FINAL

Science Fiction &

Techno-Science in

FRONTIERS
Non-Aligned India

Upamanyu
Pablo
Mukherjee

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 Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies

Editor David Seed, University of Liverpool

Editorial Board
Mark Bould, University of the West of England
Veronica Hollinger, Trent University
Rob Latham, University of California
Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck College, University of London
Patrick Parrinder, University of Reading
Andy Sawyer, University of Liverpool

Recent titles in the series

40. Paul Williams Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War: Representations of Nuclear
Weapons and Post-Apocalyptic Worlds
41. Sara Wasson and Emily Alder, Gothic Science Fiction 1980–2010
42. David Seed (ed.), Future Wars: The Anticipations and the Fears
43. Andrew M. Butler, Solar Flares: Science Fiction in the 1970s
44. Andrew Milner, Locating Science Fiction
45. Joshua Raulerson, Singularities
46. Stanislaw Lem: Selected Letters to Michael Kandel (edited, translated and
with an introduction by Peter Swirski)
47. Sonja Fritzsche, The Liverpool Companion to World Science Fiction Film
48. Jack Fennel: Irish Science Fiction
49. Peter Swirski and Waclaw M. Osadnik: Lemography: Stanislaw Lem in
the Eyes of the World
50. Gavin Parkinson (ed.), Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics
51. Peter Swirski, Stanislaw Lem: Philosopher of the Future
52. J. P. Telotte and Gerald Duchovnay, Science Fiction Double Feature:
The Science Fiction Film as Cult Text
53. Tom Shippey, Hard Reading: Learning from Science Fiction
54. Mike Ashley, Science Fiction Rebels: The Story of the Science-Fiction
Magazines from 1981 to 1990
55. Chris Pak, Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism
in Science Fiction
56. Lars Schmeink, Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society,
and Science Fiction
57. Shawn Malley, Excavating the Future: Archaeology and Geopolitics
in Contemporary North American Science Fiction Film and Television
58. Derek J. Thiess, Sport and Monstrosity in Science Fiction
59. Glyn Morgan and Charul Palmer-Patel, Sideways in Time:
Critical Essays on Alternate History Fiction
60. Curtis D. Carbonell, Dread Trident: Tabletop Role-Playing Games
and the Modern Fantastic

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 F I NA L F RON T I ERS

Science Fiction and Techno-Science

in Non-Aligned India

U PA M A N Y U PA BLO MU K H ER J EE

L I V ER POOL U N I V ERSI T Y PR ESS

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 First published 2020 by
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool
L69 7ZU

Copyright © 2020 Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee

The right of Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee to be identified as the author

of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
written permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data

A British Library CIP record is available

ISBN 978-1-78962-028-3 cased

eISBN 978-1-78962-446-5

Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

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 Contents

Contents

List of illustrations vii

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction: Science, fiction and the non-aligned world 1

Back to future 1
The three-world problem 4
Non-aligned science 14
News from the semi-periphery 24
Chapter One: Laboratory lives 37
Bodies of evidence 37
Modern temples 41
Test subjects 48
Chapter Two: The uses of weapons 73
The scientist and the soldier 73
War stars 83
A third power 87
Chapter Three: Energy matters 105
From a crater 105
Fossil subjects 108
Power lines 117
Chaotic order 121

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vi FINAL FRONTIERS

Conclusion: Science, fiction and the end of non-alignment 145

After Nehru 145
Enchantments of science 150
Terminal speculations 155
Bibliography 171

Index 183

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 Illustrations
Illustrations

Figure 1: ‘Shonku’s laboratory life’, Byomjatrir Diary by Satyajit

Ray (2003). 49

Figure 2: ‘The babu’s world wars’, Ghanada Samagra, Premendra

Mitra (2000). 75

Figure 3: ‘From text to cinema’, Ashchorjo! February 1966, pp. 2–3. 161

Figure 4: ‘Resident aliens’, Ashchorjo! January 1965, p. 3. 162

vii

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 For Levi, the unbowed.

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 Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements

My Indian friends, especially if they are Bengali, usually fall about

laughing when I tell them I have spent most of the past four years
writing this book. The idea of researching about Professor Shonku or
Ghana-da merely adds to their conviction that I rarely do any serious
work. They are, of course, more or less right about this. Nevertheless,
my hope is to persuade a few readers of this book that Indian science
fiction, particularly of the kind written during the tumultuous decades
immediately after the partition of the sub-continent, has interesting
things to say about the relationship between science, technology, literary
cultures and (colonial and post-colonial) modernity as such.
Such a claim, resting as it does on the analysis of fiction usually
deemed as being too popular to be fit subjects of academic work, cannot
be put forward without the help, sympathy and support of institutions,
colleagues, friends and family. At my department in Warwick University,
I have been sustained as ever by the conversations, shared labour
and camaraderie of the members of the WReC collective. The writing
and teaching on science fiction done by Graeme Macdonald, Stephen
Shapiro, Nick Lawrence and Sharae Deckard, in particular, made me
believe it may be possible and indeed necessary to venture beyond the
Euro–American segments of the genre. Neil Lazarus, Rashmi Varma,
Thomas Docherty, Dan Katz, Peter Mack and Paulo de Medeiros offered
an unending supply of wise counsel and much-needed coffee. Maureen
Freely as the outgoing Head of Department, and Emma Mason, as the
incoming one, between them made sure that I got enough research
leave to finish writing the manuscript. The all-star administrative team
at our office ensured that I could, more or less, write in peace once
that leave came through. Sarah Hodges from ‘History-land’ convened
Warwick’s ‘Another India’ forum with typically irrepressible energy and
compelled me to present some early versions of my arguments. I am
truly grateful to all of them.

ix

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x FINAL FRONTIERS

Outside Warwick, a number of national and international scholars

indulged me with their time and generous invitations to contribute to
their projects. Rhys Williams at King’s College, London, Elleke Boehmer
at Oxford, Anindita Banerjee at Cornell, Sonja Fritzsche at Michigan
State University and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay at Oslo University, were
all kind enough to make space for me in their workshops, lecture series
and edited books and journals. Santu Bag of the Bengali science fiction
webzine Kalpabiswa warmly responded to my questions regarding Adrish
Bardhan and, unprompted, shared with me the old issues of Ashchorjo!
that he and his colleagues are digitizing. With such gestures do kindred
fans recognize each other. Swapan and Bhaswati Chakravorty went,
as usual, way beyond all calls of duty to help me with my random
requests for navigating the potentially tricky process of securing relevant
permissions to reproduce illustrations. Moved by their promptings, Subir
Mitra, the Managing Director of Ananda Publishers, dispatched the
necessary permissions without any delay. The long-suffering librarians
of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, continued to deal with my gloomy
presence with sunny fortitude.
To misquote C. L. R. James, what do they know of scholarship who
only scholarship know? I could not have written a single word of this
book without the lessons in everyday existence doled out to me with
unfailing patience and solidarity by a legion of friends and family
spread across the world. My earliest exposure to the works of Satyajit
Ray, Premendra Mitra and others came during the numerous trips to
the dingy bookshops and cinema halls of Kolkata with my family. My
parents, and especially my mother, made sure for years that I had every
issue of pujabarshikis – the annual festive numbers of magazines for
children and young adults – which teleported me to the world of an
eccentric bearded scientist and a rake-thin teller of tall-tales. I remember
spending countless tropical evenings with a large gang of siblings and
cousins – these kinship groups are not always separately caegorized in
Bengal – swapping such stories. Most of these brothers and sisters are
now respectably middle-aged, but their eyes still light up at the mention
of a classic issue of Sandesh. My sister, Kamalika Mukherjee, managed
to conjure up some digital copies of this magical magazine for me and
also hunted down the Bengali editions of Ray and Mitra. My brother,
Uddalak Mukherjee, shared with me his writings on Leela Majumdar
and other touchstones of our childhood as well as his enthusiasm for
Japanese post-apocalyptic sci-fi. Bhumika Dogra Mukherjee generously
shared with me with her astonishing reserves of energy. The Hilton
tribe, the Maggie Arms and the Missing Bean crew, my cricket and
football team-mates made life in ‘Brexit Britain’ liveable. Tithi, Shayari

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 acknowledgements xi

and Bill together wove the strongest possible trans-Atlantic lifeline. After
I reached the last line of this book, I thought of one person and one
group of people. The person is Eliza, who continues with her unflagging
efforts to ‘unionize’ life itself. The group is made up of the teachers and
students in Britain and the US who triggered the strike wave in 2018
against the ongoing destruction of education. Both refuse to believe that
the present darkness is the only possible horizon of our times.

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 Introduction:
Science, fiction and
the non-aligned world
Introduction

Back to future

In December 2014, the magazine India Today reported on two

forthcoming sessions of the annual Indian Science Congress in Mumbai
– ‘Vedic Mythology about Aviation’ and ‘Ancient Science Through
Sanskrit’. The first featured Captain Anand J. Bodas, a former aircraft
pilot, whose paper on ‘ancient Indian aviation technology’ argued
that ‘In those days, aeroplanes were huge in size and could move
left, right, as well as backwards, unlike modern planes which only fly
forward’ (India Today 2014, n.p.). Citing an allegedly Vedic manuscript
as his source, Bodas further argued that these aircrafts were capable
of inter-planetary travel, and that it was the passage of time and the
colonization of India by successive waves of foreign invaders that had
corroded the national memory of such achievements. The report further
noted that since the election of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) –
the authoritarian Hindu organization – as the country’s governing
power, such claims regarding Indian antiquity had become common.
Recent examples included the head of the Indian Council for Historical
Research, Y. Sudershan Rao, arguing that since narrative fiction was a
relatively new literary–cultural practice, Indian epics such as Ramayana
and Mahabharata should be properly understood as records of strictly
historical facts. Another Indian historian, Dinanath Batra, thought
that ancient Indians invented cars as well as inter-planetary aircrafts.
Finally, the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi himself cited the
example of the elephant-headed god Ganesha to argue that plastic
surgery existed in pre-historic India.
With such stellar sessions, the Indian Science Congress of January
2015 attracted much attention. The Calcutta-based newspaper Telegraph
interviewed an aerospace scientist, Professor H. S. Mukunda, who
revealed that Bodas was merely recycling a canard that was at least

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2 FINAL FRONTIERS

four decades old (Jayan 2015, n.p.). It turned out that in the 1970s,
Mukunda and a team of scientists and Sanskrit scholars had already
analysed Vyamanika Shastra, the allegedly antique manuscript that was
the source of Bodas’s paper, and found that it was written by a modern
spiritualist called G. R. Josyar who claimed that it had been dictated to
him by his spiritual guide, Pandit Subbaraya Shastri.
Apart from their undoubtedly high entertainment value, these
episodes raise some questions pertinent to our arguments below.
Granted, the experts making claims for the scientific and technological
prowess of pre-historic inhabitants of the Indian sub-continent are in
many cases appointed directly by the BJP government to wage what it
sees as a culture war to cleanse all traces of ‘foreign elements’ from the
country – chief among which are ‘secularism’ and ‘leftism’. Yet, note
that their stories aim to establish the always already modern character-
istics of India, not to offer a rejection of them. What does this tell us
about the role of ideas and practices of science and technology in the
formation of post-colonial (and colonial) India? Much of the efforts of
India’s contemporary Hindu ideologues are directed against what they
see as the legacies of the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal
Nehru, whom they portray as a thoroughly ‘Westernized’ figure, and
whose vision of a secular, socialist republic as essentially antithetical to
India itself.1 Science and technology were key to this Nehruvian vision
of post-colonial India. But consider Nehru’s declarations about ancient
India to a gathering of scientists in 1958: ‘Whether you go through the
Upanishads or whether you go through Buddha’s words, as reported,
always it is a scientific approach, never unscientific. Buddha never
asked anyone to accept a single word, if I may say so, just without
understanding it, without experimenting and feeling it [.…] The whole
basis of the Vedas is an experiment, a mental scientific approach’
(Singh 1988, 179). Admittedly light on claims about antique space
travel, Nehru’s submissions about the historically consistent scientific
tradition of India, and therefore the invariant modernity of the country,
have wholeheartedly been adopted by his opponents and enemies.
On this, there is little difference between the famously cosmopolitan
and internationalist political leader and his ultra-nationalist, religious
fundamentalist successors. I am not interested in arguing (incorrectly,
in my view) that this convergence on matters of science, technology
and modernity implies a larger congruence between the morally and
ethically polarized positions on the Indian political spectrum. I am,

1
For an account of Hindutva critique of Nehru and ‘Nehruvian’ vision of
India see Guha 2005 and Vanaik 2017.

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 introduction 3

however, interested in what this means for Indian post-colonial culture

and, in particular, for popular literary–cultural forms.
This brings me to a second, related question regarding the relationship
between fiction and science in post-colonial India. The composition
and transmission history of the ‘vedic’ manuscript, Vyamanika Shastra,
as discussed by Professor Mukunda (Jayan 2015) raises not only the
interesting issue of literary forgery but also the generic specificities of such
fakes. The English translation of the text published in 1973 contained
a series of illustrations and diagram that would have been immediately
familiar to fans of Star Trek or of the many UFO narratives that entered
global popular imagination long before the Cold War, even if it was
precisely during these years that they reached the heights of their mythic
powers. The evidence for ancient Indian science and technology, in other
words, is distinctly science fictional not only in form (the visual represen-
tation of this technology can only appear as ‘alien’ to our contemporary
historical consciousness) but also in terms of the particular generic effects
as classically formulated by Darko Suvin – the dialectical interplay of
cognition and estrangement triggered by the presence of the literary
device of a novum in the narrative that is at once radically different from
the known world and ‘not impossible from the cognitive norms of the
author’s epoch’ (Suvin 1979, viii). If the manufactured antiquarianism
of the sanskrit language of the text and the illustrations of the vedic
spaceships solicit (albeit a distinctly un-Brechtian) Verfremdungseffekt
in the contemporary reader, the discussions of the vehicles’ physical
and operational properties and the technical manuals regarding their
manufacture and maintenance tug her back to the world of plausi-
bility and cognition. Perhaps the success of this science fictional effect
is precisely what propelled Captain Bodas to the hallowed gathering of
national and international scientists in Mumbai.
What then is the relationship between science fiction, science and
technology and the post-colonial nation’s claim to modernity? This
is one of the fundamental problems I want to address here. Given
the titular presence of science granted to the genre, it is surprising
how infrequently the complex traffic between literary and scientific
histories and practices have been studied at any length. This is
particularly evident in the case of non-European or post-colonial
science fiction. It is not an accident that the very decades when
Jawaharlal Nehru designated science as one of the keystones of
his nation-building exercise were also the ones that inaugurated
what we should think of as the first wave of post-colonial Indian
science fiction. Written largely in Bengali, Marathi and other regional
Indian languages, this literature tested out not merely the tenets

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4 FINAL FRONTIERS

of ‘Nehruvian science’, but also the assumptions about modernity

coded into its policies and practices. But science was not only a core
element of Nehru’s domestic strategy. It played an equally dominant
role in his aspirations about India’s ‘non-aligned’ role in an interna-
tional arena defined by the bi-polar Cold War world (dis-)order.
This internationally politicized role of science was also the matter with
which the writers of Indian science fiction of the era – Premendra
Mitra, Satyajit Ray and Adrish Bardhan among them – crafted their
stories. What I want to do here, in other words, is to tell the (necessarily
partial) story of post-colonial Indian science fiction’s location at
the confluence of ‘Nehruvian’ science policy and (inter-)national
political strategy. At this point, a caveat may be in order. Although
writing literary histories of Indian (and other non-European/American
science fiction) is an urgent task, I make absolutely no claims of
doing so here. I also make no arguments whatsoever regarding
Bengali science fiction’s primacy in the development of the genre in
India or south Asia. What I am interested in is how certain kinds of
Indian science fictional writing framed the inter-related problems of
science, modernity and modernization at a simultaneously national
and international register. The fact that I have largely confined myself
to Bengali writing has to do entirely with the limitations of my own
expertise. It would indeed be extremely interesting to compare such
writing to, say, the Hindi fiction of Ambika Dutt Vyas, Devikanandan
Khatri and Durga Prasad Khatri; the Assamese fiction of Hari Prasad
Barua, Kumudeswar Barthkur and Saurabh Kumar Chaliha; the
Marathi fiction of N. B. Ranade and Jayant Vishnu Narlikar. Such
comparisons could well reveal the regional variations, un-evenness
and mutations within both the literary sub-field of Indian science
fiction and the larger process of the modernization of India. But,
unsurprisingly, this falls out of the scope of this study and awaits the
work of scholars far more able than myself.

The three-world problem

Such considerations of the relationship between science fiction,

post-colonial politics and techno-scientific culture are, by definition, not
sui generis but built on the work of those who have tussled productively
and in critical solidarity, with Suvin’s foundational thesis. The ‘Suvin
event’ may indeed have inaugurated the academic studies of the genre
in the 1970s, but one of the (presumably) unwanted consequences of
Suvin’s own analytical perspective was a standardization of generic

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 introduction 5

features derived from the study of a fraction of the genre’s (European

and North American) content.2 Once this perspective is broadened to
include the tri-continental science fictional productions of Latin America,
Africa and Asia-Pacific, it becomes obvious that the critical assumptions
about the genre would have to be revised in the light of the diversities,
complexities and contradictions of the world it inhabited and reflected
upon. What may be the most appropriate designation for this world
– ‘post-colonial’, ‘global’ or a third designation that is quite distinct,
but one that might nonetheless attempt to distil some of the insights
generated by the other two while also critically expanding their scope?
A glance at the titles of the essays published over the past two decades
in Science Fiction Studies, perhaps still the premier scholarly organ in the
field, leaves us in no doubts about its ‘post-colonial turn’.3 Arguably, this
follows on from the journal’s pronounced interventions on imperialism
and colonialism throughout the Cold War era.4 The recent years have
also seen a number of monographs take decolonization, colonialism and
imperialism as the primary contexts of science fiction’s emergence in
the world republic of letters.5 What are the basic assumptions in this
literature regarding science fiction’s post-coloniality?
First, there is the existence of a long and rich tradition of non-European
science fictional texts that have been relatively invisible to European
scholars. Surveying the case of Aoteaora/New Zealand, Dominic Alessio
suggests that despite featuring Samuel Butler, Anthony Trollope and
seminal nineteenth-century space adventures such as The Great Romance
in its literary history, the region has until very recently not attracted
much critical attention precisely because of its colonial past and perceived
cultural dependency (Alessio 2011, 258–9). Comparing Hugo Gernsbeck’s
retrospective invention of a European and North American science fiction

2
The term is used by Mark Bould to describe the publication of Suvin’s essay
on the poetics of the science fiction genre and his founding of the journal
Science Fiction Studies with R. D. Mullen in 1972 and 1973 respectively. See
Mark Bould and China Mieville 2009, 18.
3
From a long list of distinguished publications, I am thinking here
particularly of Elizabeth M. Ginway 2005, Rachel Haywood Ferreira 2007,
Brian Attebery 2005, Mark Bould 2007 and Joan Gordon 2016.
4
The Vietnam war and the nuclear arms race in particular provided
opportunities for critics to evaluate the relationship between contemporary
imperialism/colonialism to the genre. See for example, Albert L. Berger
1978, D. H. Dowling 1986, Rafael Nudelman 1989 and Bruce H. Franklin
1990.
5
Among these are Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal 2010, Patricia Kerslake
2007, Jessica Langer 2011, Ralph Pordzik 2001 and John Reider 2008.

