Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction by Sami Ahmad Khan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction by Sami Ahmad Khan Abhijit Gupta Indian SF: The Next Generation? Sami Ahmad Khan. Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction. U of Wales P, New Dimensions in Science Fiction, 2021. xx+ 252 pp. £60 hc & ebk. It has been a good time for Indian sf in English (ISFE) recently, as a number of young writers make their mark, winning a clutch of nominations and awards. As I write, S.B. Divya's Machinehood (2021) has become the first South Asian novel to be shortlisted in the Nebula best novel category. It has also been a good time for critical writing on Indian sf. Over the last two years, there have been several full-length studies, including books by Pablo Mukherjee (2020), Suparno Banerjee (2020), Urvashi Kuhad (2021), and Ritwik Bhattacharjee and Shweta Khilnani, eds. (forthcoming, 2022). Such has been the volume of recent critical writing that one gets the sense of the genre [End Page 571] furiously footnoting itself, creating its own scholarly arcana almost as soon as new works see the light of day. Part of this output is explained by the academic imperative of publish-orperish that seems finally to have made landfall on South Asian shores. In the English department where I teach, the number of research proposals on Indian sf has increased by leaps and bounds over the last couple of years. There is a palpable sense of excitement among young researchers as they get to grips with new materials and methodologies and experiment with newly minted academic protocols that are both serious and fun. This is not an easy trick to pull off. But Sami Ahmad Khan's study of Anglophone sf in India succeeds in doing precisely that. It is a theoretically supple, analytically inventive, and above all, refreshingly accessible engagement with a genre still in the throes of making and unmaking. In his writing, Khan simultaneously dons the hats of both scholar and fan, moving effortlessly between high theory and a gratifying stream of Star Trek references. Anyone writing on Anglophone Indian sf has to deal with a number of competing paradigms. First, there is the fairly long-standing tradition of sf in Indian languages other than English, with its own ecosystem of magazines and webzines, and its history of false dawns and aborted beginnings. Then there is the osmosis of elements from Indian epic and mythological corpora, both in film and print. Finally, there is the anxiety of western sf's influence on its Indian counterpart. Khan tabulates these impulses in a brilliantly playful summa of texts and their souls (atman), ranged in a deca-kilo-mega-yotta progression. Thus, sf in India is "Kilo-atman: 103," "an aggregation of the atmans of various languages within the same genre/mode and national paradigm." The smallest subset is ISFE, designated as "Deca-atman: 101," and comprising texts from the "same language, nation and genre/mode" (36-37). But Khan's cartography is not one of rigid boundaries and generic silos. Khan is more interested in delivering an "untidy parcel," loosely tied up in two theoretical strands. The first is the "IN situ model" (202), a broad tent which tries to "map sf texts in specific networks" and proposes three nodes/theses—the transMIT, antekaal, and neoMONSTERS (22). The current study is concerned with only the first of the triad, in which mythology, ideology, and technology (thus MIT) converge to create, vivify, and sustain Indian sf in English. In considering the origins of ISFE, which despite an early start in the 1830s struggled to match the volume of sf in other Indian languages, Khan proposes an "SF threshold" which any language must reach before its textual production becomes meaningful (23). It is obvious that Khan considers ISFE to have reached such a threshold, and considers this a sign of maturity for Indian writing in English (IWE). Khan notes perceptively that the recent spurt in ISFE is a sign that it has finally grown out "of the shadow of the (anti) hegemonic, postcolonial agenda" of...