Varanasi: Arvind Mishra, a senior government official with the Uttar Pradesh Fisheries Board, spends his day hours researching fish, and his evenings conjuring up aliens battling an intra-planetary caste system, and environmental degradation in planet Teran.
As secretary of the Indian Science Fiction Writers Association (ISFWA), a non-profit organization and author of a just released anthology of science-fiction stories, including one called Achhooth (Untouchable), Mishra belongs to a literary niche of Indian science fiction that’s surprisingly far more popular in regional languages than English, even as it struggles for recognition as a well-established literary genre.
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Last week, the writers, most of whom are members of either ISFWA or the Indian Association of Science Fiction Studies, which is based in Chennai, met in Varanasi over four days to discuss the future and perils of science fiction writing in India.
Similar to their Western contemporaries, these techno fabulists plough the usual science fiction avenues: aliens, virtual reality, teleporting, gene manipulation, cyborgs and androids. However, apart from the Indian-sounding names of their protagonists, there’s almost always a preoccupation with so-called Indian values.
“Technology and the laws of science are universal everywhere, but cultural factors and moral questions arising out of it are what differentiates Indian science fiction from the Western style,” says Y.H. Deshpande, a Marathi science fiction writer and author of three collections of short stories.
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One of Deshpande’s stories written in the 1980s, for instance, was about a widow with a choice to use her dead father-in-law’s artificially frozen sperms for conception. “In my story, the woman doesn’t go for this, but I’m sure this wouldn’t be a major issue in a Western science fiction plot line.”
Moral issues apart, writers say the other distinctive characteristic of Indian science fiction writing is, uniformly, happy endings.
“See, science fiction is a literary genre and unlike (Aldous) Huxley, writing about a bleak, dystopian future doesn’t really go down well with audiences. It’s much better to have a bleak situation and then some twist in the end that saves the day and keeps everybody happy,” says Mishra.
Also, to increase the acceptability of their works, many Indian science fiction writers are wary of getting too technical.
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“The science is generally just a backdrop, and most stories will usually involve aliens and space travel,” concedes K.S. Purushothaman, a science fiction critic and author of several academic dissertations on the subject. “In that sense, most writers here are still stuck to H.G. Wells. There’s rarely an in-depth explanation of an imaginary, futuristic science.”