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6 FINAL FRONTIERS

canon in the 1920s to Latin America, Rachel Heywood Ferreira finds a

four or even five decades’ delay in the initiation of such a process there
(Ferreira 2007, 432). Once again, it is Latin America’s colonial past and
neo-colonial present and the consequent cultural (semi-)peripherality
that Ferreira offers as an explanation for this belated process of canon
formation.
Second, these non-European/North American science fiction
traditions are understood as ontologically different to their counterparts
in the global North. This ontological difference is then in turn shown
to demand concomitantly different critical protocols for their analyses.
Elizabeth Ginway’s observations in this regard is paradigmatic: ‘Science
Fiction written in the Third World requires critical tools different from
those typically applied to European and Anglo-American sf, because the
shift in geographical and cultural contexts can force a reinterpretation
of the genre’s basic premises’ (Ginway 2005, 467). Once difference is
accepted as the presiding (and perhaps the only) frame for comparison
between Euro-American and post-colonial science fiction, it leads not
only to the quest for alternative interpretations but to a vision of
incommensurable worlds altogether. Joan Gordon’s overview of the
features of Indian science fiction captures this slide with commendable
accuracy:

India’s very rich tradition begins not with Mary Shelley or Jules
Verne, for instance, but perhaps with the Ramayana (circa sixth-
century BCE). It has different definitions and aesthetic principles, a
different relationship to fantasy, and a canon that includes Jagadish
Chandra Bose and Satyajit Ray rather than Isaac Asimov and Arthur
C. Clarke. Its science may be Ayurvedic as well as Newtonian,
with triggering events revolving around historical traumas that
are different from the Western tradition or from the Chinese.
Far from estranging, this alternative history becomes increasingly
normalized and familiar the more deeply one considers it. And it
demonstrates that there are many alternative histories of science
fiction, all equally true. (Gordon 2016, 433)

Third, generic, formal and stylistic unevenness and hybridity are taken as
the most distinctive markers of such different or alternative post-colonial
science fiction. Typically, these are said to be the result of contact
between residual pre-colonial non-literary cultural forms and their
post-colonial literary counterparts. Thus, Delphi Carstens and Robert Mer
see in contemporary African science fiction the presence of an archaic,
mythic mode that is the result of the grafting of myths, magic and oral

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 introduction 7

story-telling practices on to a literary form (Carstens and Mee 2009,

80–2). This readily recalls Alessio’s discussion of the function of Maori
myths and Pacific tradition of tall-tales in contemporary science fiction
from Aotearoa/New Zealand (Alessio 2011, 266–7), Suparno Banerjee’s
suggestion of the fusion of indigenous Indian melodramatic theatrical
tropes with those of Western ‘hard SF’ in Bollywood films (Banerjee
2014, 19), and Anwesha Marty’s tracing of sanskritic rasa mode in the
Bengali science fiction of Premendra Roy (Maity 2016, 459–1). In all
these readings, the formation of a world literary genre is understood
to happen via the adaptation and re-tooling of ‘local’ forms and styles.
This process is then presented as the specific creative gesture of the
post-colonial science fiction authors.
Fourth, science and technology are understood as comprising the
chief thematic concerns of post-colonial science fiction, where the
colonial history and epistemological assumptions of those domains of
knowledge are brought into critical dialogue with various indigenous
epistemological modes. Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay has parsed the
Bengali term of science fiction, kalpavigyan, to show that it dramatizes
precisely this relationship, which then serves to question scientistic claims
of paramountcy among modern knowledge practices (Chattopadhyay
2016, 437). Claire Chambers has made a similar argument regarding
post-colonial anglophone writing by taking the example of Amitav
Ghosh’s novel Calcutta Chromosome, in which she sees a problematization
of the ‘universalist claims of Western science’ and the widely accepted
notion of the scientist as a heroic individual ushering in epistemological
revolutions (Chambers 2003, 58).
Finally, race has emerged both as a significant thematic concern
of post-colonial science fiction, as well as a powerful critical tool in
excavating the genre’s genesis. Much of the work on the intersections
between race and science fiction has been the result of the recognition
of first the colonial, and then the imperial, nature of the US, particularly
in relation to the role played by African slaves and workers in the
political and economic transformations of that country. ‘Afro-futurism’,
in particular, has emerged as a name for a distinctive literary and
cultural mode that explores African-American concerns in the context of
contemporary techno-science (Yaszek 2006, 42). As Mark Bould shows,
at its sharpest, such ‘Afro-futurist’ fiction and criticism have been able
to skewer the propaganda about multiculturalism on which much of
the US self-image rested during the Cold War era (Bould 2007, 177).
Further, the recognition of this mode has enabled the detection of a
rich tradition of nineteenth-century African-American authors including
Martin Delany, Charles Chesnutt and Edward Johnson who ‘shared

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8 FINAL FRONTIERS

interest in representing the changing relations of science and society as

they specifically pertained to African American history – including, of
course, the history of the future’ (Yaszek 2006, 44). This foregrounding
of race as a thematic problem and analytical tool has of course been
taken up well beyond the US context. Brian Attebery’s interpretation
of aboriginality in Australian science fiction not only demonstrates
the genre’s interrogation of race relations in that country, but also the
racialized modes of scientific and technological developments as such
(Attebery 2005, 387–8).
Useful and salutary as this ‘post-colonial’ turn has been in expanding
the creative and critical horizons of science fiction, it has offered
predominantly two senses of the ‘post-colonial’ world. The first is the
chronological sense denoting the end of formal Euro-American colonial
and imperial rule, while fully acknowledging the new and evolving
modes of global domination by those same powers. The second is the
perspectival sense usually associated with academic post-colonial studies,
one in which it is both ‘writing as that which critically or subversively
scrutinizes the colonial relationship [….] that sets out in one way or
another to resist colonialist perspective’ and a ‘condition in which
colonized peoples seek to take their place, forcibly or otherwise, as
historical agents in an increasingly globalized world’ (Boehmer 2005,
3). It is not so much that the world is ‘post-colonial’ (with or without
the hyphen), but it is more that the latter names it as a condition as
well as a particular way of interpreting it.
Is ‘global’, as implied in Boehmer’s definition above, then, an
appropriate name for the world in which science fiction makes its home?
Such indeed seem to be the inclination of the editor of a recent special
issue of Science Fiction Studies. Briefly surveying the history of the term
‘globalization’, he notes that the term’s various inter-related meanings
since the 1960s have all more or less settled around a notion ‘of the
expansion and intensification of social relations and consciousness across
world-time and world-space’ (Higgins 2012, 370). Against this, the various
authors of this issue understand ‘globalization as a specific development in
the unfolding of capitalist world markets that creates differential regimes
of political, economic, and cultural interconnection in an increasingly
internationalized global context [….] a process linked to the imperial
expansion of global capitalism in both colonial and post/neo-colonial
contexts’ (Higgins 2012, 370). Thus, along with this discussion of the
historical and material conditions that give birth to the ‘post-colonial’
conditions and perspective (as well as to science fiction) comes debates
about the processes of modernization that unfold across time and space
and their formative relationship to popular literatures and cultures.

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 introduction 9

Considering the contradictions of these processes, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay,

Jr. understands ‘global’ science fiction as the archive of narratives that
seduces a readership into enjoying fiction about ‘whatever conjunction of
intellectual and technological tools is effective for asserting instrumental
political power on the global stage’ (Csicsery-Ronay 2012, 489).
Now, compare Csicsery-Ronay’s understanding of ‘global’ science
fiction to that proposed in the pages of the same journal a little
over a decade ago. While globalization then was still understood as
‘American-style market-capitalist hegemony’, the attention had then fallen
on ‘how many national traditions we have ignored; how many important
writers, even in the heart of Europe, we have neither translated nor
read; how many “classics” we have forgotten’ (Anon. 1999, 1). Instead
of educating the readers in the pleasures of globalization, the essays in
these earlier twin issues of the journal proposed that a number of the
‘national’ science fiction traditions operated precisely on the principle of
subjecting that hegemonic concept to scrutiny. Be it Karel Čapek in the
case of Czechoslovakia (Kinyon 1999, 379–400), Lao She in China (Huss
2000, 93) or Kobo Abe in Japan (Tatsumi 2000, 106–17), these ‘national’
traditions were understood to have become ‘global’ precisely by opening
up ‘globalization’ and its constitutive elements such as modernization and
‘development’ to critical reflections. To put it another way, in a world
fractured into seemingly incommensurable parts by the economic and
political logic of capitalism, the imaginative work performed by ‘global’
science fiction was understood as offering to the readers a fleeting glimpse
of a totality where the actually existing relationship between these parts
become ineluctable. For Eric D. Smith, it is precisely because colonialism
and imperialism are specifically political modes of the globalization of
capital that science fiction should be thought of as a global genre: ‘Born
in the imperialist collusion of cultural identities and taking as its formal
and thematic substance the spatial dislocations that inhere in the imperial
situation, science fiction would seem the ideal instrument with which to
engage critically the transition from the postcolonial to that of globali-
zation’ (Smith 2012, 4). Thus the world of science fiction turns out to be
‘global’ or ‘globalized’ and there is much to commend in these discussions
that see modern capitalism as the historical horizon of the genre. But
at this point, two further questions arise that seem to fall outside the
scope of this particular critical paradigm. One, when did this world come
into being? Smith seems to imply a temporal sequence (‘transition from’)
where ‘post-colonial’ happens before ‘globalization’. But how can this be
maintained if colonialism and imperialism are co-eval with capitalism’s
assumption of a global form? Two, how does science fiction, critically or
otherwise, register this world?

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10 FINAL FRONTIERS

Many of the assumptions of science fiction’s ‘global’ characteristics

have been derived from earlier discussions about the genre’s utopic
impulses. Raymond Williams’s careful examination of the relationship
between what for him are two distinct modes – utopic and science
fictional – have had a decisive influence here. Williams suggests that of
the four types of the utopic mode, it is only two – those about ‘willed
transformation’ and about ‘technological transformation’ – that properly
engage with the problem of science, whether ‘applied’ or in the more
general sense of ‘scientific spirit’ (Williams 1978, 204–5). For him, the
central problem of such writing is that of modelling large-scale social
transformations, a problem that was named Utopia in Thomas More’s
foundational text. As such, Williams concludes that the genre flourishes
in two kinds of historical situation – either at the moment of the consoli-
dation and confidence of a rising class or class fraction when it knows
‘down to detail, that it can replace the existing order’; or at the point of
their decline when the collective despair at the loss of power and status
is channelled into frantic imaginative search for alternative worlds where
such catastrophes can be halted or reversed. The two dominant strains
within science fiction correspond to these socio-historical moments: ‘The
systematic mode is a response to tyranny or disintegration; the heuristic
mode, by contrast, seems to be primarily a response to a constrained
reformism’ (Williams 1978, 208).
Williams’s thoughts provide an immediately convincing answer
to the first question I raised above in relation to the periodization of
‘global’ science fiction. When was ‘global’ science fiction? It seems long
before the formation of ‘globalization’ as conventionally understood
today, and almost as soon as capital’s imperative towards accumu-
lation began obliterating the boundaries of late feudal states.6 It is
the class dynamics of a historical system of production characterized
above all by periodic crises of accumulation that is captured in this
literature of transitions and transformations. This thesis is bolstered by
bibliographical scholars like Lyman Tower Sargent who have tracked
the thematic changes in utopian fiction from the sixteenth to the
nineteenth century – from those in the relationship between religious
and secular authorities, men and women, science and knowledge,
legislative and judiciary powers and, finally, in a great flowering
between 1800 and 1887, between ‘political economy’ and social
justice (Sargent 1976, 276–8). The cross-pollination of science fiction
and utopia seems to have grown apace with the enlargement of the

6
A classical analysis regarding the relationship between globalization of
capital and imperialism can be found in Brenner 2006, 83–5.

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 introduction 11

capitalist world. And the more concretely this world was realized, the
more indispensable became the critical function of science fiction not
because they provided bullet-proof blue-prints of alternative ways of
life, but rather because they dramatized the struggles to bring such
blue-prints into being and the material and ideological blockades against
them (Moylan 1982, 163).
What of the second, related question regarding the way in which
such texts achieve their effect? Here too, scholarship on utopia as
such and utopic science fiction provides a compelling case. If the
dialectical interplay between cognition and estrangement is fundamental
to the genre’s critically negative work, this is achieved primarily by
its re-combination or re-tooling of narrative codes in such a way that
hitherto distinct and distant representational language are brought into
a shocking proximity. Recall here Jameson’s discussion of this strategy
already visible in More:

Greece, the medieval, the Incas, Protestantism: these are the four
crucial elements of More’s Utopian text, the four raw materials
of its representation. Utopia is a synthesis of these four codes or
representational languages, these four ideologemes, but only on
condition it be understood that they do not fold back into it without
a trace, but retain the dissonances between their distinct identities
and origins, revealing the constant effort of a process that seeks
to combine them without effacing all traces of what it wishes to
unify in the first place. (Jameson 2005, 25)

These formal or generic discontinuities are what lends utopic science

fiction texts their open and processual character. The works of Joanna
Russ, Ursula LeGuin and Marge Piercy recall More’s across the span of
four centuries in their experimental registers where such discontinuities
assist in the reversal of realist principles that usually accord primacy
to plot and character over setting (Moylan 1982, 45). This attention to
the formal strategies of utopic science fictional narratives echo what
we heard in the discussions regarding the genre’s ‘unevenness’ and
‘hybridity’ after the ‘post-colonial’ turn. But whereas there these were
largely descriptive terms, here they gain in their analytical focus because
of the attention paid to the historical logic of their production. For the
interplay of discontinuous narrative codes and language, far from being
random, achieve their effect precisely because they distil within them
distinct historical modes of production whose co-eval existence is made
startlingly apparent to the reader precisely when s/he had assumed the
obsolescence of one and the permanence of the other (Moylan 1982,

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12 FINAL FRONTIERS

43, Jameson 2005, xii–xiii). In this sense, utopic science fiction behaves
exactly like a time-machine that enables its reader to momentarily
become a Benjaminian angel of history, unable to defer the knowledge
of the unfailing relations between the past, present and the possible
futures because of the remorseless image of totality tattooed on her
inner eyelids by the text.
We may now begin to propose a third designation for a science fiction
distinct from ‘post-colonial’ and ‘global’ without dismissing the insights
offered by these terms. If we enumerate what have thus far emerged as
the key markers of the genre – the capacity for a dissonant combination
of narrative codes and language, the efflorescence during moments
of transition and crises over the long history of capitalism’s global
entrenchment, the modelling (in either utopic or dystopic modes) of the
limits and possibilities of resolutions to such crises, the foregrounding
of one of the principle modes of modernization – techno-science –
as a thematic problem and thereby opening up assumptions about
modernity to interrogation – they all seem to meet the definition of
‘world literature’ thrown up by recent energetic critical exchanges.7
There is no need to reproduce the details of this already decade-long
disciplinary debate, but some of the key points relevant to our discussion
here may be noted immediately. First, there is no longer any need to
think of the relationship between Euro-American and non-European
science fiction in terms of dependency or belatedness. Rather, we can
think of the latter being in accordance to a general tendency in literary
and cultural forms of the modern world to re-functionalize, in Franco
Moretti’s channelling of Roberto Schwarz’s thoughts, ‘foreign form, local
material – and local form [….] foreign plots, local characters, and then, local
narrative voice’ (Moretti 2000, 65). Second, it is this re-functionalization
or re-combination of local and non-local literary and cultural forms
that gives the genre its dissonant register and triggers the interplay of
cognition and estrangement. Third, this formal registration is precisely
what signals the genre’s coming into being through uneven processes
of modernization. Put in terms of the Warwick Research Collective
(WReC), much of both European and non-European science fiction can
be understood as a ‘world literary’ genre:

We are chiefly interested in the literary registration and encoding

of modernity as a social logic. We are operating therefore with a
preliminary tripartite conceptualization – modern world-system/

7
See, in particular, Franco Moretti 2000 and 2003; Prendergast 2004;
Casanova 2004; Apter 2013; WReC 2015 and Cheah 2016.

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 introduction 13

modernity/world-literature – in terms of which the latter is

understood in the broadest sense as the literature of the modern
capitalist world-system. We understand capitalism to be the substrate
of world-literature [….] and we understand modernity to constitute
world-literature’s subject and form – modernity is both what world-
literature indexes or is ‘about’ and what gives world-literature its
distinguishing formal characteristics. (WReC 2015,  15)

Finally, like other world literary genres, science fiction’s imaginative

registration of the modern world it inhabits includes perceptions of the
systemic political and economic relationship between the nation-states
as well as those within them. An important corollary of this is not
all science fictional texts in the long history of the genre have been
‘world literary’, although they always have had the potential to be so.
As Immanuel Wallerstein reminds us, a world system is not always the
same as the world in its entirety (Wallerstein 2011, 15). This therefore
has spatio-temporal implications for ‘world literature’ and world literary
genres such as science fiction, in so far as it has limiting functions to
our questions of when and where the genre flourishes. But at least since
the nineteenth century, with nearly every inhabited and inhabitable
earthly space becoming subsumed under nation-statist and capitalist
(whether of ‘free market’ or ‘state’ varieties) logic, science fiction has
acquired a ‘world literary’ dimension. This is certainly so in the case
of the mid-twentieth century Indian literature we will look at here. To
proceed with this understanding of the writings of Premendra Mitra,
Satyajit Ray and others is emphatically not a matter of being on-trend
with the latest academic literary theories, the fortunes of which obey
the logic of cultural and academic capitalism’s own periodic crises of
accumulation.8 Rather, it is directed by the writings themselves, which
constantly demand a widening, deepening and finessing of the act of
interpretation itself. If this sounds like a rather grandiose claim for
writing that is usually thought of as juvenile, popular, para-or even
sub-literary, the test of such claims should begin by filling in some
details of the corner of the world it inhabits.

8
For a discussion of cultural and academic capitalism see Bourdieu 1984
and 1988; Guillory 1993; Slaughter and Leslie 1997.

