5/17/2023 0 Comments Worldbuilding fantasy spy networkGiven these definitions, works of South Asian science fiction and fantasy have existed long before both genres came to be codified as such. “the literature that explores the boundaries of knowledge… that definition is mostly applicable to speculative fiction’s subgenres, including magical realism, fantasy and horror it’s just the class of knowledge that changes within each.” Space travel is one of these metaphors so is an alternative society, an alternative biology the future is another.”Ĭloser to home, Pakistani sci-fi, fantasy and horror writer Usman T. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life – science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Le Guin, one of my favourite SFF writers, explains it this way: I.Įven though definitions are notoriously slippery things in literary criticism, we might define SFF as a broad literary genre encompassing any fiction with supernatural, fantastical or futuristic elements. This makes conversations about South Asian literature woefully homogenous and, frankly, much more uninteresting than they might otherwise be. The snobbish attitude towards SFF has historically been prevalent in academic and literary circles (although things seem to be changing in the West now), even as popular culture is filled with beloved works of science fiction and fantasy films and television shows.īut the dismissal of the SFF genre, or the broader umbrella of speculative fiction, has excluded from the South Asian literary discourse a rich tradition of desi works of science fiction and fantasy, as well as the fascinating speculative fiction words being written by contemporary South Asian writers today. This dismissal of the genres of science fiction and fantasy (SFF) as low-brow, trashy or pulp or, at the very least, unimportant, is not just a desi stance, although it might be a bit more pronounced here. Playful, experimental, speculative works like Hossain’s or those of her more contemporary counterparts, either in English or local languages, rarely come into the discussion. If Hossain’s story was different from those of the white, male authors that populated my course syllabi, it was also distinct from the kind of realist South Asian fiction that is usually privileged as “literary” and therefore more worthy of attention or academic study.Īt that time, there was a certain kind of post-9/11 Anglophone Pakistani fiction that you were supposed to be reading: the kind that used a specific style of grim realism to explain South Asian “issues” like terrorism, poverty or corruption. The exploration of domesticity, gender and the notion of public and private space situated within 20th century colonial Indian nationalist and gender politics using science fiction tropes and an archly playful tone - I had never read anything like it before. Sultana’s Dreamis a futuristic tale in which the concept of the upper-caste Indian Muslim notion of the zenana (seclusion of women within a specific section of the house) is flipped to imagine a utopian world where men are sequestered into the mardana while South Asian women smoothly and efficiently run society through scientific innovation and reason. In any case, amidst the steady diet of Shakespeare and Dickens in school, encountering Hossain’s delightful story, which I promptly borrowed from my professor, blew my mind wide open. Up until then, my study of literature had been mostly white, mostly male authors, an unsurprising fact when we take into account the (Western) literary canon’s inherent whiteness and maleness, as well as the institutional history of English departments as tools of the colonial project - teaching works of English literature in the British Empire’s overseas colonies was originally part of the overarching goal of “civilising the natives.” In the words of 19th century British politician Thomas Macaulay, “a single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia” (gotta love that British sense of entitlement and arrogance). My first encounter with a work of desi science fiction was very much by accident.ĭuring my undergraduate studies at the English department at Karachi University, while idly browsing through a professor’s personal collection on her desk, I came across Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream, a English-language short story set in a feminist utopian world written by a Bengali Muslim woman in 20th century colonial India. Dismissing sci-fi and fantasy as low-brow or trashy isn’t just a desi stance, although it might be more pronounced.
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