The coming of age of Indian science fiction

Once, the then president of the Sahitya Akademi asked me why he didn’t see too many younger scholars (I was one such then, believe it or not!) at Akademi events. It looks fusty and dusty to most, I may have replied, or to that effect. While the SA takes a number of interesting initiatives, it does not manage to get coverage or publicity. The Sahitya Akademi awards are a great recognition of good writing but they don’t have the same charge as the new lit fest prizes. The Akademi’s flagship journal, Indian Literature, has been trying its best to reach readers interested in the multilingual nature of India and its writings. There have been many collectible issues over the years, but they have all been doomed to obscure corners of institutional libraries. I almost believed that the freezing touch of bureaucracy was a curse that the Sahitya Akademi suffered from. I almost believed that our English academy and media had no real imagination, no mental space for multilingual India, for the endeavours of the Sahitya Akademi to make an impact.

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Growing up in the late 1960s and 1970s, I was always interested in science fiction. Isaac Asimov (the Foundation series) and Arthur Clarke (‘Rendezvous with Rama’, and well-known for the film ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’) were favourites. Anthony Burgess and Fred Hoyle are the other two writers I recall. I don’t remember reading Indian SF till I read the Thamizh writer Sujatha (pseudonym of S Rangarajan), quite a bit later. Science fiction wasn’t big in Indian academia either, as I realised in the 1980s. Jayant Narlikar, the renowned astrophysicist, delighted us all with his science fiction when he published ‘The Return of Vaman’ in 1990, and Amitav Ghosh published the breathtaking novel ‘The Calcutta Chromosome’ in 1995. It seemed that science fiction could be taken seriously in India but we still had to wait a couple of decades before SF became popular in the country.

It was only in this century that writers like Samit Basu, Vandana Singh, Manjula Padmanabhan, Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Giti Chandra and Sami Ahmad Khan ensured the coming of age of Indian science fiction. And before you remark on the number of women writers here, do consider that the first known SF writer was a woman as well — Mary Shelley with her blockbuster ‘Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus’.

And it is only this year, in its issue number 339 (January-February 2024) that the Sahitya Akademi journal Indian Literature has put together a special section on ‘Our Own Science Fiction’. Under the editorship of Sukrita Paul Kumar, Indian Literature is no longer dusty or fusty, and the issue recognises that Indian SF has come of age, that it has arrived finally. Sukrita Paul Kumar points out in her editorial that while science fiction may have come from the West, it found a fertile ground in India with its vast repertoire of mythology and divine, and the superhuman and supernatural tales. It is in this mix that Indian science fiction is born. Tellingly, the issue begins with a graphic narrative ‘Yakshantriksh’, based on a narrative by Vandna Singh, almost as if to illustrate the editor’s point. Predictably, a predominant number of stories in the issue are written in English (10), including the other graphic narrative that frames this selection, an adaptation of Tarun Saint’s story, ‘A Visit to the Partition World’. Science fiction in India seems to sit comfortably across various genres of writing — there is even one written in the style of a scholarly paper, Sami Ahmad Khan’s ‘Ancient Zombies: Six Indian Narratives of the Undead’, which comes with 57 end-notes! The other writers in English that are included here are Dip Ghosh, Ritwick Bhattacharjee, Sakeena Shahid, Sumit Bardhan, Anil Menon, Zahra Rizvi and Manjula Padmanabhan, many of whom are already well-known to SF readers in India. There are stories from Bengali (by Anushtup Sett, translated by who else but Arunava Sinha), Dogri (by Lalit Magotra, translated by Satnam Kaur), Hindi (by Arvind Mishra, translated by Smita Mishra Chaturvedi), Malayalam (by C Radhakrishnan, translated by the author), Telugu (by Siruguri Jayarao, translated by K Chandrahas), and Punjabi by Amanpreet Singh Gill (translated by the author). An interview with Thomas Abraham by Chandana Dutta, and essays on Bengali, Telugu and Kannada SF along with others on individual writers make up this issue.

What is surprising, what is new? Read the issue to find out and do explore the larger world of Indian science fiction. But what is most surprising and new is to see Sahitya Akademi’s journal showcase this genre of writing. Both Indian science fiction and the journal Indian Literature have arrived!