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14 FINAL FRONTIERS

Non-aligned science

As in the case of science fiction criticism, the analyses of the cultures

and practices of science that has gained academic reputation for over at
least half a century now under the name ‘science studies’ has experienced
its own ‘post-colonial turn’. Interestingly enough, unlike some of the
work in the former category, the latter has been alive to the historical
and material conditions of its object of analyses. Warwick Anderson’s
call for a ‘post-colonial science studies’ is explicit in this regard:

A postcolonial perspective suggests fresh ways to study the changing

political economies of capitalism and science, the mutual reorgani-
zation of the global and the local, the increasing transnational traffic
of people, practices, technologies, and contemporary contests over
‘intellectual property’ [….] We hope that a closer engagement of
science studies with post-colonial studies will allow us to question
technoscience differently, find more heterogeneous sources, and
reveal more fully the patterns of local transactions that give rise
to global, or universalist, claims. (Anderson 2002, 643)

Although Anderson is subsequently a little too quick to adopt some of

the familiar slogans of literary post-colonial studies, such as ‘alternative
modernities’, ‘provincializing reason’ and ‘hybridization’, without
considering how they might trouble his analytical commitment to
the ‘political economies of capitalism’, he does emphasize the need to
hold the ‘metropole and the post-colony in the same analytic frame’
(Anderson 2002, 643).
An essential element of this perspective is a rigorous interrogation
of the diffusionist models of economic development or modernization
that assumes the gradual spread of a networked system of science,
technology and capitalism from a Euro-American core to various global
peripheries. Instead, it is the uneven growth and distribution of this
system that is now understood as its defining feature. Sandra Harding
suggests that the emergence of this challenge to hitherto normative
understanding of modern ‘development’ became possible only with the
inauguration of a particular political formation – that of the ‘non-aligned’
Third-World nations during the era of the Cold War. Specifically, it was
when the political and intellectual leaders of the former colonies began
to formulate their own strategies regarding science and technology
that the ‘epistemological underdevelopment’ of modern Europe and
America – that is, the poverty of the understanding of the history and
conditions of forms of knowledge associated with these zones – became

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 introduction 15

evident (Harding 2011, 3). This counter-intuitive thought is related to

another one – that ‘modernization’ and ‘Westernization’ are not identical
processes since the former always takes distinctive non-European local
and regional forms (Harding 2011, 9). The heuristic power of such
shifting paradigms for Third-World nationalism may be readily granted.
But one of the most enduring results of these interrogations has been the
revelation regarding the centrality of techno-scientific development to
all ideologies of modernity as such. Asian, African and Latin American
thinkers may have succeeded in questioning its Euro-American origins,
but its status as a social good and even as a desired ‘end of history’
remained largely unchallenged:

Even those who opposed the prevailing capitalist strategies were

obliged to couch their critique in terms of the need for development
[….] Development had achieved the status of a certainty in the
social imaginary [….] The fact that most people’s condition not only
did not improve but deteriorated with the passing of time did not
seem to bother most experts. Reality, in sum, had been colonized
by the development discourse. (Escobar 2011, 271)

A second key outcome of the ‘post-colonial turn’ in science studies

has been the exposure of the astonishing extent to which modern science
and technology have been driven by the logic of militarization long
before, albeit especially during, the Cold War. Eighty per cent or more
of the US federal science budget between 1945 and 1957 was devoted to
projects related to ‘national security’ issues, and remained at comparable
levels in the following decades (Sarewitz 2011, 404). The model of the
research university where both the theoretical and applied versions of
techno-science are developed with direct funding and subsidies from
the national defence departments was of course most visible in the US,
but hardly confined there:

The scientific–military nexus entrained – and sustained – all

sectors of the post-War research enterprise. From the perspective
of those who designed and built this enterprise, the important
functional distinction in science was not between basic and applied,
but between classified and unclassified. The knowledge-production
process was viewed not in terms of particular disciplines of basic
science, but specific outcomes of military needs. (Sarewitz 2011, 404)

The most visible products of this nexus of security/defence and techno-

science, of course, were the nuclear bomb and space race – both of

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16 FINAL FRONTIERS

which entered science fiction as indispensable thematic matters. Instead

of demarcating a before-and-after stage in the political dispensation
of the late-modern world (say, first colonial and then post-colonial),
Hiroshima and the proliferation of nuclear weapons that followed
can be thought of as events that conjugated – that is both changed
and preserved – Euro-American global power (Hecht 2002, 693). For
instance, the scientists and technicians who went from Europe and
the US to the former colonies in Africa to extract and process raw
minerals such as uranium needed for the making of nuclear weapons,
often did so with some awareness of the social and cultural implications
of the declarations of independence of their former colonies and the
corresponding requirement for themselves to behave differently from
their predecessors. But the very scientific processes they instigated and
supervised, preserved and even invigorated those very power relations
that formal independence at least in theory sought to eliminate (Hecht
2002, 694–718). Much of the energies of the Third-World leaders were
devoted to neutralizing such colonialism by other means. In the same
way, the synchronicity of the space race and the great decolonization
movements of the mid-twentieth century showed how the former was
in many ways an attempt to preserve the shadow of empire precisely
at the moment it seemed to be fading from all corners of earth. The
wholesale importation of the classic colonial and imperial adventure
tropes into Cold War space programmes served to figure space not
only as the final frontier, but as a potentially unlimited one that could
accommodate an endlessly expanding horizon of racist and imperialist
masculinities (Redfield 2002, 795–6). Again, one of the major challenges
of the Third-World national techno-scientific policies was to decide on
what terms they could or should engage with such neo-colonial star wars.
The third major consequence of the arrival of the post-colonial
sensibilities in science studies is the comparative evaluation of science
with adjacent modes of knowledge and the attendant questioning of the
former’s claims of epistemological supremacy. As we saw in the examples
of the current vogue for ‘vedic science’ in India (as well as in its Nehruvian
variants) this does not necessarily involve the rejection of ‘science’ and
its ‘others’, but an abrupt yoking of them in such a manner that their
conceptual limits become startlingly visible. The Hindu supremacists who
dominate the Indian state and nation today do not renounce science,
technology or modernity, but rather argue that India was always already
scientific, technological and modern (those glorious days of antiquarian
space travel!). Banu Subramaniam sees in this a figure of thought that
she calls an ‘archaic modernity’ that is above all evidence of the modern
colonial and imperial entanglements with science and technology in the

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 introduction 17

sub-continent (Subramaniam 2000, 73–4).9 Since under such conditions

where science, secularism and the ‘modern West’ were bundled together
on one side of the civilizational ledger and superstition, religion and
oriental primitivism on the other, the ressentiment of a post-colonial
nationalism (in stark contrast to an anti-colonial one) is expressed in
the aggressive adaptation of the former set of positions to enhance rather
than negate the claims of the latter.
But the adjacencies of colonial and pre-colonial modes of knowledge
– whether scientific or not – need not be the exclusive prerogative of a
regressive and reactionary nationalism. It can also produce a more histor-
ically nuanced model of a differentiated field of knowledge. By showing
how European, Jain and Buddhist philosophies all share a common
view of scientific practice as ‘a well-ordered epistemic culture facilitating
the production of public knowledge’, Janardan Ganeri and others have
argued for a ‘polycentric history’ of global science (Ganeri 2013, 350).
Indeed, such a perspective goes beyond demonstrating the common
philosophical bases of European and non-European sciences to suggest
that they are alike in their methods and practices also. Since detailed
studies of their skills, processes and instruments show that far from
being the product of considered European or Enlightenment rationality,
scientific practices everywhere are always ‘contingent, negotiated and
situated’, Kapil Raj thinks we should see science as a field defined by
‘circulation, flow, mutation and reconfiguration’ (Raj 2013, 344). While
always attentive to the interferences run by unequal power distribution,
such circulatory model of science acknowledges the agency (albeit of
different kinds) of all those involved in the production of knowledge.10
These insights are useful in understanding how science and technology
were perceived in south Asia and other parts of the world during the
crucial decolonizing decades of the mid-twentieth century. The ideologies
of modern development, the militarization of science and the location
of scientific practices in a polycentric, uneven, field of knowledge, were
all essential components of the thinking of India’s first prime minister
Jawaharlal Nehru, who saw the cultivation of a scientific culture as one
of the pre-conditions of fulfilling the dreams of India’s emergence as an
independent global power. In the fullest account we have thus far of
‘Nehruvian science’, David Arnold has identified five key features. First,

9
See also Subramaniam 2019 for further discussions about the entanglements
between practices of science, Hindu nationalism and ‘developmental’
imperatives.
10
For further discussion of the importance of studies of actually existing
scientific practices in India see Phalkey 2013, 330–6.

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18 FINAL FRONTIERS

it was a programme of socio-cultural changes covering issues ranging

from hunger and poverty to insanitary habits. Second, it was a ‘state
science’ – ‘conducted for the people but at the direction and discretion
of the state’. Third, it was committed to building institutions. Fourth,
it was both nationalist and internationalist in scope – a ‘vehicle for the
nonaligned movement in which Nehru was so pivotal a figure’. Finally,
it was a historiographic project – ‘a systematic attempt to rewrite the
history of science in (and for) India in ways that illustrated the long
history of science in India and its formative role within Indian civili-
zation’ (Arnold 2013, 366–8). Arnold properly cautions both against
designating as ‘Nehruvian’ all aspects of Indian scientific culture, as
well as limiting it to the three decades during which Nehru presided
over the country. ‘Nehruvian science’ began long before the 1940s,
especially, as Robert Anderson notes, in the institution-building work of
scientists like Meghnad Saha whose emphasis on planned development
and popularization of science through the publication and circulation of
journals would be endorsed and adapted by the prime minister. Even
before Saha, one can trace these impulses to nineteenth-century nation-
alists such as Mahendra Lal Sircar who advocated the construction of
an advanced research institute in Calcutta in 1869, Rajendra Lal Mitra
who dedicated himself to translating techno-scientific terms into Bengali
in 1877, Prafulla Chandra Roy who established the pioneering Bengal
Chemical and Pharmaceuticals factory in 1893 and Asutosh Mukherjee
who was instrumental in securing Saha’s academic career.11 However,
that Nehru used his political capital and power to secure unprecedented
centrality to science and technology in the social and cultural life of
India is probably undeniable.
This is not to say that Nehru ever held consistent positions regarding
the key aspects of science and technology – ‘development’, militari-
zation and relative epistemological values of science and other kinds
of knowledge – at any point during his life. But the fluctuation and
contradictions in his thinking show precisely the historical contingency
of post-colonial science and its inevitably politicized conditions. These
were particularly sharp in his struggles to understand science both as
a marker of modernity and as an embodiment of its antinomies. In
the letters to his daughter Indira (who would one day succeed him as

11
For an outline of the centrality of science and technology in the Indian
nationalist movement, see essays by Uma Dasgupta, Arun Kumar Biswas
and Pratik Chakrabarti in Dasgupta 2011. For a thorough account of Nehru’s
intense but often tumultuous relationship with Meghnad Saha, see Robert
S. Anderson 2010, especially 160–3 and 239–42.

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 introduction 19

the prime minister of the country) written from a British jail in the
1930s, Nehru expressed both his enthusiasm for the ‘miraculous’ work
of contemporary scientists and bemoaned the ‘mad race’ for innovations
that made their work obsolete long before their effects could be properly
assessed (Singh 1988, 3–7). He was already alive to the dubious effects
of the division of labour in the practice of science:

Tens of thousands of investigators work away continuously, each

experimenting in his particular department, each burrowing away
in his own patch, and adding tiny bit by bit to the mountain of
knowledge. The field of knowledge is so vast that each worker has
to be a specialist in his own line. Often he is unaware of other
departments of knowledge [….] It becomes difficult for him to take
a wise view of the whole field of human activity. He is not cultured
in the old sense of the word. (Singh 1988, 8–9)

Nearly two decades later with the coming of independence Nehru would
commit himself to building research laboratories, the kinds of spaces that
housed and bred exactly such specialists. But his early misgivings about
science’s paramountcy in the field of knowledge would remain throughout
his life. Typically, as we have seen before, they would be expressed in
his comparisons between science and religion, the latter often coded as
‘tradition’ or ‘conservatism’ in his speeches and writings. Sometimes,
as in the case of his contrasting of Ayurvedic and modern medicine to a
gathering of health ministers in 1950, these categories would be presented
as irreconcilably opposed on the grounds of rationality (Singh 1988, 84).
At others, he would stress the complementarity of both:

Perhaps there is no real conflict between true religion and science,

but if so, religion must put on the garb of science and approach
all its problems through the spirit of science. A purely secular
philosophy of life may be considered enough by most of us. Why
should we trouble ourselves about matters beyond our ken when
the problems of the world insistently demand solution? And yet
that secular philosophy itself must have some background, some
objective, other than merely material well-being. It must essentially
have spiritual values and certain standards of behaviour, and, when
we consider these, immediately we enter into the realm of what
has been called religion. (Singh 1988, 23)

We have seen before how these attempts at folding science and religion
together would later mutate into the claims about scientific Hinduism.

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20 FINAL FRONTIERS

But unlike these latter-day saints, Nehru rightly thought of these

considerations as effects of the radically compressed experience of
modernization, mid-wived by colonialism, in India:

Because, in the final analysis, In India we are trying to jump a

few centuries – a few centuries of not only living conditions but
to some extent of mental outlook. […] In fact, one finds this often
even among, if I may say so with all respect, intellectual people.
One is surprised that although they function in a different – in a
more modern way, If I may use the word – still the old habits of
functioning in a rut remains at the back of their minds. (Singh
1988, 228)

This is precisely what Subramaniam alludes to in her formula of ‘archaic

modernity’.
The historical correlative of such intellectual development was
most painfully evident for Nehru in what he called ‘a strange
mal-development’ of India, which he memorably likened to the
monstrous figure of a man five-feet tall lumbered with arms four-feet
long (Singh 1988, 113). This alleged disfigurement was often debated
within his own party, the Indian National Congress, in terms of the
proper way to industrialize where a ‘Gandhian’ line was seen as
running counter to Nehru’s emphasis on centrally planned industrial
growth.12 Nehru himself always denied, as in his letter to Aldous
Huxley, that this was a valid premise for such a debate. He admitted
that while Gandhi favoured decentralized, small-scale industries, they
were entirely in agreement about the crucial function industrialization
had to play in India (Singh 1988, 16). But for him industrialization
needed more than anything the development of human capital and this
is where the cultivation of a public scientific culture became crucial.
In a cabinet secretarial paper written months before the declaration
of independence, he estimated that India was using less than 1 per
cent of what he called ‘scientific manpower’ (Singh 1988, 49). In 1952,
he would rebuke those who thought development could be magically
provided by the state:

12
These debates about the right way to industrialize were not confined
to Indian political parties. Indian scientists, especially key figures like
Meghnad Saha, Shanti Bhatnagar and Homi Bhabha, saw the issue as
central to India’s sovereignty and their complex relationship to Nehru was
determined to a large extent by the different positions they took on this.
See Anderson 2010, 16, 81, 87–9, 130.

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 introduction 21

Industrialization is important, no doubt, but I have sometimes got

the idea that many of our business magnates – owners of factories
and industries etc. – think of industrialization as some mechanical
process like putting some penny in the slot machine – you put
money in one end and industrialization comes out of the other
end [….] Money has some importance in this life, but I think it is
terribly overrated and the sooner we realize that, the better. One
wants money to do things. You cannot, unless you have got the
right men, the right competence and the right way to do many
things. (Singh 1988, 102)

It was a core function of ‘Nehruvian science’ to produce such ‘right

men’. Nehru was fond of recounting an anecdote about his visit to the
giant Damodar Valley dam project, when he claimed he had rebuked
an enthusiastic engineer for failing to explain to the illiterate labourers
what it was they were toiling to build. The famous scientific policy
resolution that he championed in the Indian parliament aimed to
‘foster, promote and sustain, by all appropriate means, the cultivation
of science, and scientific research in all its aspects’ both to produce
the appropriate scientific and technical personnel and to ‘secure for
the people of the country all the benefits that can accrue from the
acquisition and application of scientific knowledge’ (Singh 1988, 158).
Nehru saw techno-science driven development as primarily an organi-
zational issue. The better the state was able to organize a scientific
culture, the more sustained the nation’s development would be. As
Escobar has shown, the pervasive grip of the idea of ‘development’ on
the social imagination, even or particularly of, the leaders of the Third
World, meant that its normative status was not seriously challenged.
But Nehru’s private letters to his daughter provide evidence for his
early doubts about any pre-ordained ability of modern science to deliver
development and these remained alive despite his energetic public
declarations to the contrary.
Perhaps the most contested aspect of ‘Nehruvian science’ was its
militarization, and especially, its commitment to nuclear weaponization.
As Robert Anderson has so thoroughly demonstrated, India was unusual
in so far as long before independence it already possessed a scientific
community with an advanced theoretical knowledge of nuclear energy,
as well as sensitive information about the secret weapons programme of
both the global superpowers emerging from the rubble of a world war
(Anderson 2010, 1–2). Arguably, much of India’s programme for building
scientific institutions after independence had its origins in the institu-
tional and personal networks built by these scientists within and outside

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22 FINAL FRONTIERS

the country from the 1930s onward. Nehru himself had been inducted
into this network by the late 1930s when he accepted the invitation of
Meghnad Saha (spurred on by the intermediary urgings of Rabindranath
Tagore) to become the chairman of the national planning committee
of science and culture – a body charged with building feasible models
of scientifically planned development of an independent country in the
future (Anderson 2010, 84). Saha extended the invitation to Nehru on
the grounds that other than Gandhi, no one else commanded the same
kind of political capital in India as he (‘first in war, first in peace’). But
it was precisely Nehru’s political acumen that would be challenged by
the Janus-faced nature of nuclear power – at once a potential source
of energy required for peaceful nation-building and the pre-eminent
weapon of the Cold War world.
Saha had himself eloquently articulated this problem in a series of
essays he wrote in the wake of the Manhattan Project and the decimation
of Japan. On the one hand, he was full of praise for the process of
planning and building nuclear weapons because it could work as model
for a well-functioning ‘state science’. If a team of well-chosen scientists
was selected for studying a problem in an objective way, and directed
to find out the remedy, and if sufficient funds and power be placed
in its hands to execute plans, it can be trusted to solve problems of
reconstruction that baffle the professional politician (Anderson 2010, 128).
On the other hand, such heroic labour could clearly result in appalling
crimes against humanity – ‘No greater vile or criminal application of a
great and magnificent scientific discovery could have ever possibly been
made. This has rudely shaken the conscience of the scientists today and
they are gradually becoming alive to their responsibility’ (Anderson 2010,
128). Perhaps so. But scientific consciences were easily over-ridden by the
calculus of local, regional and global political imperatives, and this was
where someone like Nehru was called upon to make difficult decisions.
India’s commitment to nuclear power posed two over-riding challenges
to Nehru’s declared intentions regarding the kind of society he wanted
to build. Could the secrecy required for nuclear research be squared
with the transparent and accountable democracy he said he wanted to
build? And how could India set a course for a non-violent foreign policy
that was non-aligned to the Cold War superpowers if the government
was involved in the international trade of fissile material and transfer of
weapons technology? The question of secrecy was a particularly knotty
one for Nehru the parliamentarian. When pressed by his colleagues,
such as the minister of finance, C. D. Deshmukh, about the spiralling
cost of the Atomic Energy Commission, he claimed to know nothing
about how the organization worked, but at the same time provided him

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 introduction 23

with summaries of the reports of the meetings as well as the details

of the budget for the nuclear programme (Anderson 2010, 200). Later,
he admitted that secrecy and science did not go well together, but it
was the unfortunate result of how the great powers compelled India to
behave: ‘Those other countries are more advanced than we are, and if
we have any association with them in regard to this work, they want us
to keep it secret, even if we do not’ (Anderson 2010, 200). He repeated
this line in the tumultuous passage of the Atomic Energy Bill through
the Indian parliament in 1948:

We have, therefore, ourselves proceeded somewhat cautiously, that

is to say, in the sense that research work cannot be as public as
normal scientific research work ought to be. Firstly, because if we
did that may be the advantage of our research would go to others
before even we reaped it, and secondly it would become impossible
for us to cooperate with any other country which is prepared to
cooperate with us in this matter, because it will not be prepared
for their own research to become public. Therefore, this Bill lays
down that this work should be done in privacy and in secrecy.
(Singh 1988, 60–1)

But it was clear from the outrage of many of his colleagues that nuclear
toxicity had a tendency to contaminate democratic practices.
Nehru’s defence of secrecy on the grounds of India’s entanglement
with global superpower politics thus raised profound questions about
his much-vaunted non-violent, non-aligned foreign policy. He had
been struck by the possibility of developing an international alliance
between former colonies in the legendary Brussels congress of 1923
and had outlined the principles of such a strategy in the Asian
Relations conference that he convened amidst the gathering clouds of
the disastrous partition of India in 1947 (Brecher 1998, 341–2; Edwardes
1971, 109; Gopal 1975 vol. 1, 544–5). His most explicit statements about
the non-aligned movement, of course, came at the Bandung conference
of Asian and African nations in 1955 – an event he did much to convene
and that is now commonly accepted as the landmark moment in the
formation of the Third World:

We are not, I hope, yes-men sitting here to say yes to this country
or that, saying yes even to one another. I hope we are not. We are
great countries of the world who like having freedom, if I may say
so, without dictation. Well, if there is anything that Asia wants to
tell the world, it is this: there is going to be no dictation in the

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24 FINAL FRONTIERS

future; no “yes-men” in Asia, I hope, nor in Africa. But in the

future we shall only co-operate as equals; there is no friendship
when nations are not equal, when one has to obey the other and
one dominates the other. (Asian-African Conference 1955, 8–9)

Benjamin Zachariah has argued that such strategic vision was also
intimately related to Nehru’s attempts to chart a middle course between
the left and right wings of his own party in his search for domestic
stability (Zachariah 2004, 140). His nuclear policy turned out to be the
reactor where the collision between international and national forces
and the imperatives of a ‘scientific state’ became brilliantly luminous.
As the secret shipment of uranium oxide from Canada (in exchange
for promises of access to India’s thorium deposits) organized as early
as 1947 by Homi Bhabha shows, Nehru’s quest for a moral leadership
of a peaceful Third World was always going to be an ambiguous affair
(Anderson 2010, 192–3). He could loftily assert, on being presented
plans for the growth of the Indian Army, ‘We don’t need a defence plan
[….] scrap the Army. The police are good enough to meet our security
needs’ (Anderson 2010, 206). He could embed the principles of nuclear
technology transfer for exclusively peaceful purposes as well as proposals
for an international atomic energy agency in the ‘Final Communique’ of
the Bandung conference (Selected Documents 1955, 29–30). But he could
not gainsay the fact that his commitment to nuclear power meant that
‘Nehruvian science’ in India would always carry a distinctly militant
edge.13

