Indian science fiction has a long history. A new anthology of speculative writing from India takes the tradition forward

"Science fiction is born hand-in-hand with modernity," Bhatia explains over a Zoom call. "It was inevitable that Indian writers would engage with this genre in their own way and give it an Indian slant. That's been going on since the late 19th century, both in English and in a number of (regional) languages like Bengali, Marathi."

Edited excerpts from an interview with Bhatia where he talks about Indian speculation fiction, science fiction by women writers in India and abroad, and why sci-fi is a "genre of modernity":

The history of Indian speculative fiction goes back to the 1800s, with some very successful examples through the 20th century including Amitav Ghosh's Arthur C Clark Award winning 'The Calcutta Chromosome' (1996) and Satyajit Ray's Prof Shonku stories. Yet, science fiction is often seen as a Western import to India. How do you see this, and how has the scene evolved in recent years?

Science fiction is a genre of modernity. It's born hand in hand with modernity; and modernity comes to India as well. And in that way, it is inevitable that Indian writers would engage with this genre in their own way and give it an Indian slant. That's been going on since the late 19th century, both in English and in a number of languages like Bengali, Marathi and so on. So, there is a tradition of Indian science fiction. It has undergone a lot of changes over the years, but it's definitely not something that we are imitating the West in our writing. There is a history of Indian science fiction.

When you say that science fiction and modernity come hand-in-hand, could you unpack that? Mary Shelley wrote 'Frankenstein' in 1816; it is still considered the first real science-fiction story today...  

Many of the preoccupations of science fiction, for example, both an optimism about and a concern with technology, strong engagement with urbanization and the city as the site of where a lot of things happen - basically the really major themes of science fiction and its inception, are themes that arise out of responding to the industrial revolution, to modernity, and so on.

Etymological disputes aside, it is reasonably commonly accepted that 'Frankenstein' is the first contemporary science-fiction novel. And that is literally responding to the rapid growth of technology. So in that way, science fiction is a genre of modernity. You do find medieval fantasy, like medieval epic man and myth, but you don't find medieval science fiction. It comes into being with the modern age.

And as I said, India has its own engagement with modernity. That's when you see Indian science fiction beginning to really come up in various languages.... It's not that first there was either Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clark, and then there were the Indian writers who wrote in their shadow. There's always been writing of science fiction in India.

Filmmaker Satyajit Ray, novelist Amitav Ghosh, even Dalit feminist writer Bama created some successful speculative fiction in the 20th century but these are not writers that we associate exclusively or even mainly with science fiction writing. Other popular Indian writers in this genre - Jayant Narlikar (astrophysicist), Jagadish Chandra Bose (physicist), Sujatha (engineer), even Anil Menon (computer scientist) who is still active - had 'day' jobs other than writing. You yourself are a Constitutional lawyer as well as a speculative fiction writer and editor. Is the scene evolving now? For example, are more people taking up science fiction writing as their primary or only occupation now? Is there some sort of timeline to understand when science fiction writing becomes more mainstream in India?

For sure. So, after Independence, there is a genre of what the Bangalore-based critic TG Shenoy calls scientific fiction, which is science fiction used as a vehicle to propagate scientific ideas. Many of the most popular novelists are actually scientists: Jayant Narlikar, Sujatha and a couple of other names. Jagadish Chandra Bose is writing before Independence. But in the 1950s, there is this thing that the purpose of science fiction is the propagation of scientific ideas. So in Maharashtra, in Tamil Nadu, a bit of Kerala, Karnataka, you have all these writers who are primarily scientists or engineers or technicians, and they're writing fiction to find another vehicle to communicate their ideas. What you're referring to is part of that broader trend where for many years it was that I do something else and I write science fiction.

That has now changed, perhaps over the last decade or so, where you actually have dedicated science fiction writers. I think the part of it is that the genre itself has changed a lot. You can't survive anymore just by saying: I have like a great science-fiction idea, but I'm not going to pay attention to my prose style... that doesn't work anymore. You have to really pay attention to the literary qualities of your writing. And you can't do that if your goal is to just use science fiction as a vehicle for communicating ideas. Your primary goal has to be telling a good story. That's why in the last decade or so, you see that there are dedicated writers of science fiction, and more broadly speculative fiction, who are now coming up in a way that didn't exist in India before.

You've drawn this distinction a few times now: science fiction versus speculative fiction. In 'Between Worlds', of course, there are some stories where there is no science. An example that comes to mind is "A Rough-Edged Confection" by Suchitra Sukumar, which is about a middle-aged woman straining against the holds of domesticity, parenthood and the expectations that her community and society at large have always placed on her.

Speculative fiction is the umbrella term which covers science fiction, fantasy, horror; so it's called SFFH. They all come within speculative fiction and also magical realism, slipstream fiction, things like that.

Science fiction, for me, is also a fairly broad term in the sense that the science in science fiction is not just the physical sciences, it is also the social sciences. So Ursula Le Guin's novels, 'The dispossessed', 'Left Hand of Darkness' — the physical science there is less (pronounced) and it's more about how do we organise society in alternative worlds. So as long as there is an element that is some genre of science fiction... and labels, I think, obscure more than they reveal.

But yes, I think there is merit to distinguishing, at least at the core, science fiction and fantasy. So 'Lord of The Rings' or 'Game of Thrones' is most definitively fantasy. There is definitely something different between George Martin and JRR Tolkien on the one hand, and Ursula Le Guin and Asimov and the others who are writing science fiction. But honestly, at the margins, it all blurs. And a lot of the stories in this anthology are actually at the margin... some ideas from the science fiction tradition... a bit of like fantasy, a bit of purer speculation. The idea was not to actually try and confine people to genre labels... but like I said in my initial call (for submissions), basically we're not really looking for epic fantasy or stuff like that. But as long as it is speculative fiction, the story will be read on its merits and considered.

