in the coercive aggression of the colonial state and an exponential rise in petty urban crime that made the native upper classes deeply suspicious of the underlings. The setting is identical to that of Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay’s Byomkesh Bakshi series of detective stories and novellas. Indeed, Sumit Bardhan pays tribute to Byomkesh by naming his detective protagonist Dhurjati, another name for the maverick Lord Shiva, whose third eye is believed to have the power to penetrate through all webs of deceit. Both Byomkesh and Dhurjati are satyanweshis, or truth-seekers, with the airs of a renunciate. Both are paired with less gifted but perceptive companions who also function as narrators of their respective peers’ exploits. The similarities extend up to their immediate predicament of being bachelor tenants in rented pensions within central Calcutta’s petty-bourgeois neighbourhoods. Both are eccentrically obsessed with the laws of deduction and seem to operate within a well-worn template offered in Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic Sherlock Holmes adventures. Yet, unlike Byomkesh’s Calcutta wherein the ubiquitous presence of the colonial state was registered as a mere fact of social, and to a much lesser extent, political life, Dhurjati’s Calcutta is the emblem of the colonial uncanny.⁵ Its industrial past lies in ruin and its once-prosperous commerce has been laid waste by wartime inflation and hoarding. The warehouses on the banks of the Hooghly lie empty and unused, except as squalid sites of refuge for fugitives or as secret meeting places. The city slumbers or sluggishly goes about its routines in the daytime but comes alive in a restless air of devilry and daring after sundown, even as it fattens and thrives on the illicit trades and nocturnal labours of the hapless. It is a city of night, reminiscent of China Mieville’s surrealist rendering of London as Bas-Lag in Perdido Street Station (2000).

The abrupt foreclosure of industrial progress in the 1940s Calcutta precipitated a historically significant period of crisis and upheaval. However, it is rare to come across literary accounts of that period, realistic or otherwise, that leverage the impulses of this crisis to explain the social and cultural transformations that took place during the fag end of colonial rule. In Arthatrishna, this crisis acts as a fitting backdrop for the introduction of steampunk elements. The forlorn and alienated existence of the Indo-British Clockworks, a commercial establishment housing archaic mechanistic inventions and other curious objects dating back to the times of Charles Babbage, symbolises a past ruined by colonial greed. On deeper discernment, however, it turns out to be a past that has already been visited by the spectral future of computers and robotics. Humanoid brass machines, programmed through Hollerith Cards, are objects of a clandestine ongoing trade that holds the key to an extraordinary theft committed in the premises of the establishment. To simple-minded onlookers, the Indo-British Clockworks is a mere museum of steampunk paraphernalia; but to Dhurjati, the intriguing traces of the past signal the moral and civilisational obsolescence of industrial modernity. The proper understanding of this obsolescence becomes a precondition for the detection of the motive, instrument and modus operandi of the theft.

Fairly early in Dhurjati’s investigation, it becomes clear that the thief managed to access the closely guarded premises of the Clockworks by landing an aircraft on its rooftop. Aeroplanes were a common sight in Calcutta’s airspace during the Second World War. Commissioned military planes shipping combatants, cargo and officials were being used by the colonial government regularly. But a common citizen had no access to commissioned aeroplanes. Hence, Dhurjati concludes that the thief would have used a Giffard Airship, a helium-propelled smaller cousin of the monstrous Zeppelin and a familiar junk item of wonder in the steampunk imaginary, to accomplish the task. The stolen item, a brass robot, also provokes the reader’s curiosity because, like the airship, it is an unused item leftover from the hyped futuristic experiments of nineteenth-century pioneers. While the British merchants and agents of the state have no use for airships and brass robots, except to collect them as memorabilia, Dhurjati correctly deduces that someone from the native milieu may be involved in repurposing junk technology for sinister ends.

The quest to uncover the thief’s identity leads Dhurjati and his companion to the discovery of a spate of murders and uncertain threats that cannot be clearly connected but indicate the presence of a formidable and shadowy adversary who acts upon complex motives and is willing to improvise at every step. At the behest of Soumendranarayan, a chance acquaintance who feels threatened and solicits professional assistance, the duo visits the provincial estate of Dulmigarh where it is fortuitously discovered that Soumendranarayan’s toddler son Upen owns a brass robot that has started malfunctioning. Dhurjati closely observes Upen playing with his mechanical toy and begins to comprehend the mysterious motive of the theft.

Two observations on the relationship between technology and agency become pertinent at this point. First, the use-value of discarded mechanistic props from the steampunk imaginary is resurrected by those who have no access to more updated technology. Disenfranchised native subjects of the Empire improvise with abandoned machines and invent novel uses that may be imperceptible within a more evolved discursive paradigm of technology, thereby disrupting, and momentarily subverting, the discursive framework itself. Second, to comprehend improvisation, one must observe elements of a system at play, detached from the system’s own episteme or ‘condition of possibility’ (Foucault 1972). Upen frees the brass robot from the uses to which it had been originally intended and, in turn, guides Dhurjati into a world of parodic adaptations wherein the concealed motive for stealing junk robots can be found.

In his influential work The Savage Mind (1966), Claude Lévi-Strauss described the observable forms of creativity in non-European societies as bricolage, a process involving heuristic repurposing of available signs to accomplish ‘concrete’ tasks, and culturally distinguishable from Western modernity’s reliance on totalising conceptual systems that govern all aspects of its civilisational knowledge and self-representation. Even though Lévi-Strauss questioned the stability of this distinction, he wished to retain it as an analytic model because it helped him explain the mode of construction in myths. For our purposes, it allows us to see a specific valence of the dialectic that conditions cultural differences in the colonial encounter between Europeans and the colonised peoples. In the novel, both the adversary and Upen, as bricoleurs, have counterposed the pursuit of technology-as-signs (semiotic and syntagmatic) to the colonial state’s pursuit of technology-as-system (symbolic and paradigmatic). Owing to the asymmetry of power relations between the colonisers and the colonised, the dialectic cannot acquire a real resolution. In the real context of colonialism, the semiotic will necessarily have to submit itself to the symbolic. Its psychic and cultural survival is predicated on play or, in the broadest sense, playfully mimetic gestures. It is in this sense, too, that steampunk is adapted into the novel as a bricolage with intermittently parodic references to colonialism’s ‘mimic’ modernity (Bhabha 1994), which, in its own turn, relates to the nineteenth-century industrial past of Europe as a ‘sign of the inappropriate’ that ‘poses an imminent threat to both “normalized” knowledges and disciplinary powers’ (ibid.).⁶

The child figure in the novel is another trop...