News from the semi-periphery

This confluence of ‘Nehruvian science’, post-colonial nation-building

and Third-World internationalism was a formative condition of the
fiction of Ray, Mitra and Bardhan. But it will be obvious from my
remarks above that I do not want to argue for any radical alterity of
Indian science fiction. The idea of a ‘one but unequal’ world literary
system carries with it the commitment of paying attention to both the
singularity and relationality of literary and cultural forms at the same
time. Thus, what I have called ‘non-aligned Indian science fiction’
here bears striking family resemblance to other kinds of writing from
zones primarily outside western Europe and North America (as well

13
On the various ambiguities in Nehru’s non-violent non-aligned policy see
Zachariah 2004, 155–9.

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 introduction 25

as to certain ‘underdeveloped’ segments within them). With these it

shares certain key features – a seemingly belated and sudden emergence
of a group of authors experimenting with the genre; the group’s
creative struggles with the weight of a foreign canon or ‘selective
tradition’ (Milner 2012, 22–40); the formation of a print-cultural
network of adequate density within which their work circulated; the
intersection of literary and audio-visual media key to the sensibility
of the authors; their critical interrogation of the boundaries between
science and adjacent modes of knowledge (often coded as ‘magic’); their
engagement with the issues of national development – economic and
cultural (usually designated as ‘modernization’); their corresponding
engagement with the international world order dominated by colonial,
imperial or neo-colonial powers.
Andrea Bell comments on the absence for a long time of any coherent
science fictional tradition at a continental scale in Latin America, and
then a sudden efflorescence of it in the 1960s (Bell 1999, 441). Similar
observations have been made regarding Japanese science fiction by
Tatsumi, who observes that even when compared to the genre’s rapid
formation in the US (over three decades from the ‘Jazz Age’ to the
1950s), the Japanese case gives the impression of greater chronotopic
compression, springing from the ground zero of space adventures to
‘new wave’ all within a single decade (Tatsumi 2000, 105). Rachel
Heywood Ferreira sees the nineteenth century and not the 1960s as the
time when Latin American science fiction came into its own, and to
that extent differs from Bell’s genealogy. But she usefully identifies the
creative struggle of Latin American writers with the ‘North’ in order
to establish a distinctive regional literary and cultural tradition as one
of the primary drivers of this process (Ferreira 2007, 432). Much of
this struggle for national or regional cultural autonomy understandably
took and continues to take the form of a simultaneous importing and
adaptation of works from the established ‘selective traditions’. Liang
Qi Chao and Lu Xun, two of the greatest figures of modern Chinese
culture, imparted to Chinese science fiction a decisive impulse when they
began translating Jules Verne’s fiction at the beginning of the twentieth
century while also writing pioneering science fiction texts themselves
(Song 2013, 15). They both did so in the belief that ‘science fiction would
help the spread of modern knowledge in China, emancipate people’s
minds and bring positive developments to a declining civilization that
was being surpassed by the industrialized Western nations’ (Song 2013,
15). Exactly the same pattern is evident in the case of Latin America
in the nineteenth century, when science fiction was seen as a part of
a wider scientific culture, the establishment of which would free the

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26 FINAL FRONTIERS

nations of the region of their dependence on the colonial and imperial

‘North’ (Ferreira 2007, 433–4).
But as we have seen, if science was held to be the key to the moderni-
zation of the post-colonial nations, it was also subject to penetrating (and
often fictional) criticisms by being assessed in comparison to adjacent
or competing forms of knowledge. In the case of African and Oceanic
science fiction, this was often expressed in terms of what has been called
‘archaic’ or ‘mythic’ modes and styles. As such, these kinds of writing
have the virtue of focusing our attention on the prolonged generic border
wars between science fiction and fantasy as well as on the historically
contested and contingent nature of science and technology themselves. If
both the propositions – ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistin-
guishable from magic’ and ‘any sufficiently rigorously defined magic is
indistinguishable from science’ – are true (Milner 2012, 103), then they
perhaps ought to be joined by a third – any rigorous division between
science and magic may in the final instance be essentially ideological in
nature. If the literary style that challenges such a division can be neither
realist or modernist, a third, more appropriate designation for it, might
take the form of something like Michael Lowy’s ‘critical irrealism’ (Lowy
2007, 193–206) instead of the alternatives considered by Milner in his
useful discussion (Milner 2012, 26–30). Lowy does not include science
fiction in his discussion of ‘critical irrealism’ but it is worth recalling
his definition to see how closely it describes the work of Third-World
science fiction:

The term ‘critical irrealism’ can be applied to oeuvres that do not

follow the rules governing the ‘accurate representation of life as
it really is’ but that are nevertheless critical of social reality. The
critical viewpoint of these works of art is often related to the
dream of another, imaginary world, either idealized or terrifying,
one opposed to the grey, prosaic, disenchanted reality of modern,
meaning capitalist, society. Even when it takes the superficial form
of a flight from reality, critical irrealism can contain a powerful
implicit negative critique, challenging the philistine bourgeois order.
(Lowy 2007, 196)

Whether marketed as elite or popular cultural commodity, such

writing is usually sustained by a print-media network made up
of magazines, journals and small presses. There have been many
Gernsbackian formations in the Third World that have not, until
recently, received any sustained critical or historical attention. This
is despite the fact that magazines like Argentina’s Más Allá had a

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 introduction 27

continental reach with a circulation of 20,000 issues per month, and

its 48 consecutive numbers have acquired mythic status since its
demise (Heywood Ferreira 2016, 209). In the Indian sub-continent,
and restricting for the moment our discussion to one of India’s 122
major languages, Bengali, magazines like Sandesh, Ashchorjo! and the
various puja annuals published by presses like Deb Sahitya Kutir where
science fiction found a congenial home had lower geographical span,
although the sheer volume of Bengali-language readers means that
they were probably numerically comparable to the legendary Amazing
Stories and other American pulp magazines. Here, we will also do
well to remember Milner’s salutary caveat against overemphasizing
the ‘literariness’ of twentieth-century science fiction writing. If it is
indeed the ‘concentration of interest in science and technology’ that
distinguishes the genre, Milner sees this persisting ‘within the novel
and the short story, but [is] also redeployed into various theatrical,
film, radio and television genres of the dramatic mode’ (Milner 2012,
12). Among the writers we will look at below Ray is regarded as
probably the leading auteur of modern Indian cinema who also did
pioneering work in photography and print design, and Mitra also was
an accomplished film director and scriptwriter. While any sustained
discussion of the relationship between their cinema or photography
and writing is outside the scope of our enquiries, a fuller analysis of
Indian science fiction in the twentieth century awaits the mapping
of the genre across multiple media of the period.
But these family resemblances between Indian and other Third-World
science fiction should not blind us to the fact that they also shared
some of the most basic features with their counterparts produced in
the core Euro-American zones such as the key role also played there by
magazines and small presses, the relative importance of the short story
form and distribution of the genre throughout a multimediascape. The
axioms proposed by Milner regarding the general structure of the field
of science fiction – the contested boundaries of the genre’s ‘selective
tradition’ and the membranous nature of that boundary between
the genre and the modernist ‘literary canon that permits a restricted
movement between the two (Milner 2012, 39–67) – also holds true for
the more limited sub-field of Indian science fiction. The striking and
simultaneous differences between the two emerge around the ways
in which they registered the process of modernization and the distri-
bution of the political power in the Cold War era. Should we think of
these differences as being those between the literatures of a ‘core’ and
‘semi-periphery’, or is it more useful to think of these in terms of the
distinctions between that of a ‘core’ and ‘periphery’?

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28 FINAL FRONTIERS

These terms have entered into science fiction criticism recently and
most notably through the work of Milner who has been interested in
testing out Franco Moretti’s model of ‘world literature’ that we have
already encountered above. As I remarked in relation to that discussion,
understanding science fiction as a world literary genre seems exactly right
to me. But exactly what kind of world literary genre is it? For Milner,
the difference between a semi-peripheral and peripheral science fictional
literary culture is basically that the former substantially contribute to the
overall global reach of the genre and the latter cannot (Milner 2012, 166).
Therefore, in his view, the science fictional semi-peripheries comprise
mostly of Europe, inter-war North America and post-war Japan, while
the peripheries emerged in ‘those cultures that have received texts from
and even to some extent imitated the Franco-British and American-
Japanese cores, but did not independently contribute to the development
of the global selective tradition’ (Milner 2012, 166). These turn out to
be early nineteenth-century Japan and early twentieth-century Poland.
Where does that leave the substantial body of Third-World writing?
It seems to me what is at stake here is not only a matter of extending
our range of reference to the long tradition of tri-continental science
fiction. It may be that Milner’s understanding of the tripartite division of
the world system has absorbed from some of the ambiguities embedded
in both Wallerstein’s political–economic and Moretti’s literary models.
As originally articulated by Wallerstein, the ‘semi-periphery’ is both a
spatial unit and a specific economic work performed by a particular
class that dominates this zone:

The semiperiphery, however, is not an artifice of statistical cutting

points, nor is it a residual category. The semiperiphery is a necessary
structural element in a world-economy. These areas play a role
parallel to that played, mutatis mutandis, by middle trading groups
in an empire. They are collection points of vital skills that are often
politically unpopular. (Wallerstein 2011, 231)

We should note here in passing that this zone is not necessarily identical
with national boundaries. As such, it can operate both within and beyond
nations. Moretti’s initial attempt to import this systemic model into
literary theory altogether neglected this crucial unit. Subsequently, he
sought to correct this oversight but at the cost of emphasizing the spatial
aspect of this unit over the specifications regarding class and modes
of work: ‘By reducing the literary world system to core and periphery,
I erased from the picture the transitional area (the semi-periphery)
where cultures move in and out of the core; as a consequence, I also

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 introduction 29

understated the fact that in many (and perhaps most) instances, material
and intellectual hegemony are indeed very close, but not quite identical
(Moretti 2003, 77).
Yes, ‘cultures move in and out’ but of course they do not do so by
themselves or by some divine fiat. Who or what are the agents of such
cultures in transition? We are reduced to guessing here, although one
could argue that Moretti’s other work leaves us in no doubt as to the
identity of such agents.14 In Milner’s usage, on the other hand, the
specificities of space and class have receded. But subsequently, it turns out
that ‘cultures’ mean more or less national cultures, hence his references
to Russian, German, Japanese, Polish and other semi-peripheral science
fiction. In so doing, he misses the chance to explore how Wallerstein’s
original tripartite structure allows us to bring the national, local/regional
and international levels together in a relational field of analysis. Milner’s
Bourdieusian framework enables him to be scrupulous in his attention
to the role played by the bourgeois artists and public in the formation
and distribution of science fictional literature across the world. But his
equation of ‘semi-peripheries’ with national cultures means that only
certain national bourgeoisie can be thought to possess what Wallerstein
calls ‘vital skills’ of creatively mediating between the (cultural) capital
of the core zones and the raw (fictional) materials extracted from the
peripheries. In this scheme, the rest of the ‘middle groups’ in the world
system, all located outside Europe, can only engage in baldly imitative
and not creative work that does not allow them to make any contribution
to science fiction’s worldly life.
In contrast, my proposal here is that Indian science fiction of the
mid-twentieth century, like its other Third World and even certain
European counterparts, is semi-peripheral in nature. It is so both in
terms of the space it inhabited and the specific kinds of literary labour
that produced it. As we shall see below, Mitra, Ray and others not
only benefitted from the network of press and book trade in cities like
Calcutta or Pune, but folded into their writing their own semi-peripheral
formations, mediating between the marginal areas of the Bengal or
Maharashtra and their adjacent regions and the core zones towards the
north and west of the country, where economic and political powers in
post-colonial India were and are located. At the same time, these writer’s
affiliation with the bhadralok or genteel bourgeoisie conferred on them

14
For Moretti’s appreciation of the intermediary role played by the ‘middle
trading groups’ in the formation of world literatures, see his The Bourgeois:
Between Literature and History 2013 and The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman
in European Culture 1987.

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30 FINAL FRONTIERS

certain kinds of cultural capital that in turn enabled them to engage to

varying degrees in creative adaptation of ‘foreign form’ through ‘local
themes’ and ‘local voices’ that was very far from sterile adaptations of
Anglo-French or American exemplars of the genre. To that extent, they
continued the Bengali (and, to a lesser extent, Marathi) bourgeoisie’s
claims of being the ‘sentinels of [Indian] culture’ from the colonial to
the post-colonial eras (Bhattacharya 2005, Sartori 2008).
Among this group, it is undoubtedly Ray’s writing that is best known
internationally, thanks to his reputation as one of modern cinema’s
foremost auteurs. What is perhaps less familiar is his location in a
particular Bengali social milieu that in many respects illuminated the
limits and possibilities of semi-peripheral cultures. One of the central
contradictions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial capitalism
in India was the simultaneous underdevelopment of the economic
capacities of the indigenous middle classes (particularly in Bengal), and
the overdevelopment of their cultural resources. Thus, any serious survey
of this class frequently reveals the pairing of the cult of the relatively
modest white-collar jobs in the colonial administrative machine (chakri)
along with the furiously energetic cultural activities ranging from
religious reforms to striking literary innovations. Accordingly, it was
in this latter sphere that the bhadralok men’s capacities of combining
‘foreign form’ with ‘local matter’ and ‘local voice’ acquired its most
distinctive dimensions.
Even amongst this peculiar formation, the Ray family shone bright
because of its striking felicities with the various cultural modes and
technologies. Prominent members of the reformist Bramho society, which
was often at loggerheads with orthodox Hindus, the Ray men were also
unusual bhadraloks in so far they did not produce ‘lawyers, doctors,
clerks’ and merely one government functionary (Sengoopta 2016, 16–17).
Instead, at least until the 1920s, they may be best understood in terms
of what Marx once called ‘small masters’ – small-scale (in this case,
cultural) entrepreneurs who both owned the means of production and
fully expended labour in producing commodities, which in the case
of the Rays was printing and print-block manufacturing. Satyajit’s
grandfather Upendrakishore was a musician and a photographer whose
experiments with half-tone print production earned the astonished
notice of British technical journals: ‘He is far ahead of European and
American workers in originality and this is more surprising when it is
considered how far he is from the hub centres of process work, which
has necessitated his dependence on reading and experiment (Sengoopta
2016, 211). This capacity to leapfrog the creative capabilities of core
zones, not despite but because of the economic underdevelopment, we

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 introduction 31

can take as one of the signatures of semi-peripheral cultures. From this

productively contradictory position, Upendrakishore could argue that
contemporary Indian and European art had their own specificities but
were related in their attempts to register a singular world (Sengoopta
2016, 259). And since a nation’s capacity to fully inhabit this singular
world rested in large measure on developing its children’s sensibility,
Upendraksihore in 1913 founded the magazine Sandesh, which aimed to
offer a delicious confection of ‘archeology to science, from biographies to
mythological tales, from translations of European literature to original
stories, plays, and riddles’ to its young readers (Sengoopta 2016, 224).
This was the magazine that Satyajit would inherit after more than four
decades and publish his Professor Shonku stories in.
True to his ‘small masterly’ affiliations, Upendrakishore wrote,
illustrated and printed Sandesh by himself. In his memoirs, Satyajit would
write of roaming as a child in the press and the printing workshop
spread over two floors of his grandfather’s house, entranced by the
various paper samples that had come all the way from Germany (Ray
1998, 9). This scale of production process meant that Sandesh had a
print-run of 3,000 copies and its cheap price meant that it rarely met
the cost of producing it (Sengoopta 2016, 225). On Upendrakishore’s
death in 1915, the editorial duties passed to his mercurial son Sukumar,
Satyajit’s father. Sukumar Ray would die tragically young, within eight
years of taking over Sandesh, but in his custody the magazine changed
from being primarily aimed at children to one catering for young adults
(kishore in Bengali). Sukumar’s own distinctive sensibility could be seen
in the larger space devoted to poetry that often show-cased his ‘nonsense
language games’ that combined the ‘irrational substance of colonial
reality, and the rational response to it’ (Sengoopta 2016, 324). Indeed,
Sukumar’s ‘nonsense’ poetry and drama is arguably among the most
successful examples of the creative fusion of ‘foreign forms’ and ‘local
themes/matters’ not only in the Ray family, but in world literature as
such. In the poems of the Abol Tabol collection or a play like Haw-Jaw-
Baw-Raw-Law can be glimpsed the exemplary use of Edward Lear or
Lewis Carroll’s prototypes in the making of a ‘counter discourse’ to
the colonial ideology of development (Sengoopta 2016, 332). Much of
Satyajit’s own science fiction absorbed his father’s sensibilities.
Like his father and grandfather before him, Satyajit Ray’s cultural
formation showed a marked openness to the world. His youthful
artistic preferences (Gainsborough, Landseer, Reynolds, Rodin, Cezanne,
Giorgione), literary taste (Christie, Conan Doyle, Woodhouse) and
fascination with the various Hollywood genres are sometimes seen
as indications of his ‘europhilia’ (Sengoopta 2016, 324–6). But, like

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32 FINAL FRONTIERS

Upendrakishore, he was interested in both the specificity of Indian

art forms and the characteristics they shared with their European
counterparts – the hallmarks of a properly comparative and worldly,
not to say internationalist, sensibility (Robinson 1989, 51). This could
be seen in all his artistic work – from the early calligraphic designs
he incorporated into advertisement campaigns, his typographical
innovations, his films and his fiction. Ray was also unusually perceptive
about precisely what I have called a moment ago the signature of
semi-peripherality – the relationship between economic underdevel-
opment and cultural advancement. Of all the films he watched during
his brief sojourn in Europe, it was De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves that had the
most decisive influence on him, and the reasons he offered for this are
revealing: ‘I came out of the theatre my mind fully made up. I would
become a film-maker [….] I would make my film exactly as De Sica had
made his: working with non-professional actors, using modest resources,
and shooting on actual locations.’ The village which Bibhutibhushan
Bandopadhyay had so lovingly described in his novels would be a living
backdrop to Ray’s Apu trilogy just as the outskirts of Rome were for De
Sica’s film (Robinson 1989, 72). Perhaps nowhere else is this creative
privilege conferred by economic constraint or ‘backwardness’ better
expressed than in the famous ‘Dance of the Ghosts’ episode in Goopy
Gayen, Bagha Bayen (1969) – a fantasy adventure that left American and
European critics bewildered (Robinson 1989, 182). Ray himself thought
of the six-and-a-half-minute sequence as ‘a most abstract, avant-garde
affair which I haven’t the faintest idea how people are going to react
to’ (Robinson 1989, 186). In it, four kinds of ghosts appear to the
travel-weary Goopy and Bagha and through ‘a long series of visual
and aural cuts’ seem to offer a kind of compressed history of colonial
class-formation through their dance movements (Robinson 1989, 187).
Despite Ray’s own misgivings about the effectiveness of the avant-
gardist register, the discrepancy between the film’s success in Bengal
(and India) and its critical reception in Europe and America points to,
as Keya Ganguly has correctly emphasized, the kind of impoverished
thinking about modernism that presumes the diffusion of the style from
Paris, London and New York to the rest of the world (Ganguly 2010,
13–15). Ray’s films and his writings suggest modernism’s (and modernist
avant-garde’s) multiple international points of emergence in anti-colonial
struggles as well as trenchant critiques of capitalist modernization by
Third-World intellectuals (Ganguly 2010, 3). Seen thus, Ray’s cinema
and his science fiction, despite his own tendency to think of the latter
as ‘mere entertainment’, should be properly understood as related parts
of a total artistic project.

