Science Fiction in Colonial India, 18351905

Description

Five fascinating tales of revolution, rebellion and utopia.

‘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.

Acknowledgements; List of Abbreviations; Introduction; 1. The Junction of the Oceans: A Tale of the Year 2098, Henry Meredith Parker (1796?–1868); 2. 1980, H. H. Goodeve (1807–84); 3. A Journal of 48 Hours of the Year 1945, Kylas Chunder Dutt (1817–59); 4. The Republic of Orissá: A Page from the Annals of the Twentieth Century, Shoshee Chunder Dutt (1824–85); 5. Sultana’s Dream, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880?–1932); Appendix: Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937); Runaway Cyclone, Translated by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay; Index.

Sujets

• Musulmán
• Musulman
• Islam
• Science-fiction
• Fiction
• Science fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 30 mars 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783088652
• Langue: English

Extrait

Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905
Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905
Five Tales of Speculation, Resistance and Rebellion
Edited by Mary Ellis Gibson
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2019
by ANTHEM PRESS
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© 2019 Mary Ellis Gibson editorial matter and selection;
individual chapters © individual contributors
The moral right of the authors has been asserted.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-863-8 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-863-X (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
for Charlie and Emily
I obtained a cursory knowledge of history, and a view of the several empires at present existing in the world; it gave me an insight into the manners, governments, and religions of the different nations of the earth. I heard of the slothful Asiatics; of the stupendous genius and mental activity of the Grecians; of the wars and wonderful virtue of the early Romans—of their subsequent degeneration—of the decline of that mighty empire; of chivalry, Christianity, and kings. I heard of the discovery of the American hemisphere, and wept with Safie over the hapless fate of its original inhabitants.
—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)

Oh Freedom! There is something dear
E’en in thy very name,
That lights the altar of the soul
With everlasting flame.
Success attend the patriot sword,
That is unsheathed for thee!
And glory to the breast that bleeds,
Bleeds nobly to be free!
Blest be the generous hand that breaks
The chain a tyrant gave.
And, feeling for degraded man,
Gives Freedom to the slave.
—H. L. V. Derozio, “Freedom to the Slave” (Calcutta, 1827)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Texts
Introduction
1. Henry Meredith Parker (1796?–1868)
The Junction of the Oceans: A Tale of the Year 2098
2. H. H. Goodeve (1807–1884)
1980
3. Kylas Chunder Dutt (1817–1859)
A Journal of 48 Hours of the Year 1945
4. Shoshee Chunder Dutt (1824–1885)
The Republic of Orissá; A Page from the Annals of the Twentieth Century
5. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880?–1932)
Sultana’s Dream
Appendix: Runaway Cyclone
Runaway Cyclone
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For the discovery and compiling of these texts, I am indebted first to a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship in Kolkata. For pursuing the texts, I am most grateful for the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Sawyer Fellowship at the National Humanities Center. Librarians in the Oriental and African Studies Department at the British Library have been, as always, unfailingly helpful.
Additional support from the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow made possible further research on these texts and their authors. Generous research support from Colby College has allowed me to complete this work with the help of excellent student researchers, Javin Dana, Jane Franks and Sophie Fink.
Personal debts are always impossible to repay with thanks alone, but I would like especially to thank Julia Kimmel for editorial assistance and Charlie Orzech for endless ad hoc research assistance. I am also grateful to Jim Fleming and Chris Walker at Colby College who read materials and responded to ideas, correcting at least some of my errors and elisions. In Kolkata, for paving the way, I thank Sanjukta Dasgupta. I thank Sue who healed my writing wrist and asked for this book for her children. And finally I thank Emily Orzech who made me see the fascination of speculative fictions of all kinds.
A NOTE ON THE TEXTS
Each of the stories here was first published in a periodical, as indicated in the introductions and notes to each. The copy text for each, however, is the author’s last supervised edition in English.
The story with the most complex editorial history is Henry Meredith Parker’s “The Junction of the Oceans,” which he revised for inclusion in his later collection, Bole Ponjis . Significant variants are discussed generally in the introduction to Parker and are annotated. Neither H. H. Goodeve nor Kylas Chunder Dutt reprinted his story; copytext is the original periodical publication for each. Shoshee Chunder Dutt reprinted “The Republic of Orissá” in his collection, Bengliana , and the collected edition provides the copy text here. Rokeya Hossain translated her English story into Bangla (Bengali) some years after it appeared in the Indian Ladies’ Magazine ; the copy text is the English periodical version.
Spelling has been altered for consistency; American spellings are used throughout texts, notes and introductions. Archaisms, loan words and Indian English words have been retained as in the copy text.
Annotations have been developed assuming an audience relatively unfamiliar with Indian colonial history, Indian loan words and Indian English. Annotations rely on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (abbreviated as ODNB). A key source is Henry Yule, Hobson-Jobson: A glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms, etymological, historical, geographical and discursive, 2nd ed., edited by William Crooke (London: J. Murray, 1903). The dictionary is abbreviated as Hobson-Jobson in the notes, and the source may, in each instance, be located alphabetically in the dictionary. For readers in search of full entries, Hobson-Jobson is easily searchable at http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/hobsonjobson/.
The authors of these stories provided few annotations. These are retained and marked in brackets with the writer’s initials (for example, [HMP] for Henry Meredith Parker). The remaining annotations are the editor’s.
INTRODUCTION
Let me take you to Bengal in 1835 where a young British doctor would see his first—and only—story in print. He had been in India for just four years. He was about to be appointed to the faculty of the new Calcutta Medical College. An optimistic believer in scientific progress, H. H. Goodeve was eager to teach Indian students. He imagined an egalitarian postcolonial future, replete with modern conveniences of every sort. 1
Goodeve set his story, “1980,” some century and a half in the future, in an independent democratic India. The British empire has ended, and even summer heat has been made bearable:

It was a warm evening in May, somewhere in the year of Grace 1980, when the wheels of the Himalaya steam mail were rolling swiftly along the polished trams of the great high rail road to Calcutta. The vehicle was one of the most elegant of modern improvements, fitted up with aircooling machines, fountains of iced soda-water, and every other convenience for those who in spite of the usual heat of the season were obliged to travel at that time. … The party was of both sexes, and of all colours and ranks, for the republican spirit of time allowed of no distinction. 2
Passengers hurtle through North India in a fine machine called a Vaporo, heading at 80 miles per hour toward the new capital. The train’s compartments and the Indian Parliament alike exemplify a new and nearly ideal world.
When I discovered this story and others like it, published early on in British India, I felt I had stumbled into a chapter of the history of science fiction either unknown or known only to specialists in nineteenth-century Indian literature. Indeed, the standard accounts of Indian science fiction date its origins to the early twentieth century, with an occasional bow to a single story in 1879 and a deeper bow to the 1890s. The stories collected here, however, were originally published between 1835 and 1905. They stretch our understanding of the history of science fiction—both temporally and geographically. Four of the key stories in this collection were written by Bengali and British interlocutors who were engaged in imagining futures from the perspective of the promising, problematic and contentious 1830s. Two of these stories—by British-born authors published in the Bengal Annual in 1835—are virtually unknown to readers in India and in the Anglophone world beyond. Two stories by their Bengali interlocutors have been reprinted recently in a fine volume by Alex Tickell, which is not widely available. The fifth story, a feminist utopia by a Muslim Bengali woman, was reprinted by the Feminist Press (New York, 1988) and is now available in used copies and in several other anthologies. Though the stories here by Indian writers have been known to specialists in Bengali fiction, they have never been easily available to scholars and students of science fiction or to nonspecialist readers of colonial/global Anglophone literatures.
The stories collected here a