Borders, Boundaries and Barricades: Speculative Delhis

Abstract

In Samit Basu’s SF novel Chosen Spirits (2020), a character offers a cosmology of power within India’s capital city: ‘Delhi has always been a city of seven walls […] You could guess you’d crashed into your wall before, when you couldn’t go further, but now the walls can be mapped and measured, the tools exist.’ Written against the backdrop of India’s discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the protests against it in 2019–20, Chosen Spirits extrapolates a near-future Delhi in which, despite the relative success of the protests, the stark inequalities of caste, class and religion have been reinforced by changes to the city’s geography, and state surveillance increasingly precludes the possibility of working for change. Reading the novel alongside other recent works of speculative fiction set in Delhi, this article analyses Basu’s walled city, and those of other contemporary Indian SF writers, against the shifting borders, boundaries and barricades of the city, exploring their potential as sites of radical activism.