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 introduction 33

If Ray’s science fiction has been relatively eclipsed by his cinema,

at least among his international audiences, those written by Mitra and
others like Adrish Bardhan are even less familiar to them.15 Yet, they
share some striking similarities with Ray’s formation as an artist of the
semi-peripheral world. Mitra, for example, was firmly embedded in the
avant-gardist (ati-adhunik in Bengali) literary magazine culture of 1920s
Calcutta. Emerging as a notable poet, short-story writer and essayist
in pioneering publications such as Kallol and Kali-Kalam, Mitra saw his
milieu in distinctly worldly and internationalist terms:

We are not equals, of course, to Knut Hamsun or Maxim Gorky,

but let it be known that it is certainly they whom we have learnt
our lessons of life from [….] But don’t think this writing would
emerge only if we copy a Hamsun’s manner or make use of a
Gorky’s ink. They won’t. The true writing comes forth from one’s
deep realization of life. (Bandyopadhyaya 1999, 13–14)

His fellow writers were entirely in agreement, and the pages of

Kallol contained essays not just on Hamsun and Gorky, but on Zola,
Maupassant, Mann, Whitman and Benavente. We should also note in
passing that the contours of the world literary space as seen from Bengal
relegated Anglo-American writing to a much more realistic, provincial,
proportion in contrast to the view from Bloomsbury. Mitra had direct
experience of life in the peripheries of Calcutta, spending much of his
youth and adult life in towns such as Mirzapore, Naihati, Ghatshila and
Jhajha, but this did not prevent him from developing a reading habit
that included Dickens, Verne and Chesterton alongside Bengali writers
like Sharatchandra Chattopadhyaya (Bandyopadhyaya 1999, 7). From the
1930s, he became a regular contributor to a number of children’s and
young-adult’s magazines such as Rangmashal, Mouchak and Ramdhanu
that tried to emulate the example of Sandesh in informing, educating
and entertaining the future citizens of an independent India. Like Ray,
Mitra ranged well beyond his literary activities. Around the same time
he started writing in Rangmashal, Mitra also made his debut as a script-
writer in the romantic comedy film Pathe Bhule, and went on to have a
distinguished career both as writer and director. In the 1950s he worked

15
Such recognition is now being accorded to them by contemporary Indian
science fiction writers such as Vandana Singh, who do command interna-
tional attention by writing in English, and who identify Mitra’s Ghana-da
stories exercising decisive influence on their own work. See Kurtz 2016,
536–7.

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34 FINAL FRONTIERS

as a producer and consultant for the Indian state-owned radio station,

Akashbani (Bandyopadhyaya 1999, 22–7). Mitra’s poetry has often
been noted for its engagement with Whitman, and his science fictional
writing with Wells and Capek (Bandyopadhyaya 1999, 75–6). In his
Ghana-da stories we will see how such engagements can be understood
as semi-peripheral transformations of a world literary genre.
Younger than Ray and Mitra, Adrish Bardhan was in a sense the most
Gernsbackian of the figures under consideration here. He is best known
as the inventor of the Bengali term for science fiction – kalpabigyan –
and as the editor of the first Bengali science fiction magazine Ashchorjo!
(Wonder!) in 1962. Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay’s entry in the Encyclopaedia
of Science Fiction suggests that the magazine specialized in bigyanbhittik
galpo or ‘science-based stories’, one of the three constitutive modes he
sees operating in Indian science fiction (the other two are named as
bigyannirbhor galpo or ‘science-dependent stories’ and bigyan-rahasya or
‘science-mysteries’) (Chattopadhyay 2015, n.p.). These distinctions are
useful in so far as they help Chattopadyay sustain his argument regarding
kalpabigyan – that unlike its Euro-American counterparts, it is better
understood as a narrative mode where the diachronic transformation of
science through contact with adjacent fields of knowledge is dramatized
(Chattopadhyay 2015, n.p.). My emphasis below will fall not so much on
any fundamental difference between Indian and Euro-American science
fiction, but in equal parts on the formal and thematic innovations in
this literature and the semi-peripheral conditions that enabled, if not
compelled, such moves. Like Ray and Mitra, Bardhan was interested in
Conan Doyle and Jules Verne and was a prolific translator of their works
(in particular of the Sherlock Holmes canon). His own science fiction is
stamped with parody and satire that critically scrutinizes, among other
things, the ideologies of development and the Cold War global order.
The main vehicle for such scrutiny is the central figure of the scientist
himself, described by Bardhan as an unkempt, dentally challenged old
man whose name would immediately signal the absurd quality of his
scientific work – Professor Nut-Boltu-Chakra. Most of Bardhan’s own
writing, as opposed to his editorial and translational work, came after
Nehru’s death and some decisive alterations in the characters of both
‘Nehruvian science’ and the non-aligned movement. As such, we will
be paying a rather fleeting attention to his work in comparison to the
writing to Mitra and Ray. Yet, as a figure bridging the writers of the
classically Nehruvian generation to those of the post-Nehruvian dispen-
sation, he remains a key point of reference. In our readings, therefore,
we will compare his sensibilities to those of his predecessors but also in
relation to his contemporaries such as the Marathi writer and scientist

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 introduction 35

J. V. Narlikar and Vandana Singh, the cosmopolitan scientist and writer

from Delhi who is also an academic in the US. It is far from accidental,
for instance, that comic-heroic scientist figures who are often the
targets of ironic undercutting of authority are common to the works
of Mitra, Ray and Bardhan as well as to that of the later writers. They
work as the key device around which some of the central concerns of
‘Nehruvian non-aligned science’ – space, weapons, aliens and above all
the development of the world – are staged and interrogated. We now
turn to the exploration of such devices and aliens after this long but
necessary preamble.

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 Chapter One

Laboratory lives
Laboratory lives

Bodies of evidence

Ghana-da entered the world in 1945 as a deceptively mundane witness

to the long and complex chain of historical events that had climaxed
in a world-wide conflagration:

It is impossible to guess his age from his tall, dry, bony appearance.
He could be anywhere between thirty-five and fifty-five. If asked,
he would say with a faint smile – ‘It is hard to keep track of
one’s birthdays while travelling the world, but…’ and then begin
to tell us of his experiences during the Sepoy Mutiny or the first
Russo-Japanese War. So we have given up trying to guess how
old Ghana-da really is. We believe that there are not many places
he has not been over the past two hundred years, nor are there
many historic events in which he has failed to take part during
that period. (Mitra 2000 vol. 1, 21)1

The ironic narrator’s perspective – unable to wholly believe or entirely

dismiss Ghana-da’s tall-tales – is key not only to the Suvinian interplay
of cognition and estrangement in Mitra’s fiction, but also to the
formation of one of the most important elements of such a process –
a critical imagination that Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay calls ‘wonder’
(Chattopadhyay 2016, 435–7). I want to pay attention here to the
importance of a particular kind of location in Indian science fiction of
the Nehruvian era that is key to this narrative production of critical
imagination – the wondrous space of the laboratory in which certain
models of truth and knowledge are both produced and tested. This is

1
All citations from Mitra’s Ghana-da stories here are my translations from
the volumes edited by Dasgupta 2000.

37

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38 FINAL FRONTIERS

not an entirely whimsical choice that denies the importance of other

kinds of locations that also appear in this literature – ‘modern’ urban
buildings and libraries, ‘primitive’ forests, caves, submarine worlds,
off-world planets, inter-galactic spaces, etc. But I do want to suggest that
the laboratory in such narratives provide us with vital clues regarding the
social functions of these other spaces. That is, the laboratory is a kind
of primal scene that produces certain readerly predispositions regarding
the interpretation of the location of the characters and the actions they
perform. Such interpretations then allow us a glimpse of the networked
relationships between humans and the world they inhabit. At various
points in these narratives, different kinds of spaces behave like they are
laboratories, and characters moving in and through them behave like
they are in one. At others, laboratories strongly take on the various
qualities usually associated with these adjacent locations and, in this
manner each are irradiated by history just as the historical processes
are operationalized by them.2
Consider what follows the first description of Ghana-da above in the
story ‘Mosha’ (‘Mosquito’ 1945). Having barged into a conversation in
the living room of the men’s hostel at 72 Banamali Naskar Lane about
the eradication of mosquitos, our hero embarks on a tale about his
adventures on the remote Sakhalin island on the eve of the Second World
War. In what will emerge as a formulaic device designed to enhance his
mock heroism, Ghana-da features in his own narration as a scientific
entrepreneur with extensive technical and financial expertise as well
as notable innovative flair. In Sakhalin, for example, his allegedly vast
mineralogical knowledge has landed him the job as a manager of an
unnamed company engaged in extractive activities that are carried out
by a band of wretched Chinese labourers under his supervision. He is
assisted in his task by an American colleague and scientist. The action
begins with the disappearance of Tan Lin, one of the aforementioned
labourers, and the manhunt led by Ghana-d that takes him to the lair
of a rogue Japanese scientist. Mitra’s Nehruvian perspective on the Cold
War world is fairly obvious here – India’s new bid of power and prestige
is led by a scientific hero who mediates between a recently vanquished
imperial power (Japan – ‘Mosha’ was published in 1945 but the action of
the story takes place during the earlier period of the Japanese occupation
of China) and a newly hegemonic one (the US). The ideological contest

2
The social character and function of laboratories have become something
of a critical commonplace after the pioneering work of Latour and Woolger
1986. But such understandings of scientific spaces were not entirely absent
before their work. See, for example, Swatez 1970 and Lynch 1985.

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 laboratory lives 39

for the legitimization of these rivals is staged through their tussle over
the body of the Chinese labourer which recalls the traumatized modern
history of his nation – the subject of numerous such rivalries between
imperial states throughout the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries.
Such contests call not only for the appropriate degree of Tan Lin’s
abjection, but where they take place – which turns out precisely to be a
laboratory in the middle of the northern wilderness of China:

We peered cautiously through the window into a large, well-lit

room. It was a bit like a museum, with a giant glass table in the
middle. We could not see what was on the table [….] The next
morning, Mr Nishimara showed us around his laboratory. It was
clear to us, looking at the various sections of the room, that he
was no ordinary entomologist. Every inch of the enormous space
was covered with chemical and electronic equipments designed not
only to observe insects, but also to raise and nurture them. (Mitra
2000 vol. 1, 26–7)

It is in this space, well-equipped with modern technological

wonders, that Ghana-da discovers the tortured and dying body of
Tan Lin. He has been used in a deadly experiment by the rogue
scientist Nishimara, who gloatingly reveals that instead of eradicating
malaria, his research aimed to convert mosquitos into lethal biological
weapons. In effect, Tan Lin and his numerous other compatriots have
been coerced into becoming yet another, perhaps the most wondrous,
instruments housed in Nishimara’s laboratory. The narrative denouement
arrives when a mosquito – a product of the successful experiment –
escapes during the confrontation between the desperate heroes and
Nishimara’s black African-American bodyguard (we shall look at the
importance of such racialized figures in Nehruvian science fiction
below) and administers its deadly bites to its creator. The story thus
secures the claims of the surviving Indian and American scientist-
entrepreneurs to steer the post-war world away from deviant uses of
scientific knowledge.
At one level, Mitra’s story is a remarkable early registration of criminal
uses of science in the Second World War. Specifically, Nishimara’s use
of the absconding Chinese worker in his laboratory experiments recalls
the activities of the infamous Unit 731 of the Japanese imperial army
stationed in Harbin in north-eastern China. There, under the supervision
of Surgeon-General Shiro Ishii, around 3,000 men, women and children
were subjected to live vivisection, infected with a variety of diseases,
frozen to death in frost-bite experiments and used as targets for chemical

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40 FINAL FRONTIERS

and biological weapons.3 Literature after Auschwitz or Harbin may

necessarily be barbaric, as Adorno suggested (in contrast to the misquo-
tation usually attributed to him about the impossibility of poetry after
death camps), but one way it seeks to open its own barbarism to critical
inquiry has indeed been to deploy deliberately misplaced narrative modes
such as the comic-ironic in the depiction of this fallen world. Such, at
any rate, seems to be Mitra’s wager here. For what precedes the hero’s
pantomime escape from the Japanese laboratory is the rogue scientist’s
confession about the symbiotic relationship between science and power:

With his high-pitched laughter, Nishimara began to explain: ‘You

find it unbelievable? Not to worry, the evidence will soon be
forthcoming. You remember me telling you about altering the
chemical composition of the mosquito saliva? I have done it. I have
experimented during each stage of the mosquito’s life-cycle, from
larva to the fully grown amphibious insect – and have succeeded
in turning its saliva into a corrosive poison. What you heard last
night was the scream of one of my test subjects. You can see the
state Tan Lin is in. Now it is your turn.’ At a sign from Nishimara,
the bodyguard pinned down Mr Martin. As he walked towards
him, Nishimara continued, ‘There is just one poisonous mosquito
in this tube. But it can easily dispatch twenty of you. You are from
the mecca of modern science, the USA. I am therefore giving you
first the honour of sacrificing your life to science. When I press
this tube against your skin, its lid will open and the mosquito will
waste no time in biting you.’ (Mitra 2000 vol. 1, 29)

The scientists themselves are always offered by Mitra as (inter-)national-

allegorical figures and the struggle between them is shot through with
the sense of ironic vengeance directed against the prevailing world
order. The joint Indo-American suppression of the dangerous desires
against such an order, framed by the tall-tale form, acts as the negative
imprint of what cannot be said in Mitra’s story – that, historically, Shiro
Ishii and other criminal scientists of Harbin were given amnesty by the
Americans after the war in exchange for the data on biological weapons
they possessed as the result of their experiments; that they were co-opted
as advisors to the US biological weapons programme; that the official

3
Most of the literature on Unit 731 is Russian and Chinese. Among the
useful English-language treatments are Sheldon H. Harris 1994, Walter
E. Grunden 2005 and Robert Peaty 1947. For an overview of the archival
material and eye-witness testimonies, also see Keiichi 2005, 1–9.

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 laboratory lives 41

name for Ishii’s program in China was ‘Epidemic Prevention and Water
Purification Department’. But none of these literary manoeuvres would
be possible without the particular charge carried by the laboratory, which
is essentially a space where diverse kinds of knowledge are produced
and tested by wondrous devices. What enabled the laboratory to become
this kind of narrative device during the years of ‘Nehruvian science’
and non-alignment?

Modern temples

Laboratories were at the centre of Nehru’s vision of India’s post-colonial

sovereignty. The eight-fold increase in the national science budget within
a decade from 1948 that Nehru oversaw meant, as David Arnold has
argued, that Indian scientists had ‘to accept the logic of funding resources
controlled by the state and state-driven science policy’ (Arnold 2013,
367–8). Nehru’s government had inherited a number of colonial scientific
institutions such as the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
(CSIR), and developed others such as the Atomic Energy Commission
(AEC), that were modelled on their British and American counterparts.
There was little ambiguity about nationalist character of these institutions
and the scientific work that they were designed to undertake – Nehru
himself thought of the chain of laboratories being built across the
country as ‘temples of science built for the service of our motherland’
(Arnold 2013, 368). But equally importantly for Nehru, such spaces
were designed to foster collaborative work and overcome what he saw
as the disadvantages inherent to modern specialist research culture that
corralled scientists into isolated silos of knowledge – a danger about
which, as we have seen before, he had already warned his daughter in
1933 (Singh 1988, 8–9). He hoped that it was such collaborative work
that would imbue Indian science with a progressive character. Nehru
acknowledged that such social responsibility often made contradictory
demands on individual scientists who might feel they would have to be
both ‘completely neutral, passionless, just observing, recording, drawing
conclusions from those records’, and full of ‘passion, wanting something,
aiming at something, at social improvement’ (Singh 1988, 88). But in
the final instance, the imperatives of the nation over-rode the pleasures
of the lone researcher:

So far as science is concerned we must give it a free hand to

grow unattached and not tied to any particular problem [….]
Nevertheless, I want to tell the scientists, that the burden of today

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42 FINAL FRONTIERS

is a great burden and we have to meet that burden as brave men

and not think of other things but try and solve it in so far as we
can; whether it is the burden of providing food to our millions or
whether it is the burden of providing something else they lack.
(Indian National Congress 1951a, 2)

Of course, such emphasis on the nationalist, collaborative and social

character of scientific work and of institutions such as laboratories
long preceded, as we have seen, Nehru’s career as India’s first prime
minister. By the mid-nineteenth century, Indian public figures as diverse
as Syed Ahmed Khan, Swami Vivekananda, Rajendralal Mitra and
Bankim Chatterjee, were all emphasizing the importance of science and
technology for the revival of India (Dasgupta 2011, xii–xlv). Nor was the
heroic labour of building nationalist scientific institutions a Nehruvian
novelty. Mahendralal Sircar’s Indian Association for the Cultivation of
Sciences was founded in 1876 precisely to instil a nationalist scientific
culture:

We want an institution which shall be for the instruction of the

masses, where lectures on scientific subjects will be systematically
delivered and not only illustrative experiments performed by the
lecturers, but the audience should be invited and taught to perform
themselves. And we wish that the Institution be entirely under
native management control […] that we may begin to learn the
value of self-reliance. (Biswas 2011, 71)

Behind Sircar’s initiative lay Ram Mohun Roy’s famous 1823 letter
to Lord Amherst where he named ‘Mathematics, Natural Philosophy,
Chemistry and Anatomy with other useful sciences’ as essential tools
for developing a modern and progressive India (Biswas 2010, 71).
We should keep in mind that, under colonial conditions, nationalist
science was often conceived of in opposition to state science – the
latter being closely associated with the patronage by and interests of
the British ruling class. Closer to Nehru’s own time, an important
institution-builder like Asutosh Mookerjee mildly upbraided Meghnad
Saha – a scientist with whom Nehru would go on to have a long and
complicated relationship – for applying to the British High Commissioner
for research funds. In Mookerjee’s view, Saha should have come to
him and his own university first on both moral and ethical grounds
(Dasgupta 2011, lv). This discomfort with the state’s close relationship
with scientific institutions – not least because of some of their colonial
imprints – persisted after independence and proved to be a major obstacle

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 laboratory lives 43

to Nehru’s attempts to realize his science and technology policies. The

other thing to remember is that even under colonialism, such ideas of
nationalist science were challenged by some of the most eminent Indian
scientists themselves. Prafulla Chandra Ray warned in 1923 how such
nationalism (and therefore nationalist science) in India could easily take
on a communal and sectarian character:

‘Our country, right or wrong’ was the watchword of an Englishman

when he plunged his country into a war of frightful consequences
[…] the word ‘national’ therefore has to be used as cautiously as
possible. But unfortunately this is not the case. An influential
section of the Hindus use the term as synonymous with a reversion
to the good old days of the Vedas or at least of the Ramayana and
the Mahabharata, while to the Muslim it recalls to his memory
the pristine glories of Islam. Ask any average educated Hindu or
Muslim as to what he means by ‘national’ and you will be treated
to a jargon of confused ideas. But this medievalism, this narrow
nationalism, this weak harkening back unto the past will not do.
(Dasgupta 2011, lvi)

Others like Jagadish Chandra Bose warned Nehru that his Indian
nationalist movement would mean nothing to ordinary Indians unless
they felt they had a stake in it, that ‘their life is worth living’ (Dasgupta
2011, lvii). Thus, one of the major tasks of Indian laboratories in the
mid-twentieth century was to suture the gap between the citizen, the
state and the nation. They were nothing if not deeply socialized spaces
from their foundation.
Permeated by an overtly nationalist ethos they may have been, but
Indian laboratories and other research sites were not necessarily socialist
in character. Indeed, private entrepreneurship played a significant role
in the formation of Indian scientific culture from very early on. An
iconic organization like the Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceuticals
Works (BCPW) was animated by a rejection of the Indian romance
with chakri or salaried colonial ‘clerkdom’ in favour of the commercial
and entrepreneurial application of science (Chakrabarti 2011, 121–2).
Such entrepreneurship often took on a regional or caste-chauvinist
form. Prafulla Chandra Ray, the presiding spirit of BCPW, scoffed
at the ‘lure of an insignificant number of coveted prizes’ that held
Bengali graduates with science degrees spell-bound, while Marwari
and Gujrati communities of Calcutta monopolized trade and commerce
(Chakrabarti 2011, 122). He hoped that entrepreneurial scientists,
conjuring marvellous inventions in their laboratories, would be at

