Studies in South Asian Film & Media - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2014

This article studies four (science fiction [SF]) short stories written by Manjula Padmanabhan in order to draw linkages between the texts and their contemporary material realities. Using the theoretical framework of Darko Suvin’s novum, it focuses on the extent to which contemporary discourses contour the narrative framework and thematic concerns of an SF text. Each story studied here represents at least one specific malady that afflicts contemporary India. This article seeks to locate and determine how Padmanabhan engages in social criticism, and how the self-aware delivery mechanism of SF is deployed for this sociopolitical indictment.

This article aims to trace a history of Indian science-fiction (SF) cinema linking it with the scientific and technological milieu of the post-independence nation state. The tropes and themes that operate in Indian SF cinema across various regional film industries are juxtaposed against the sociocultural and political backdrop of the nation as well as against the historical trajectory of Indian science and technology (S&T) that manifested under the patronage of the nation state at the time of the films’ release. The article foregrounds the underlying issues and anxieties that inform SF tropes and themes in Indian cinema and grant uniqueness and legitimacy to Indian SF films. Thereby, the article hopes to establish that Indian SF cinema is not just a derivative of western genres of SF, but works by its own logic.

A number of low-budget science fiction (SF) films were made in Bombay in the 1960s that have entirely been glossed over in scholarly accounts of Indian film history, genre studies, or global accounts of non-western SF cinema. Symptomatic of the desires and anxieties of the space age, these films mobilized common science fictional tropes of UFOs, space travel, rockets, atomic energy, gigantic monsters, epic disaster, automatons, aliens, and so on, in an attempt to legitimize India’s claims to scientific and technological modernity. Inspired by the SF narratives and iconography of 1950s international films, these B-films constructed alternative circuits of stardom and creative labour, along with new imaginations of science, technology and ethics. Although prints of most of the films are unavailable, this article constructs a speculative account of the industrial economies and aesthetic characteristics of this peculiarly 1960s Bombay B genre through film scripts, song and publicity booklets, film stills, posters, media interviews and film reviews. The flash-in-the-pan appearance of the genre in the 1960s, much like a meteorite zapping past, is indicative of the tremendous risk and enterprise that characterizes 1960s Bombay cinema, and this article attempts to recover some of this, in its lowbrow forms.

The Films Division (FD) of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting went through a spurt of experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s that yielded a small but historically significant corpus of films with a unique vision. Pramod Pati was one of the most distinctive voices to have emerged among FD film-makers in this period. While his short films have traditionally been categorized as ‘experimental’ and ‘avant-garde’, in this article I argue that they are also examples of proto science-fiction cinema and provide a flickering glimpse of a newly budding outer space imaginary in 1960s India. In making a case for Pati’s films to be regarded as proto sci-fi, this article analyses three short films, Explorer (1968a), Claxplosion (1968b) and Trip (1970) with respect to their formal features, imagery and sound. Through the use of nonlinearity, special effects and electronic sound, the films both challenge and affirm the ambitions of a postcolonial nation caught between its past and future. This article suggests that these films are representative of a peculiar moment in the history of Indian experimental cinema when the deployment of science-fictional tropes signalled a transforming mediascape being mobilized by the state into constructing ‘modern’ publics.

The article delves into the recesses of an almost non-existent genre in Bengali cinema; that of the modern science fiction (SF). It proposes that the SF imagination in Bengali cinema is driven by the mode of fantasy and is an example of an alternative modernity which celebrates the technological aspirations of the community along with the indigenous cultural elements of Bengal. The template of fantasy also changes over time from magic to media-induced hallucinations to trace the contemporary techno-media culture, addressing the desires of a media savvy and image-addicted society.

Urban practice has become increasingly speculative about the future. If there is a world where utopias are literally a commodity, bought and sold as little pieces of dreams, it is here. Full of futuristic and visionary images about the way the world and its buildings should look, buildings, neighbourhoods and entire regions seem afloat in space, free from the constraints of the lived world. They do seem to have a clear source, however, derived largely from fictional scenarios of the future of humanity. While apocalypse, paradise, utopia and dystopia are the moral anchors for several speculative fables, the city is evoked as double-edged – at once the pinnacle and tipping point of human choices. This article demonstrates how speculative fiction limits the idea of the urban future and with it restricts choices we make in the present. If fiction is another mode of activist expression, it is being sculpted and shaped in concrete and glass as well.

In the later years of his life, the influential British psychoanalyst Wilfred R. Bion compiled a fictional trilogy called A Memoir of the Future (1990), loosely based on his childhood in Mathura, India. Through his method – which he modestly called ‘science fiction’ – he constructed a speculative account of the future of psychoanalysis. Considered one of the greatest psychoanalytic thinkers since Freud, Bion is most well-known for his work on emotional states within groups and also for his ‘theories on thinking’. Bion’s concept of maternal ‘reverie’ as the capacity of the mother to sense (and make sense of) what is going on inside the infant has been an important element in post-Kleinian thought. All these concepts are revisited through his ‘science-fictional method’ in A Memoir of the Future (1990). Through this work he wished to break down the constraints of sense that characterized psychoanalytic writing and arrive at a ‘communication of pure non-sense’.

The text that follows is a creation myth that combines elements of science fiction and Bion’s theories of psychic envelopes, imagined within the context of the colonial experience in India.

This piece explores the proposition of going on a one way trip to Mars. Owing to Mars One a programme initiated by a Netherlands-based company, this is now a real possibility. Of the several applicants to the mission, some are from India. Through the application of one such candidate, the piece attempts to grasp the conceptual ramifications of this significant moment in the living history of this planet.

The Ghanada stories, a landmark series in Bengali science fiction, authored by Premendra Mitra (1904–1988; poet, short story writer, filmmaker) between mid-forties and mid-eighties, often feature intriguing, single worded titles like Insect, Hole or Phial. One is drawn precisely to the incredulity of the contrast between these apparently banal objects and their supposed role in events and process of historical significance, often rendered with a strong counterfactual flavour: a contrast that serves well as the narrative fulcrum of these ‘tall tales’. However, one could also read these stories as sites where these objects are actively foregrounded as objects in themselves, as artefacts arising as dense nodes in a web of networks and actants. Playing with the neologism of ‘Ghontology’, this piece of speculative fiction is guided by the image of a room where one could potentially listen to a conversation between objects that frequent the Ghanada universe: a wonder cabinet where phials and umbrellas jostle with dormant volcanoes and green algae. Sitting in this room, the reverberations and feedback loops might also tempt the reader to reflect on monads and hydraulics in diamond mines.