"Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905" shows, for the first time, how science fiction writing developed in India years before the writings of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. The five stories presented in this collection, in their cultural and political contexts, help form a new picture of English language writing in India and a new understanding of the connections among science fiction, modernity and empire. [NP] Speculative fiction developed early in India in part because the intrinsic dysfunction and violence of colonialism encouraged writers there to project alternative futures, whether utopian or dystopic. The stories in "Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905," created by Indian and British writers, responded to the intellectual ferment and political instabilities of colonial India. They add an important dimension to our understanding of Victorian empire, science fiction and speculative fictional narratives. They provide new examples of the imperial and the anti-imperial imaginations at work.

lgrsnf/Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835-1905 - Mary Ellis Gibson - Anthem Press - 2019.pdf

Science fiction in colonial India, 1835-1905 : five tales of speculation, resistance and rebellion

Ingram Publisher Services UK- Academic

Wimbledon Publishing Co

Thames River Press

United Kingdom and Ireland, United Kingdom

Illustrated, 2019

London, UK, 2019

FR, 2019

'Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835-1905' shows, for the first time, how science fiction writing developed in India years before the writings of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. The five stories presented in this collection, in their cultural and political contexts, help form a new picture of English language writing in India and a new understanding of the connections among science fiction, modernity and empire.
Speculative fiction developed early in India in part because the intrinsic dysfunction and violence of colonialism encouraged writers there to project alternative futures, whether utopian or dystopic. These stories, created by Indian and British writers, responded to the intellectual ferment and political instabilities of colonial India. They add an important dimension to our understanding of Victorian empire, science fiction and speculative fictional narratives. They provide new examples of the imperial and the anti-imperial imaginations at work.
In Victorian India technological change was necessarily understood through differences between the colonizer and the colonized. Since India was not a settler colony, new British-imposed forms of government could scarcely claim continuity with the past, and political and cultural dislocations gave rise to speculation about wholly new forms of social organization. Creation and destruction, cultural innovation and colonial resistance gave rise to the plots and tropes of science fiction. In the stories collected in 'Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835-1905' nineteenth-century Indian writers project successful and failed revolutions into a twentieth-century future. British writers imagine, on the one hand, a catastrophic flood - thanks to the projected Panama Canal - and, on the other, a utopian future of peaceful multi-ethnic parliamentary government. And a Muslim writer designs a feminist utopia in which women practice science and men keep house.

Cover
Front Matter
Half-title
Title page
Copyright information
Dedication
Epigraph
Table of contents
Acknowledgments
A note on the texts
Chapter Int-5
Introduction
Modernity in the Empire: Colonial versus Metropolitan Science Fiction
Bengal in the 1830s and 1840s: A Culture of Dispute
Indian Science Fiction in Colonial Periodicals
Works Cited
Chapter 1 Henry Meredith Parker (1796?–1868)
The Junction of the Oceans: A Tale of the Year 2098
Chapter 2 H. H. Goodeve (1807–1884)
1980
Chapter 3 Kylas Chunder Dutt (1817–1859)
A Journal of 48 Hours of the Year 1945
Chapter 4 Shoshee Chunder Dutt (1824–1885)
The Republic of Orissá; A Page From the Annals of the Twentieth Century
Chapter 5 Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880?–1932)
Sultana’s Dream
End Matter
Appendix: Runaway Cyclone
Foreword
Runaway Cyclone
Part I—A Scientific Mystery
Part II
Index

2024-10-26