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44 FINAL FRONTIERS

the vanguard of breaking such regional monopolies over wealth in

independent India. The great Bengali comic writer Rajshekhar Bose
thought that the upper-caste Hindu men who dominated the scientifically
educated middle-class had a historic aversion to commercial activities.
Bose proposed that scientific institutions should therefore be devoted to
affecting a cultural transformation that would imbue profit-making with
a sense of prestige – ‘young men should realise that although it is good
to know how to produce a commodity, it is very often more profitable
to know how to sell it’ (Chakrabarti 2011, 123).
Such contradictions between the social and the private entrepre-
neurial missions of Indian scientists and institutions also marked the
decades after 1947. It can be seen, schematically and no doubt simplis-
tically, in the differences that plagued the leading scientists whom Nehru
had gathered around him in order to be build a ‘laboratory state’, such
as Meghnad Saha, Shanti Bhatnagar and Homi Bhabha (Anderson 2010,
20). Bhatnagar and Bhabha saw industrial and commercial entrepre-
neurship as indispensable parts of science’s nation-building mission,
while Saha vehemently disagreed. A decade before independence,
Bhatnagar was already writing about how the Second World War
provided India with a ‘tremendous scope … to make a really substantial
contribution to the war effort by organizing a planned cohesion of
labour and industry’ (Anderson 2010, 92). He lavished public praise on
the giant Indian business houses such as the Tatas and Birlas for their
wartime profiteering and was duly rewarded when the Tata metallurgy
laboratory in Jamshedpur was handed over to him for conversion into
a national research institute. In Anderson’s judgment, in the absence
of international political leverage and a poor industrial base, Bhatnagar
saw co-operation with big business as key to national development.
Through it, he hoped to build ‘a whole chain of related laboratories,
all dedicated to building new industries, discovering new processes and
products, protected by a vigorous patent regime’ (Anderson 2010, 130).
Homi Bhabha came to very similar conclusions in 1944. Writing to the
chairperson of the Tata Trusts, J. R. D. Tata, he stressed the importance
of establishing centres for fundamental research that would also solve
‘the problems of immediate practical application to industry’ (Anderson
2010, 104–5). To Tata’s proposals of funding such a centre, he attached
two conditions – the recruitment of exceptional researchers and freedom
from state interference and control of research.4 Saha, on the other hand,
saw private enterprise as the main obstacle to national progress. Not

4
In addition to Anderson’s important study, see also the recent work by
Chowdhury 2016 on Homi Bhabha and Naik 2017.

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 laboratory lives 45

only did he emerge as a formidable critic of independent India’s energy

and nuclear programmes for this reason, he also consistently opposed
Nehru’s involvement of business leaders and industrialists in large dam
projects, oil exploration and other key government initiatives. As a
parliamentarian, he often used the floor to publicly air his grievances,
as he did after Nehru appointed two businessmen to the massive
Damodar Valley project: ‘It is wrong to hand over the administration
of the fertilizer factory to a body of private industrialists, who had no
share in its conception or erection, and who will now try to use it for
their own benefit’ (Anderson 2010, 232). Saha was equally scathing, as
a glance at the Indian parliamentary records of 1955 reveals, about the
licensing system that Nehru’s government had developed for attracting
foreign capital – something he dubbed the ‘license-permit raj’ (Anderson
2010, 236). His interventions often struck home, as an exasperated Nehru
complained in a letter: ‘After making a strong attack on everything that
Government has done and running it down, you were good enough to
compare us to Chiang Kai-Shek and his failure. It seemed to me that your
criticism was not only unjustified but completely lacking in objectivity
and therefore most unscientific’ (Anderson 2010, 240). This twinned and
conflicting pressures of entrepreneurship and building a progressive and
equitable society acted as a formative force in the Indian laboratories,
national or otherwise, during the Nehru era. It would provide science
fiction with a fertile representational problem.
Such contradictions were of course not unique to post-colonial
India. It was also evident in the reorganization of scientific research in
the US during the Cold War (Sarewitz 2011, 404–5). But the context
of post-colonial nation-building meant that the nature of scientific
knowledge and facts as well as the spaces and institutions that produced
them were immediately revealed to be socio-politically determined.
This had consequences for what was understood as science in Nehru’s
India. In their landmark study of how scientific facts are established in
laboratories, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolger show how the

material organisation of laboratory spaces are essential to this

process. First, laboratories are sites of inscription – vast amounts
of textual and diagrammatic paperwork produced by any item of
apparatus or particular configuration of such items which can
transform a material substance into a figure or diagram which is
directly usable by one of the members of the office space [….] An
important consequence of this notion of inscription device is that
inscriptions are regarded as having a direct relationship to the
original substance. (Latour and Woolger 1986, 51)

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46 FINAL FRONTIERS

Second, laboratories are sites of conversation and exchanges – both

formal and informal – between participants that are in effect acts of
negotiation about various competing meanings of their work:

Firstly, conversational material exhibits quite clearly how a myriad

of different type of interests and preoccupations are intermeshed
in scientists’ discussions. Secondly, we have presented evidence to
indicate the extreme difficulty of identifying purely descriptive,
technical, or theoretical discussions. Thirdly, we have suggested
that the mysterious thought process employed by scientists in their
setting is not strikingly different from those techniques employed
to muddle through in daily life encounters. (Latour and Woolger
1986, 166)

Finally, laboratories are sites that are linked to mechanisms of credibility

and distinction such as funding, budget, pay-offs, peer reviews etc., that
emphasize the cost of producing facts and relatedly, ‘their epistemological
stability or believability – something this expensive to produce must
be true or made valid’ (Latour and Woolger 1986, 238). For Latour
and Woolgar, the interplay between these three processes – literary
inscription, conversational negotiations and mechanisms of credibility
and distinction – results in the simultaneous disappearance of the social
character of scientific fact and its re-appearance as an explanation for the
success or failure of scientific processes (Latour and Woolger 1986, 23).
This is not to say that Latour and Woolgar offer a relativist argument
about the non-existence of facts or the epistemological equality between
their various different categories. Rather, facts or ‘reality’, they suggest,
is ‘the consequence of scientific work rather than its cause’ (Latour and
Woolger 1986, 182). Rather than being produced by analogical reasoning,
it is a construction – ‘the slow, practical craftwork by which inscriptions
are superimposed and accounts backed up or dismissed’ – that emerges as
responsible for what is accepted as scientific fact and knowledge (Latour
and Woolger 1986, 236).
Latour and Woolgar conducted their fieldwork in a US laboratory.
In the much more ‘underdeveloped’ setting of Nehru’s India, both
the socialization of science and the everyday nature of knowledge
production were even more visible. Consider Anderson’s description of
the celebration of a Bengali festival in Calcutta’s Saha Institute in 1968.
Housed in a ramshackle building, the institute was intimately linked to its
neighbourhood. While consulting a copy of Nature in the library Anderson
recalls gazing into the bedroom of an adjacent house ‘that leaned more
and more crazily against the institute’ and its elderly, snoring occupant.

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 laboratory lives 47

Thus, the laboratory and research centre was ‘completely open to the
world’ (Anderson 2010, 294). Experiments were conducted to the tune of
‘the whoops of family life or mourning of death. The Metallic clunk of the
bell of the thin rickshawallah [….] Sometimes one could hear the hammers
of the cobbler […] mending a scientist’s pretty slippers while she attended
a seminar’ (Anderson 2010, 294). There appeared to be no pronounced
spatial division of the laboratory between scientists, technicians and
support staff such as the noted by Latour and Woolgar in the US, but
the invisible lines of caste- and class-hierarchies were strong with very
little interaction between high-ranking officials and low-paid workers. A
partial exception proved to be the festival day of Visvakarma – a deity of
engineers and architects – in September 1968, when the mechanics of
the institute’s workshop invited a Hindu priest to bless their machines
and the space was transformed by incense, flowers and the presence of
their families. This scene was then furthered altered momentarily when

Suddenly, the director, registrar, and a few senior professors entered

as a procession, without warning. Benches were cleared for them
to sit down, amidst the machines. The director exchanged greetings
with familiar workers, while the priest and his assistant continued
the puja, unaffected [….] the priest had now stood up to sprinkle
“water from the Ganges river” onto all of us. There was giggling
among the gathering about the coming of the rains. Everyone
relaxed. I turned to see that the director and his party had just as
suddenly gone, having stayed about six minutes. (Anderson 2010,
296–7)

The intimate coexistence of science and religion, seemingly the most

striking aspect of Anderson’s visit, in fact serves to underline a more
fundamental structure of the laboratory space – the dynamics of power,
consent and coercion between social groups who are engaged in scientific
labour within it. What Anderson immediately noted was the relative
absence of any scientists in the little party that accompanied the director
to the workshop. The festival took place while a confrontation was
brewing between the scientists and the administrators about the financial
condition and governance of the institute. Scientists by and large stayed
away from the puja not only because they had internalized the logic of
‘rank and salary distinctions’, but also because they were anxious not to
dilute their social accreditation or distinction as pre-eminent producers
of scientific knowledge by hanging out with technicians and machinists.
By maintaining such distinctions and prestige, they hoped to strengthen
their bargaining power with the administrators (Anderson 2010, 297).

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48 FINAL FRONTIERS

The ‘open-ness’ of this particular laboratory to a variety of social

cross-currents was fairly typical of such spaces (and remain so in many
ways) in Nehru’s India. Although Anderson does contrast his experience
in Calcutta with that of the Tata Institute in Bombay in the same year,
the difference between the two seem to be of degree rather than of
kind (Anderson 2010, 298–304). The social differentiation of laboratories
have of course been among their core feature from at least the early
modern period and not only in the context of non-European science.
Steven Shapin’s meticulous investigations into Robert Boyle’s laboratories
have revealed both the collaborative work between technicians, domestic
servants and ‘gentlemen scientists’ such as Boyle in the production
of scientific knowledge and the unequal process of the authorization
of such knowledge, with the aforementioned scientist located at the
apex of a well-entrenched hierarchy (Shapin 1994, 369–83). But the
professionalization of science over the long duration of modernity in
Europe, a duration sustained by the interlocking of capitalism and
colonialism, enabled it to gradually disguise the social and historically
contingent nature of scientific knowledge. This was in contrast with
the non-metropolitan laboratories located in the former colonies, where
such professionalization occurred over a far more compressed period and
was hence less complete. The latter resembled more what Kapil Raj has
called ‘open air’ sites where the credibility and civility of gentlemen
scientists was constantly exposed to ‘the thorny question of the “other’s”
civility’, and therefore also of the credibility, of ‘indigenous interlocutors
on whose linguistic means and testimony much new knowledge and
associated material practices depended’ (Raj 2007, 103). Such was
also the case in the Nehruvian laboratories, where the co-existence
of science and religion, scientists and technicians, administrators and
politicians, machines and neighbours, experiments and siesta, all served
to interrogate the nationalist (and internationalist) missions that had
been assigned to scientific knowledge itself. Unsurprisingly, science
fiction proved to be an ideal form of such interrogations.

Test subjects

Nehru’s India is sometimes referred to as a ‘laboratory state’. As Anderson

points out, this term should be understood in a couple of ways. First, that
Indian scientists often thought of the state as their experimental subject,
one that could be developed through a trial-and-error process and
planning; second, that the state in turn was committed to incorporating
scientists in the delivery to its citizens of some of basic amenities such

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 laboratory lives 49

Figure 1: ‘Shonku’s laboratory life’, Byomjatrir Diary by Satyajit Ray

(2003).

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50 FINAL FRONTIERS

as shelter, food, healthcare, security and infrastructure (Anderson 2010,

20). But as we have seen with Latour and others, laboratories are
marked by a fundamental contradiction. On the one hand, they are
committed to the production of a special kind of knowledge, sometimes
also called ‘facts’, which appear as epistemologically stable, constant
over time and universally valid. On such ‘facts’ state policies often
rest. On the other hand, the processes through which these ‘facts’ are
produced – inscription, negotiation, accreditation, authorization – all
reveal their contingent, unstable and above all historical, political and
social determinations. In the laboratories of the science fiction of the
Nehru years, this contradiction was fully expressed.
Such representations have also left lasting legacies for Indian science
fiction long after the Nehru era. Novels like Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta
Chromosome (1995) contain memorable depictions of the role played by
colonial laboratories in the production of knowledge. In particular,
Ghosh’s emphasis on the productive role played by religious and other
non-scientific practices in the artful construction of scientific facts has
been seen as ‘a radical alternative to the hegemony of ‘Western scientific
knowledge’ (Chambers 2003, 64). In addition, Ghosh’s understanding that
colonialism often treated entire societies as laboratories is particularly
useful since it allows him to present

the tropics as the hot, fertile, colonial spaces in which the ‘human’ is
hypothesized, tested, and re-mapped and in the sense of the tropes
or figures that serve as lab equipment. Storytelling itself, the process
of finding things out, is a central actant in The Calcutta Chromosome
[….] What might be called the postcolonial human has been defined
through stories (tropically), like the debates over mass murder and
enslavement that asked whether the naked creatures ‘discovered’ in
the brave new world even counted as human. (Nelson 2003, 247)

If such fiction excavates the colonial origins of ‘facts’ about human

subjects and citizens, its Nehruvian counterpart fleshes out further a
genealogy by focusing on the post-colonial stages that revealed the
continued production of such vital, but contested social and political
categories.
As we have seen above, Mitra’s Ghana-da series began precisely by
revealing the geo-political logic of experiments with the human subject
in the mid-twentieth century. Nishimara’s unspeakable treatment of Tan
Lin’s body immediately strips the latter of any designation as a human
and converts him into nothing more than one of the scientist’s ‘test
subjects’ (Mitra 2000 vol. 1, 29). The same move involves converting a

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 laboratory lives 51

non-human species – the mosquito – into a weaponized life-form and

thus furthers the erasure of the always porous boundaries between
biological species and their mechanical counterparts. The (inter-)national
allegorical dimension at play here works obviously to outline the
threat of a rogue Asian imperial power to the established world order.
At first reading then, it would appear that the successful disruption
and termination of such experiments by the combined prowess of
the enterprising Bengali and American scientists secures the stability
of this order and quells any challenges to it. But subsequently, it is
revealed that Ghana-da’s adventures should be properly understood
as experiments themselves in so far as the negation of the attempted
Japanese construction of ‘scientific facts’ regarding species boundaries,
epidemiology and bio-weapons can take place only at the cost of leaving
a key step in that process unchanged – namely, the assumption of an
unbridgeable gap between the ‘test subjects’ and any conception of
rights and attributes that may otherwise have made them recognizable
as human beings or citizens. Seen thus, Ghana-da’s tale smuggles back
into its mock-heroic edifice the very world view that had sustained the
Japanese scientist’s criminal enterprise. The world order that it defends
turns out to be not so different from the rogue attempts to disturb it.
This is also the ‘wonder’ produced by Mitra’s tale that Ghana-da’s readers
must struggle to come to terms with.
For it is not only over and through the abject body of Tan Lin –
who appears first as a labourer absconding from a dubious extractive
enterprise, and then as the tortured victim of a bio-weapons programme
– that the life and humanity of the Bengali and the American are
established. Nishimara initially chooses Martin as Tan Lin’s successor
in his ghastly experiment both because the latter is from the ‘mecca
of modern science, the USA’ and because the intimate physical process
involved – the pressing of the same test-tube containing the mosquito
that killed the Chinese, on Martin’s skin – erased those markers consti-
tutive of the American’s humanity, gender and race, that had hitherto
distinguished him from Tan Lin. The real threat of the Japanese
experiment is not only the weaponization of a non-human species,
but the morbid equilibrium that such a weapon achieves between the
different civilizational values assigned to ‘white’ and ‘yellow’ races.
We should note, however, that in the narrative itself, Martin’s racial
attributes are never overtly presented. What permits us to assume his
whiteness?
It is here that the presence of the second ‘test subject’ – even if
not named as such – becomes crucial in the tale. When Ghana-da and
Martin stumble into Nishimara’s laboratory for the first time, they are

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52 FINAL FRONTIERS

apprehended by the Japanese scientist and his unnamed bodyguard who

calls forth an overtly racist representation – a ‘very devil of a kaffir’ (the
Bengali word deployed is Kafri). Not only do Ghana-da and Martin have
to overcome the dumb, brute force of this colonial caricature before they
can terminate Nishimara and his experiments, but their own humanity
is defined in opposition to him as an absence of blackness. Along with
Tan Lin, the unnamed ‘kaffir’ thug should then be properly understood
as one of the ‘test subjects’ or apparatuses in an experiment conducted by
Ghana-da’s narrative in a secret parallel to the more obviously heinous
activities of Nishimara. However, the outcome of both the experiments
is identical – that is, they establish the limits of the ‘human’ by defining
what it is not and, in so doing, attempt to stabilize a racialized and
gentlemanly world order.
Such representational gambit may at first appear to be resolutely
opposed to the spirit of non-alignment championed by Nehru for two
decades from the 1940s. After all, in the famous Bandung conference
of 1955 where Nehru formally announced his vision of a non-aligned
world, he also stressed how the legacies of colonial racism would first
have to be overcome if such a world was to come into being:

But I think there is nothing more terrible, there has been nothing
more horrible than the infinite tragedy of Africa in the past few
hundred years. When I think of it everything else pales into
insignificance, that infinite tragedy of Africa ever since the days
when millions of Africans were carried away as galley slaves to
America and elsewhere, the way they were treated, the way they
were taken away, half of them dying in the galleys. We must
accept the responsibility for all of this, all of us, even though we
ourselves were not directly involved [….] it is up to Asia to help
Africa to the best of her ability because we are sister continents.
(Selected Documents of the Bandung Conference 1955, 10–11)

Nehru cited the memory of the Atlantic slave trade in the hope of
forging a trans-continental Third-World sorority. Yet, note that for him
this was not a partnership of equals – it is ‘Asia’ that possessed the
capacity to assist ‘Africa’ while expecting nothing in exchange except
the noble satisfaction of having done the right thing. Such fault-lines
around ideas of race and ‘development’ ran right through the ‘Bandung
spirit’. Richard Wright, the pioneering African-American author, who
travelled to Bandung to report on the non-aligned conference, was
initially confident of the common ground he shared with the recently
independent peoples of Asia and Africa:

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 laboratory lives 53

I’m an American Negro; as such, I’ve had a burden of race

consciousness. So have these people. I’ve worked in my youth as
a common laborer, and I’ve a class consciousness. So have these
people. I grew up in the Methodist and Seventh Day Adventist
churches and I saw and observed religion in my childhood; and these
people are religious. I was a member of the Communist Party for
twelve years and I know something of the politics and psychology
of rebellion. These people have had their daily existence in such
politics. These emotions are my Instruments. (Wright 1955,  13)

But Wright’s reportage from Bandung painfully revealed the centrality

of race in non-aligned thoughts about development and progress, even
or especially during moments of epochal crises such as de-colonization.
He spoke to Asians and Africans who had no problems folding race as
a constitutive element of their anti-colonial world view:

In an intimate interview with one of the best-known Indonesian

novelists I asked him point-blank:
‘Do you consider yourself as being colored?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I feel inferior. I can’t help it. It is hard to be in contact
with the white Western world and not feel like that.’ [….] Yet he
holds the most violent attitudes towards the Japanese.
‘Those yellow monkeys!’ He spat as he referred to them.
‘But they are colored too,’ I reminded him.
‘But we Indonesians are brown,’ he told me proudly. (Wright
1955, 162–3)

Wright’s diagnoses of the Bandung moment was not optimistic. He saw

at the conference a toxic blending of racism and a ‘defensive religious
consciousness’. In his judgment, 400 years of ‘racial conditioning’ had
produced human beings for whom ‘this vicious pattern of identification’
had become second nature (Wright 1955, 100).
Thus, the laboratory in Mitra’s Mosha should be seen both as the
site where a successful experiment to establish the world historical
credentials of the Bengali gentleman is conducted and where the
prejudices and assumptions underlying the production of ‘scientific’
knowledge and facts are laid bare. Such a dual operation, we can
now see, generates precisely the dialectical tension that Jameson sees
between utopian programs (such as non-alignment, decolonization and
post-colonial nation-building) on the one hand, and utopian impulse on

