Radical Reimaginings of the Body and Technology: A Study of Selected Contemporary Anglophone Indian Science Fiction

Abstract

The thesis considers portrayals of the body and technology in contemporary Indian science fiction written in the English language. Arguing that science fiction (SF) propagates racial stereotypes and upholds the fantasies of the empire, most studies have labelled postcolonial SF as a subset that interrogates the genre’s imperial associations by circumventing the prevalent ways of utilizing its tropes. While previous studies on the growing body of Anglophone Indian SF have demonstrated that it embodies the facets of postcolonial literature, the discourse of postcolonial SF has gained fresh prominence, with some arguing that SF by white authors may also be postcolonial in its sensibilities and ideology. No previous study, however, provides a wider view of how the embodied experience of postcolonial subjectivity influences representations of the body and its relationship with technology (both of which are fundamental to world-building in SF) in Anglophone Indian SF. Attempting to address this gap, the present study critically examines literary portrayals of the body and technology in Anglophone Indian SF, including the interactions between them, and assesses how their unique illustrations across science-fictional contexts challenge the politics of the SF genre. It investigates, through close textual readings, how reimaginings of ideas of the body and technology in selected contemporary Anglophone Indian SF can destabilize some established generic conventions of SF. The texts chosen for study are Anil Menon’s The Beast with Nine Billion Feet (2009), Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape (2008), The Island of Lost Girls (2015), and “Flexi-Time” (2020), Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s Generation 14 (2008), Vandana Singh’s “Oblivion: A Journey” (2008), “The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet” (2008), “The Tetrahedron” (2008), “With Fate Conspire” (2013), “Lifepod” (2015), and “Ruminations in an Alien Tongue” (2018), and Sukanya Datta’s “When the Tide Turns” (2006) and “The Tide Turns Again” (2012). The thesis attempts to gain fresh insights into Anglophone Indian SF regarding the chosen focal concepts of the body and technology and demonstrates how contemporary writers’ engagement with SF not only offers a deeper understanding of the genre’s traditional ideological biases but also increasingly contributes to a re-moulding of its contours in ways that may have far-reaching consequences with regard to what we understand as SF in the first place.