So what were some of the things that you were looking for? And how many submissions did you get?

We got 233 submissions, which I read and shortlisted 30 submissions. Then the three of us - me and two editors of Westland, Karthik and Ajita - sat together and picked the final list. So that was the process. And what we're looking for: there's a very famous magazine of science fiction called Clarks World. We borrowed a bit of their submission criteria and what not to give us. Again, this is very intuitive: Like, we don't want stories that glorify racism, communalism, police violence, all of that -- find a home for them elsewhere. Not saying you can't write them, but we don't want them; we don't want supremacist stories, stories that celebrate discrimination, things like that; and unless you're doing something very unique, we don't want zombies, werewolves, vampire, stuff like that because they've just been done to death by now in the genre. So broadly it is a list of what we don't want.

But as long as you're writing a speculative fiction story, if it's a good story, it has a good chance.

Like I've written in my introduction, I have a personal bias towards space opera. So of course I will be almost subconsciously favouring those. But I tried to consciously get rid of that bias. I think we have like one space opera story finally in the collection, not more than that.

This is going to be an annual feature, are you already thinking about off the back of this one? Anything you want to change or redo for the second edition?

We're going to have the call very soon, sometime next week. It'll be exactly the same process: open submission call, followed by shortlist, followed by the final selection. It gave debut writers their first break, and it gave us access to fresh voices and unexpected themes, so we don't see a reason to change what we're doing for Volume 2.

When you say debut writer...

Around half of the writers (in Vol. 1) are debut writers. That means, not that they haven't published before, but it's their first sale to a paying market. Their first professional sale.

We had an anonymous questionnaire to check how many debut writers; the gender representation, which of course you can tell from the names often, but not always; and region.

Coming back to the question of 'Indian' science fiction. Were you looking at it from the point of view of themes that resonate with Indians versus the rest of the world? Or are we looking at settings that are in India? How do you sort of look at Indian science-fiction?

I find very annoying this whole thing that if you're a white Western writer, you can write space opera, you can do universal themes: the human condition, empire - you can basically address the great theme of science fiction. But if you are an Indian writer, it (your theme) has to be some trauma of Partition or poverty or caste discrimination, caste violence - basically we are forever stuck in the reality that we inhabit. And the whole point of science fiction is not to do that.

So the only requirement of this of this anthology was you should be an Indian citizen. And then write whatever you want.

Writers also obviously write what they know. And you see that in the anthology with, say, "A Rough-edged Confection" which is about the life of an Indian woman stuck in her marriage and in her duties at home. Perhaps there are echoes of this kind of constrained living elsewhere in the world, but the rituals and rhythms of life captured in this story by Suchitra Sukumar are unmistakably Indian. In that sense, in its concerns and its expression, would you say it's an Indian story?

It will happen its own right. In an anthology which has 11 stories written by Indians, at least half will be in some way rooted in some Indian setting. That's the way it will be. If you don't force it, it will happen.

You've talked about the history of Indian science fiction in your foreword to Vol. 1. Is there an equally long tradition of women writing sci-fi? After Mary Shelley, of course.

The first ever science-fiction story written by an Indian in English was by a woman: Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's 'The Sultana's Dream'. 1905, right? So, it began with a woman.

For many, many years, science fiction was the preserve of white male writers for the most part. There were, of course, challenges to this. So in the '60s Ursula K. Le Guin. In the '70s, Joanna Russ. They were banging on the doors. And they're both very respected in their own lifetimes. And then C. J. Cherryh. It (the gender ratio) was still very skewed. Over the last 15 years or so, there's been a massive change at least as far as gender goes. It is much, much, much more equal now.

Did we have women sci-fi writers out of Indian too in the '60s, '70s, '80s?

Not to my knowledge, not in English.

Even in pulpy science-fiction magazines?

None that has survived in a way that's accessible today. If they were writing, then it's not come down to us. It was mostly men. But last maybe 15 years or so, at least in the global scene, there have been big, big changes. N.K. Jemisin won the Hugo Award three years in a row; Connie Willis; in Chinese science fiction... Hao Jingfang won an award for 'Folding Beijing'.

And it is echoed in India as well. There was this anthology called 'Magical Women' which was an anthology of fantasy more than SF - but you can say SFF broadly - only by women writers. Lavanya Lakshminarayan was an Arthur C Clark Award finalist three or four years ago. That was recognition on an international scale. Now you have Tashan Mehta's book being published in the US.... You broadly see some kind of gender equality in terms of who is getting published, and who is making it abroad.

I also edit this magazine, Strange Horizons, which is a weekly magazine of SFF, and we have published submissions by Indian women writers. I think it is changing in India as well.

Finally, would like to comment on some of the other content that is getting created in science fiction, especially for the screen?

In India or like globally?

India mainly, but if you have a comment on global content...

Globally, of course, science fiction is very popular right now. The Expanse, Foundation, Severance, Silo - a lot of popular stuff that is there. In India, I don't think we have that kind of science fiction that's being made for OTT  - at least not yet. The only example I can think of is Prayag Akbar's 'Leila', which I think there were some issues with how it was made and how true it was to the vision of the book. Beyond that you don't really have stuff that you could call (sci-fi).

There was 'Mandala Murders', for example, which became popular...

I'm not anywhere near being the expert on this, but it's my understanding that that the kind of Indian production these days is a lot closer to the horror side of the SSFI spectrum than the science fiction side. So 'Leila' is the one I can think of. Beyond that, of course, a couple of movies. There was 'PK' where an alien comes down (to earth); it was played by Aamir Khan. So again, they're very proto-science-fiction; they take a couple of old SF ideas and sort of run with them. We do see fantasy and horror, but not so much science fiction on TV yet.