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54 FINAL FRONTIERS

the other, which, by remaining heretically suspicious of and only ever

equivocally committed to the former, prevents the closing down or
foreshortening of utopic imagination itself (Jameson 2005, 3–4). If it is
indeed the case that ‘the best Utopias are those that fail most comprehen-
sively’ (Jameson 2005, xiii) because they work to make us aware of our
ideological and imaginative limits, then such work is usually organized
around a utopian space. At first sight, the laboratories in early Indian
post-colonial science fiction do not seem to fit Jameson’s description of
such spaces: ‘in them, the differentiation process has momentarily been
arrested, so that they remain as it were momentarily beyond the reach
of the social and testify to its political powerlessness, at the same time
that they offer a space in which the new wish images of the social can
be elaborated and experimented on’ (Jameson 2005, 16). But it is their
deliberate openness to and saturation by the social that allows them to
undertake the urgent work of exposing the negative print of the utopian
programme of ‘Nehruvian science’ and non-alignment. In so doing,
they perhaps signal the necessity of thinking about utopia and utopian
programmes in their properly worldly dimension – one which would
include their colonial and post-colonial dimensions as integral parts of
the culture of capitalist modernity itself.
Laboratories continue to appear as a key narrative element in many
Ghana-da stories that followed Mosha. But they are not necessarily
immediately identifiable as laboratories. Rather, in line with Kapil Raj’s
suggestions about the ‘open-air’ character of colonial science, a whole
array of locations take on laboratory-like features and functions in
Mitra’s fiction where the production of knowledge takes place via the
mechanisms and devices identified by Latour and others. For instance,
in Maach (‘Fish’, 1949), the ability of certain species of catfish to detect
the tremors of an impending earthquakes long before they become
evident to human senses is experimentally proved, but the location,
devices and mechanisms of this experiment are borrowed from hoariest
of stereotypes belonging to the colonial adventure tale genre – the perils
posed by African savages, the jungle of ‘darkest Africa’, the ‘cannibal
pot’ and so on. As in Mosha, an alliance between a white scientist
– the benign figure of the British Dr Alfred Hill – and the Bengali
scientific entrepreneur Ghana-da, seemingly works to validate the
heroic credentials of the latter. After Hill’s attempts to cure an African
chieftain’s migraine with aspirin makes him the object of the village
witch-doctors’ ire, he is falsely accused of being the source of a plague
that has decimated the community’s prized cattle and is condemned to be
boiled alive along with Ghana-da in the proverbial pot (and presumably
eaten). On this flimsy narrative premise, however, is staged a sustained

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 laboratory lives 55

interrogation of the process of the production of scientific evidence and

the authorization of scientific knowledge. Ghana-da at first proceeds with
colonial assumptions about the savage mind, and tries to purchase their
freedom with overtly racist threats: ‘Spurred on by your false priests,
do you know who you have upset? Can you not see from the colour
of his skin that he has come to us from the moon itself?’ (Mitra 2000
vol. 1, 72). Much to his consternation, the witch-doctor’s replies are
couched in the distinctly modern demand for evidence: ‘All lies. Where
is your proof?’ ‘Is his colour not enough?’ ‘No, we want real evidence’
(Mitra 2000 vol. 1, 72). With time running out – they have been given
the length of a half-burnt torch to prove the unprovable, that is, Hill’s
celestial nature – Ghana-da notices the agitation of a catfish kept in a
container nearby and concludes that their salvation is nigh:

The fire was nearly out and I was almost resigned to reciting our
last rites when I heard a sound coming from the water jar. The fish
in it had suddenly started splashing with great vigour [….] I started
to yell, ‘Where is the chief and his witch-doctors? Come and see
the power of the man from the moon!’ They came running. ‘You
thought that by conjuring clouds you would defeat him. Behold, he
will now crack open the very mountains and earth itself.’ (Mitra
2000 vol. 1, 73)

The earthquake duly arrives, destroying the village and enabling the
heroes to escape. It also results in the opening of the channels of a
new river, the discovery of which is celebrated by the awarding of a
fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society to Dr Hill.
Note what kind of narrative experiment the ‘open-air’ laboratory of
‘darkest Africa’ allows Mitra to perform here. The physiological properties
of the catfish are offered at first as the evidence for something that can
only be a racist fabrication – Hill’s supernatural ‘white’ cosmic power.
But since we know from Ghana-da himself that the former can in no
way prove the latter, it is clearly inadequate to meet the demands of
evidence by the witch-doctors, and what the episode in fact reveals is
what Latour and Woolger had concluded from their field-work about
laboratories – namely, that they produce facts and realities through the
interlocking processes of inscription, negotiation and authorization that
are activated by various apparatus and devices. Ghana-da’s tall-tales
and their recording by the narrator Sudhir, one of the residents of
72 Banamali Naskar Lane, is of course the most privileged form of
inscription in Mitra’s story-cycle. The ‘cannibal pot’, the catfish and
the various accoutrements of modern civilization such as aspirin act as

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56 FINAL FRONTIERS

the various devices and apparatus. The conclusion points to the kinds
of socio-political power that authorizes scientific facts. The fellowship
of a metropolitan scientific organization makes Hill the author of a
‘discovery’ that is not made by him and entirely erases any traces of
labour expended by his non-European collaborators of whom Ghana-da
is only the most prominent. It also reveals the human cost of such
authorization – the dead African ‘savages’ over whose villages, cattle
and bodies flow the new river that is the physical proof against which
Hill’s prestige is acquired. Thus, what initially appears as an experiment
designed to demonstrate the sway of science over superstition turns out
actually to provide evidence for the kinds of social and historical powers
that sanction such epistemological and ethical superiority.
Not all of Mitra’s laboratories are either ‘open-air’ or African, but
they are all deeply marked by geo-politics. In Phuto (‘Hole’, 1954),
Ghana-da is parachuted with an American spy, Michael, into a remote
Russian outpost near the Arctic circle in order to penetrate the secrets
of a laboratory conducting space research. Published three years before
the launch of the Soviet Sputnik 1 as the first artificial satellite in space
and the subsequent triggering of the ‘space race’ phase of the Cold War,
Phuto has its finger solidly on the geo-political pulse from the opening
moments of the narrative:

Not many people know that since the last world war, the two
superpowers have each started thinking about building a space
station in order to make themselves invincible. One scientist
has even drawn up a blueprint for it. A small satellite would be
constructed fifty miles above earth, and just like the moon, it would
orbit our planet. To make this possible one would need advanced
aero-space science and engineering. Therefore, the two superpowers
were keeping tabs on each others scientists and many spies were
risking their lives to gather information about them. (Mitra 2000
vol. 1, 130)

The complete absence of any recognizable scientific apparatus alerts

Ghana-da and Michael about the unusual nature of the laboratory, and
it soon becomes obvious that they are going to act as the instruments
in an extraordinary experiment by the presiding genius, Dr Minosky.
Minosky exposes Michael’s real espionage mission and reveals that the
laboratory is in fact a spaceship, and the experiment he was about to
conduct would prove the existence of a fourth dimension in addition to
the familiar three – length, height and breadth. Actually, the experiment
helps stage Ghana-da’s impeccable non-aligned sensibilities, since he

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 laboratory lives 57

helps Minosky to overpower and restrain Michael and volunteers to be

his ‘test subject’. Unlike the unfortunate Tan Lin from the earlier story,
however, the experiment is non-lethal:

When I came to, I was sitting exactly on the same spot. Michael
was still out of it. Minosky was staring out of the window. Hurrying
to him, I asked ‘What happened? What are you looking at?’ He
smiled and said, ‘Take a look.’ What I saw stunned me. Instead of
the Siberian permafrost, all I could see was a red desert. ‘Is this
the Sahara?’ I exclaimed. Minoski laughed aloud and said, ‘Try
something a little further. Like Mars.!’ [….] ‘But how?’ I asked,
bewildered. ‘Through the hole’, he said. ‘The hole that is the fourth
dimension in space. Length, height, width – we are used to seeing
things in these three dimensions. We have known of a fourth
mathematical dimension, but no one had hitherto been able to find
its physical form. My experiment has now brought this within the
grasp of mankind.’ (Mitra 2000 vol. 1, 135)

If in some of the other stories Ghana-da’s, and by extension Bengal’s

and India’s, world-historical credentials had been secured at the cost of
reinforcing colonial ideologies, here it is balanced by the role he plays
in the sabotage and defeat of an American espionage mission against
the Soviet Union and the accreditation of the humanitarian credibility
of ‘socialist science’.
Weapons and energy are the two products that are unsurprisingly
associated with the various laboratory-like spaces that feature in Mitra’s
Ghana-da tales during the non-aligned years. The narratives describe the
tussle to control them both in acknowledgment of their pre-eminence
in geo-political calculations of the Cold War, and as a way of testing
Nehru’s submissions of India’s unique mediatory role in this conflict.
At the same time, Ghana-da’s entrepreneurial inclinations mean that
such mediations as imagined by Mitra never really conformed to the
Nehruvian ethics usually proclaimed in relation to it as the historically
disinterested pursuit of world peace and equality among former colonies
as well as among the Euro-American powers. Rather, Ghana-da’s
extractive and managerial ventures, even or especially when they fail, air
the suspicion that the non-aligned position should be seen more properly
as an extension of a bid for power by India’s new rulers dominated by
the bhadralok classes, both Bengali or otherwise.
Shishi (‘Bottle’, 1959) begins with a testing of the authority and
credibility of Ghana-da’s tall-tale. The residents of 72 Banamali Naskar
Lane take advantage of an international science congress being hosted

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58 FINAL FRONTIERS

in Calcutta to print a fake invitation to Ghana-da purporting to be from

one of the famous attendees of the event – the French geographer Sustel.
Like many of the other stories, the narrative tension is here generated
by the question of how or whether the trap engineered by Ghana-da’s
fellow residents will be matched and neutralized by the hero’s own
fake counter-narrative. This can only happen if the latter is able to
produce enough evidence that cannot be disproved by his audience,
and therefore outweigh their own ‘fake’ proof, which is of course the
invitation letter that they have concocted together with much care and
ingenuity. That is to say, like the other Mitra stories we have looked
at, Shishi’s geo-political and scientific adventure is an experiment about
the production of the authority of facts.
The laboratory spaces that host such a narrative experiment in Shishi
include both the ‘open-air’ variety – which here are the Galapagos
islands where Ghana-da is studying a rare type of sea iguana with his
Ecuadorian indigenous assistant – and the enclosed kind – on board
a nuclear submarine where he is taken by Sustel and his mysterious
boss after they kidnap him. The pursuit of the seemingly ‘pure’
scientific knowledge on the island is made possible by the fully, and
occasionally violently, authoritarian relationship between Ghana-da and
his superstitious, Christian assistant. The nuclear submarine, on the other
hand, is engaged in the practice of obviously geo-politicized science – the
mapping of the deep-sea trenches in order to discover a navigable route
that will break the monopoly of the global superpowers on military
technology and to prospect for the extraction of minerals and petroleum
from such oceanic depths. But such military and economic challenges
to the superpowers are far from desirable to Ghana-da’s sensibilities:

From Sustel I learnt that it was not just the mapping of the Atlantic
Rift Valley he was interested in, but also the undersea mountains
rich in petroleum and all kinds of precious minerals [….] This means
that the rumours are true […] A secret third power, different from
US or Russia, is emerging. Despite their many faults, both the US
and Russia are committed to human progress. But this power has
no such weaknesses. (Mitra 2000 vol. 1, 248)

The scientific experiment Ghana-da conducts on board the submarine in

the first instance demonstrates the remarkable properties of the chlorella
fungus that can filter oxygen from carbon dioxide, and the application
of which saves the whole party from death when the ship malfunctions
and is stranded on the ocean floor. But it also enables the defeat of
this unnamed and malignant ‘third power’ since it allows Ghana-da to

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 laboratory lives 59

pass off a fake map of the marine trenches to its agents and therefore
sabotage the whole project with Sustel’s reluctant assistance. That is, in
Ghana-da’s narration, the evidence provided by the experiment with
chlorella also establishes the authority of the fake map and this in turn
outweighs the credibility of the fake document that the hostel residents
attempt to entrap him with in the frame-narrative. This complicated
fabrication of facts also authorizes Ghana-da’s non-aligned balancing
act that maintains the geo-political structure of the Cold War. We
shall return again to this story in the following chapter to examine
the implications of the representations there of the moral and ethical
differences between national and cosmopolitan belongings for Mitra’s
engagement with the idea of non-alignment.
We can conclude this discussion of laboratories in Mitra’s fiction in
order to turn to the corresponding treatment of the trope by Ray with
one more example that features a key ‘developmental’ concern of the
non-aligned years – food security and population growth.5 Chuunch
(‘Needle’, 1963) begins with a discussion among the hostel residents
about the rising price of basic food items and their attempts to trap
Ghana-da into a (fake) agreement of starting a sustainable urban farm
on their terrace that would require the pooling of money and labour.
Predictably, Ghana-da retorts with a tall-tale about two scientists called
Lavalle and Solomos, whose research might lead to the patenting of
artificial chlorophyll and solve forever global food scarcity by photosyn-
thesizing sunlight into edible protein. However, the successful conclusion
of this experiment depends on another one, which is conducted by
Ghana-da himself, and which secures the freedom of the scientists
from the intervention of powerful forces that want to monopolize the
production of this artificial chlorophyll, as well as from the credulous
African ‘primitives’ who have been easily manipulated into imprisoning
Lavalle and Solomos.
The cat-and-mouse game to rescue the scientists between Ghana-da
and his adversary, the secret agent Sabatini, traverses Europe, the Middle
East and Africa, but the denouement is staged in a make-shift laboratory
in the jungles of Gabon. Here, the two scientists are hiding from their
pursuers and are close to the experimental breakthrough when, as in
Maach, the local Fang tribes are incited by Sabatini to rise up against
them. There is a variation built into the caricatures about the savage
mind here, in so far as it is the Fang who had built the laboratory and

5
By ‘developmental concern’, I mean here something like the ideology of
development or ‘developmentality’. On the growth and entrenchment of
this ideology see in addition to Escobar 2011, Sutton et al. 1989, 35–60.

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60 FINAL FRONTIERS

installed the machines and devices. But while they possess the kind of
technical expertise required for these tasks, they are incapable of sifting
through the false proof presented to them by Sabatini regarding Lavalle’s
alleged impiety and they intend to sacrifice him to their gods. Thus is
maintained the distinction between the properly scientific and technical
labour that, as we have seen from Anderson and Shapin’s accounts, is one
of the basic structural principles of the modern laboratory. Ghana-da’s
experiment, involving sowing the local rivers with florescent microscopic
sea anemones and correctly predicting that they will light up the river
with crimson colours, outweighs Sabatini’s fabricated evidence and,
empowered by such authority, he persuades the Fangs to set Lavalle
free. In so doing, Ghana-da activates a two-fold process of accreditation.
First, he solves the labour problem that had sabotaged the laboratory,
where the ‘primitive’ workers (the Fangs) had disrupted the hierarchy
of knowledge-production by holding the scientist captive. This secures
Ghana-da’s administrative credibility. But this managerial solution can
only be imposed through the scientific proof of the physical properties
of the sea anemone. Granted the latter has to be translated into the
language of religion to account for the ‘underdeveloped’ sensibilities of
the Africans. But the Fang’s capacity for appreciating the experimental
production of proof also signals their potential, under the correct
tutelage, for ‘development’. This recalls a key mantra of ‘Nehruvian
science’ – that popular and spectacular demonstration of scientific
experiments would gradually inculcate a ‘scientific temper’ among the
‘backward’ populations. The African tribal and her Indian counterparts
can thus be seen as interchangeable units carrying similar values in
such developmental calculations. This too, is one of the proofs offered
by Ghana-da’s narrative experiments to the convictions of post-colonial
scientific developmentality.
Many of the issues raised by Mitra’s use of the laboratory as a
narrative device are also present in the fiction of Satyajit Ray. The careful
revelations regarding the process of constructing facts, the hierarchical
structure of laboratories and the labour relations that this involves,
the nature of evidence and the kinds of authority they produce, the
geo-political implications of laboratory work – all appear as central
concerns of the Professor Shonku stories. But we can immediately notice
two key differences between Shonku and Ghana-da. First, Shonku’s
entitled credibility as a professional scientist – Professor Shonku – and the
absence of a comparable conversational milieu around him (despite the
intrusions of his neighbour Avinash babu) mark him out as a decidedly
different kind of gentleman than Mitra’s hero. Perhaps he has more
thoroughly internalized some of the key ideologemes of modernization

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 laboratory lives 61

– efficiency, professionalization, organization, productivity – all of

which must be achieved by avoiding arcane social practices such as
Ghana-da’s adda sessions that merely serve to waste time.6 Second,
there are fewer ‘open-air’ laboratories in Ray. Shonku’s experimental
spaces contain many more obviously scientific devices and apparatus,
are organized more effectively and are more obviously aligned to the
production of ‘pure’, ‘disinterested’ scientific knowledge. These two
differences, paradoxically, serve to make Ray’s fictional interrogations
about the premises of scientific knowledge and scientific development –
those keystones of Nehruvian national and international policies – more
dramatic. Despite the inaugural genealogical account of the Shonku
archive in Byomjatrir Diary (‘The Diary of a Space Traveller’, 1961) and
the layers of editorial interjections regarding its credibility, the stories
by and large soften the tall-tale effect precisely because of the absence
of the fictional body of sceptical interlocutors around the scientist who
are capable of testing him through the conversational exchanges. What
we get instead is Shonku’s own shocked realization that his assumptions
about science are repeatedly challenged from within what appears to be
its exclusive domain – his own laboratory. Furthermore, these challenges
are not the result of any corruption of the laboratory’s organizational
integrity by unruly social reality. Rather, the presence of external agents
serves to confirm the thoroughly socialized character of the seemingly
autonomous and antiseptic space of the laboratory itself.
Byomjatrir Diary deploys the ‘lost manuscript’ trope familiar to the
readers of colonial adventure tales. Roy’s (and Mitra’s) uses of such
tropes and themes undoubtedly reflect both their own formations
among the anglophile Bengali literary classes and the lasting, world-
literary persistence and scope of popular colonial popular-fictional genres
throughout the post-colonial era. But equally notable is how they use
such narrative resources to re-purpose the genre of science fiction. The
story begins with the unnamed editor receiving Shonku’s diary from a
jobbing writer, Tarak Chatterjee, who spins him a fantastic tale of having
found the text in a crater made by the recent meteorite strike in the tidal
forests of the Sundarbans near Calcutta. This tall-tale is presumably to
be tested by the subsequent experience, shared by the fictitious editor
and her readers alike, of sifting through the various events recorded
by Shonku in the diary. Among the very first events, we note, are
the struggles that mark everyday life in Shonku’s laboratory. These

6
The best-known discussion of the practices and social meanings of Bengali
adda, or conversational gatherings, can be found in Chakrabarti 2000,
180–213.

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62 FINAL FRONTIERS

pit Shonku against his servant Prahlad, who is also his only assistant
in the experiments conducted there and, in so doing, underscore the
hierarchical and oppressive labour-relations that mark this space. It also
readily recalls the accounts of the historical versions of such conflicts
in Indian laboratories of the era in the notes of Anderson and others.7
Shonku’s first significant act is to punish Prahlad for uncovering a
mirror, and thus startling Shonku by revealing his own aged (and
scarcely human) appearance after months of solitary experimental
work. Prahlad’s punishment is a comic variation of the more sinister
activities that we saw in Nishimara’s laboratory – Shonku fires one of his
own inventions, the snuff gun, at his assistant resulting in the latter’s
continuous sneezing for 48 hours (Ray 2008, 5–6).
Shonku further suspects that Prahlad’s incompetence has more
serious implications for his laboratory work. Prahlad’s tampering with
the clock has already resulted in a catastrophic miscalculation and the
failed launch of the spacecraft that Shonku has been devoting most of
his inventive energies to. Yet, the servant-assistant remains indispensable
to Shonku:

There is no doubt that Prahlad is very brave. I remember one

particular occasion very well. A gecko had fallen from the ceiling
on my bottle of bicornic acid and overturned it. I was there, but
could not do nothing except watch helplessly. All my limbs went
numb at the mere thought of what might happen if the acid made
contact with the powder. Prahlad entered the room at this crucial
moment, saw me staring at the acid, grinned and coolly wiped it
off with a towel. (Ray 2008, 7)

It is this stereotype of the ideal relations in the laboratory between

the masterful scientist and his physically competent, but intellectually
deficient assistant, that the rest of the story scrupulously deconstructs.
The space journey to Mars and then to Tafa in fact serve as occasions
for Shonku to narrate the undoing of his own presumed mastery of
science and of science itself as a privileged form of knowledge. Prahlad
remains instrumental in such unravellings, but he is joined by another
figure who is another of Shonku’s experimental ‘test-subjects’, his robot
Bidhushekhar. As Kamile Kinyon has shown, the theme of the machine
that acquires consciousness and other anthropoid attributes has been
a stock feature of science fiction at least since Čapek’s path-breaking

7
See, for example, Abha Sur’s 2011 investigations into the gender- and caste-
politics that mark Indian laboratories.

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 laboratory lives 63

R.U.R., and is typically used to de-familiarize the ‘normal’ processes

of economic and social reproduction (Kinyon 1999, 379–400). What
remains implicit in Čapek – the allegorical function of the machine
to illustrate social and labour relations in the capitalist world –
acquires an added sharpness in Ray’s fiction precisely because Prahlad
and Bidhushekhar do not figure as industrial workers there. Rather,
they occupy an indeterminate position between domestic helpers and
laboratory assistants, attesting to the historical conditions of uneven
development in Nehru’s India where laboratories, as we have seen,
displayed the unsettling combination of middle-class babu domesticity
and institutional professionalism.
The alliance between Bidhushekhar and Prahlad is sealed not only by
the near-death experience of the space travellers on Mars in the hands
of the piscine aliens, but also in their shared cultural appreciation of
ancient Indian epics and classic European literature – Bidhushekhar
picking up verses of the Mahabharata from Prahlad, as well as speaking
in Shakespearean cadences to the utter surprise of Shonku (Ray 2008,
24). But these uncanny linguistic abilities of his robot assistant in turn
generate a thought that is much more unsettling for the scientist – that
its grasp of science is better than his. He had already suspected as much
when Bidhushekhar prevented him making a catastrophic error in the
manufacturing of a chemical compound critical to building the spaceship
(Ray 2008, 9). During the journey, Bidhushekhar warns Shonku of the
danger waiting for them on Mars, and then inexplicably corrects their
course to take them to Tafa – a planet inhabited exclusively by brilliant
scientists belonging to the most advanced civilization in that part of
the universe.
Bidhushekhar’s mysterious actions have one decisive consequence –
the diminution of Shonku’s status as a scientist and of human scientific
knowledge as such. Baffled by the aphid inhabitants of Tafa and the
total absence of any recognizably scientific institutions or even techno-
logical progress there, Shonku asks to be taken to what he assumes to
be a kind of Platonic elite he has evidently failed to meet thus far. The
alien’s reply infuriates him:

The ant replied, ‘What will you do with scientists, or science? Why
don’t you just stay the way you are? We’ll visit you from time to
time, all right? We find your plain and simple words, your naivety,
most entertaining!’ What impertinence! Highly incensed, I took my
Snuff-gun and fired it directly at the ant’s nostrils. But nothing
happened. The ant remained quite unaffected. The reason was clear.
These creatures haven’t even learned to sneeze! (Ray 2008, 28–9)

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64 FINAL FRONTIERS

The comic force of the ending is generated simultaneously by Shonku’s

obvious humiliation and his desperate but failed attempts to impose
some kind of anthropoid civilizational grid on the aliens in the hope
that he may be able to hide the implications of such humiliation. We
may detect all kinds of literary genealogies here – from the satiric
spirit of Lucian’s True History of the second century CE to de Bergerac’s
comic history of the lunar republic (1656) and Voltaire’s Micromegas
(1752). What is common to this particular mode is the ironic exposure
of the assumptions regarding the totality and perfection of human
knowledge-systems. Ray’s achievement is to preserve this mode by
cross-hatching it with elements of the Victorian nonsense-verse tradition
so beloved of his father Sukumar and himself, and invent an allegory
for the Nehruvian scientific culture that he found himself inhabiting.
The pattern inaugurated in the first Shonku story – the unexpected
challenges to and dilution of Shonku’s own scientific creed – was to be
repeated many times throughout the first two decades of the story-cycle.
Often, this examination of the limits of science takes the form of
disturbing contrasts between Shonku’s laboratory processes and those of
antagonists marked as non- or anti-scientific – typically coded as adherents
of religious, magical or supernatural beliefs and practices. In Professor
Shonku O Harh (‘Professor Shonku and the Bones’, 1964), Shonku dismisses
the news of a holy man brought to him by his neighbour Avinash babu,
who can allegedly revive the dead by chanting an ancient magical formula
over their bones. Eager to expose what he is sure is a fraud, Shonku
arrives at the scene only to be utterly perplexed by what he witnesses:

I am a scientist. I do not know if the things that I saw next could

have any scientific basis. May be they could; may be they did.
Perhaps, in fifty years, science will be able to explain it; but certainly
at this moment, all of it is incredible. Yet, I cannot deny what I
saw very clearly, with my own eyes. What was just a heap of loose
bones, soon disappeared. Each bone clicked into place [….] turned
into a bright white rabbit. Its red eyes darted here and there for a
few moments; then it flicked its long ears a couple of times, before
leaping up and hopping away, making its way through people’s
legs. (Ray 2008, 38)

Determined to defeat this affront to his scientific sensibility, Shonku

attempts to record the sadhu’s chant. But when he tries to play the tape
in the seclusion of his laboratory, it inexplicably malfunctions and Shonku
becomes aware of the malevolent spectre of the holy man just outside in
his garden. Months later, the two come face to face again, this time in

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 laboratory lives 65

a south Indian cave where Shonku has been excavating the bones of a
hitherto unnamed dinosaur. With the help of Prahlad and the local tribal
population, he has transformed the cave into a temporary laboratory and
is on the brink of announcing his discovery to the world when the holy
man mysteriously appears to resuscitate the dinosaur with his chanting.
Facing what appears to be certain death, Shonku also thinks that the
moment marks the victory of ancient magic over modern science: ‘I
darted a quick glance at the sadhu. His face was lit up by a monstrous
glee. Once I had used my knowledge of science on him and tried to steal
his mantra [….] Today, the sadhu was here to pay me back’ (Ray 2008,
46–7). Yet, it turns out that some modern zoological knowledge would
have been useful to the holy man. The animal he has resurrected is a
herbivore, who, with a perishing hunger, proceeds to devour the tree
on which he is hanging. Yet, there is time for a final, magical flourish:

And could I have imagined that, just before he died, he would

give a final magical performance? [….] What I saw next was just
the opposite of everything I had seen so far. A living, breathing
creature, made of flesh and blood, turned once more into a great
heap of bones. And through the gaps in its ribs, I could see a
human skeleton. (Ray 2008, 48)

It is not just science and magic that are pitted against one another here,
but specifically, the devices and processes associated with them. Against
Shonku’s laboratory, tape recorders, tools of excavation and, above all, his
deductive reflexes supported by experimental evidence, are arrayed the
holy man’s chants, non- or anti-technological habitus (he mostly hangs
from trees) and kinesiological knowledge (his chants work only if they
are accompanied by a specific pattern of body and hand gestures). In the
narrative, laboratories, both conventional and non-conventional, are spaces
that facilitate if not the equivalence between these two different kinds
of knowledge, then at least their fraught conversations with each other.
Indeed, one could argue that among the main functions of labora-
tories in Ray’s stories is the revelation that magic is both archaic or
residual forms of scientific knowledge that coexist with its modern
variant, as well as the possibly emergent and futuristic form that the
latter might go on to take.8 The Chinese magician Chee-Ching visits

8
This relationship between science and magic has of course been a matter of
much scholarly investigation. Lynn Thorndike’s monumental eight-volume
investigation 1923–58, is a classic example. More recent examples include
Styers 2004 and Nadis 2005.

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66 FINAL FRONTIERS

Shonku’s laboratory in Professor Shonku O Chee-Ching (‘Professor Shonku

and Chee-Ching’, 1965) with precisely this question:

‘You Plofessol Shonku?’

I nodded.
‘You scientist?’
‘Yes, so it would seem!’
‘Science is magic.’
‘Yes, you might say that. It is a kind of magic.’
‘And magic is science. No?’ (Ray 2008, 90)

Affronted by this suggestion, Shonku tries to impress Chee-Ching with a

tour of his laboratory and all his instruments, medicines and apparatuses
contained there. But after Chee-Ching leaves, Shonku is afflicted with
the vision of the resident gecko of the laboratory metamorphozing into
a Chinese dragon and feasting on the chemicals, seemingly impervious
to the might of the weapons that have been patented by Shonku. This
turns out to be the traces of a ‘little magic’ performed by Chee-Ching
that defeats any attempts by Shonku to understand it. Shonku may
have embarrassed Chee-Ching in the past by exposing his hypnosis
trick. But the suspicion at the end of the story is that his command
over ‘physics, chemistry, physiology, psychology, everything’ may have
enabled Chee-Ching to invent a unified, total practice that appears to
lie ahead of contemporary science, and therefore appears to be magical.
Both Professor Shonku O Egyptio Atonko (‘Professor Shonku and the
Egyptian Terror’, 1964) and Professor Shonku O Baghdader Baksa (‘Professor
Shonku and the Box from Baghdad’, 1970) stage encounters between
Shonku’s modern sensibilities and ancient practices of knowledge that
were scientific in their days, but can now only be thought of as magic.
There seem to be little possibility of them ever re-appearing as science
in Shonku’s or our own lifetime, but they gesture towards a utopic
horizon when such magic could be re-integrated into the scientific
domain. A significant element in both the stories is Shonku’s association
with scientists who represent dominant world powers – the British
James Summerton in the former story and the American Goldsetin
in the latter – an alliance that can only be experienced as a betrayal
(much to Shonku’s puzzlement) by his Egyptian and Iraqi interlocutors
of their common bond as formerly colonized peoples and non-aligned
sensibilities.
Thus, Shonku’s unreflective cosmopolitanism and his easy assumptions
of equality between citizens in the world republic of the sciences rub
up against the distinctly Nehruvian Third-World Arab internationalism

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 laboratory lives 67

that refuses to forget the histories of coercion, conquest and plunder

that underwrites such cosmopolitanism. This is spelt out by a stranger to
Shonku in Egypt as he prepares to assist Summerton in his excavations
of a pyramid: ‘You appear to be an Indian. So why are you getting
mixed up with these white brutes? Why are you so concerned about
the ancient and holy objects of our past? [….] Interest is one thing [….]
but digging the earth, then stepping into the sacred resting place of a
departed soul and disturbing its peace, is quite another’ (Ray 2008, 162).
Thus, what would otherwise have appeared (and still does to Shonku) as
Summerton’s generous gift of ‘one of the mummies I have found here’
is more properly revealed as an act of neo-colonial vandalism with a
very long history indeed. Back in his provincial laboratory in Giridih,
Shonku’s excitement at the prospect of conducting experiments on the
mummy (unconsciously) echoes precisely the entitled connoisseurship
of those European explorers and scientists whose looting of cultural
treasures of their former colonies is always conducted in the name of
the disinterested pursuit of science:9

Having thus instructed Prahlad, I set to work. All my equipment

was laid out on a table next to the sarcophagus. I dragged a chair,
sat down and turned my attention to the mummy. Among the
chemicals used by Egyptians to prevent a corpse from decaying,
there were such things as sodium hydroxide, bitumen, balsam and
honey. But, in addition to these, they used various other substances
which have not yet been successfully analysed and identified by any
scientist. It was those mysterious constituents that I had to uncover
[….] I donned a pair of gloves and a mask, and began my work,
starting from the top of the body. (Ray 2008, 173)

This absorbed and expert laboratory work is disrupted, as in the case of

the holy man in Haarh, with the inexplicable and vengeful appearance
of the Egyptian stranger. Shonku’s demise at his hands is prevented by
the intervention of his cat, whose scratches cause the stranger to collapse
unaccountably. The mystery of his death is solved when Summerton’s

9
The eminent role played by archaeology in the production of colonial,
neo-colonial as well as nationalist ideologies is, of course, well-documented.
The regular and irate exchanges between Britain and Greece regarding
the Elgin marbles is only one of a whole variety of examples regarding
the uses of archaeology in such projects. For a general discussion, see
Diaz-Andreu Garcia 2007. Egypt has always been the site of such struggles.
A good discussion of Egyptian archaeology’s entanglements with modern
colonialism can be found in Reid 2002.

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68 FINAL FRONTIERS

letter reveals that the hieroglyphs he has decoded from the tomb tells
the story of the death of a pharaonic priest for insulting Nephdet, the
Egyptian cat-goddess. Instead of the scientific revelation about the process
of mummification, Shonku’s laboratory offers evidence of re-incarnation
told within the framework of (neo-)colonial plunder and the ressentiment
of the colonized.
A very similar lesson is offered by Hasan al-Hubbal to Shonku in
Baghdad. Having arrived in the city to take part in an international
science congress, Shonku’s and his friends are entertained by the story of
a secret cave containing ancient wonders by al-Hubbal, who is reluctant
to reveal its location. To the considerable chagrin of the scientists,
al-Hubbal gives them the reason for his hesitation: ‘I don’t mean you,
Professor Shonku, but [….] many of our valuable possessions have
made their way to museums in the West. So, even if you didn’t want
anything for your own use. I fear you might tell some museum or other
about things you’ve seen’ (Ray 2008, 211). Even Shonku has to admit
the force of this argument, and suspects that the American Goldstein,
for example, may indeed be one of the people more energized by the
prospects of archaeological plunder than by the pursuit of intellectual
pleasures. But this unfortunate proclivity he attributes to Goldstein’s
wealth and antiquarian interests and to the fact that ‘science is no
more than a pastime for him’. Al-Hubbal also leaves his audience in
no doubt about the nature of the wonders stored in what he calls ‘Ali
Baba’s cave’: ‘There are many, and they are scientific inventions made
before the birth of Christ’ (Ray 2008, 211). The challenge he issues
to the ‘inventors … well-known scientists of the twentieth century’ is
to comprehend what ‘the scientists in the first century had achieved’
(Ray 2008, 215) without dismissing the latter as magic or superstition.
This they have profound difficulties with, in part because they simply
cannot understand the technology of the cave that must entered by the
chanting of a formula at a precise aural tone and pitch; in part because
of the buried remains of a Sumerian magician they find there; and in
part because there does not seem at first glance anything scientific about
the treasure trove they discover in the cave: ‘boxes, cases, chests, bowls,
pots, pitchers, vases and chairs. All were made of metal … studded with
bright, sparkling gems’ (Ray 2008, 216). The sense of wonder is generated
in the narrative precisely because what appear to be ornamental turns
out to be scientific. The most attractive article in the cave, a casket, is
actually a sophisticated machine: ‘The inside of the box was packed with
tiny gadgets. These were made of not just metal, but what appeared to
be pieces of glass and beads. It was impossible to tell what those gadgets
were meant to do [….] I have handled a lot of complex machinery in

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 laboratory lives 69

my life, but nothing as perplexing as this’ (Ray 2008, 224–5). A space

where such machines are kept may of course with some justification be
thought of a laboratory. When Shonku experiments with the box and
finds the right combination that activates the switch, the casket turns
out to be a cinematic device that has recorded the moving 4,000-year-old
images of funeral that took place in the ancient city of Ur. The story
ends with Goldstein’s predictable attempts to rob the casket, which is
defeated by al-Hubbal’s determination to preserve what he sees as his
national cultural heritage. He dies in the cave clutching the casket, while
Goldstein survives but is driven insane by something unexplained that
happens to him there. Shonku’s salutations to the Sumerian magician
is also a frank acknowledgement that scientific development is not
linear, nor can modern science define ancestral processes of knowledge
production as necessarily inferior: ‘We have found evidence of such a
brilliant scientific mind that our own achievements have paled into
insignificance. I have decided to throw my Omniscope into the Tigris.
How I’ll find the enthusiasm to work again when I go back home, I do
not know. Never before have I experienced such an odd mixture of joy,
wonder, despair, excitement and fear’ (Ray 2008, 225). The scientists
themselves appear to have been the ‘test subjects’ of laboratories that
they have initially mistaken as an antique treasure chamber.
If one of the main tasks of Ray’s laboratories is to turn modern
science and scientists into the objects rather than authors of knowledge-
production, there is one other theme that is crucial for the full
achievement of this effect. It is that of professional rivalry between
scientists that gives the lie to any notion of science as a disinterested,
ethical pursuit of truth. Shonku’s zealous attempts to guard his
laboratory against intrusions by ordinary people may be an attempt
to keep intact the aura of his distinction, but his scientific visitors
bring with them both the solace of prestige and the threat of theft of
his intellectual property. As Shonku himself comments while uneasily
assessing one such guest in Professor Shonku O Macaw (‘Professor Shonku
and the Macaw’, 1964):

Other scientists have visited me before. Many of them, virtually

from every country, wish to see my laboratory if they happen to
be in India. A Norwegian zoologist once spent a whole month
with me. But Tarafdar seemed different from any other scientists,
with an interest in my work [….] Since scientists often work in
the same area, there is bound to be a certain amount of rivalry
amongst them, to see who has gone further ahead in doing original
research and experiments. However, there was no reason to believe

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70 FINAL FRONTIERS

that I would answer every question, and reveal everything that I

had learnt over the years through my own hard work, using my
own intelligence and doing my calculations. (Ray 2008, 50)

His instincts prove to be accurate, as Tarafdar attempts to steal his

research by planting an exceptional bird – the macaw of the title – in
Shonku’s laboratory, in the hope that it would be able to memorize his
formulae. His scheme is defeated when, like Shonku’s other assistants
human and non-human – Prahlad and Bidhushekhar – the macaw
displays an uncanny ability – in this case the ability to make moral
choices. It exposes Tarafdar’s plan to Shonku since it judges the latter
to be ‘good’. In doing so, it is accepted by Shonku as a resident of the
laboratory, but only on condition of continuing loyalty and professional
discretion: ‘You are most welcome. But I hope you are not friendly with
any other scientist? You won’t be repeating my secret formula to others,
will you?’ (Ray 2008, 62).
Conversely, Shonku’s own visits to the laboratories of foreign scientists
underscore the often deadly rivalry between them. Both Professor Shonku
O Ashcharya Putul (‘Professor Shonku and the Curious Statuettes’, 1965)
and Professor Shonku O Robu (‘Professor Shonku and Robu’, 1968) draw
our attention to the competitive system of the prestige and authority
that structure the field of science. Ashcharya Putul begins with an idyllic
description of the process of Shonku’s consecration as a scientist:

Today is a memorable day in my life. The Swedish Academy of

Science has conferred a doctorate on me, thereby making all my
hard work over the last five years truly worthwhile [….] Last year
the Swedish scientist, Svendsen, came to my laboratory in Giridih.
He was quite speechless after he’d eaten one of my creations. Upon
his return to Sweden, he wrote widely about my work. As a result,
the matter received a lot of publicity abroad. In fact, Svendsen is
responsible, to a large extent, for the honour that I received today.
(Ray 2008, 179–80)

But Shonku’s trip to receive the honour soon reveals that labora-
tories are sites of different kinds of consecration. He is invited to
Norway by Lindquist, who claims to be an artist who specializes in
making miniature statues of celebrities. Wonderstruck as he is by the
remarkable details of Lindquist’s statues, including one of Shonku’s
colleague Ackroyd, Shonku is immediately suspicious when he spies
discarded scientific apparatus around the house. Why would anyone
deny being a scientist? The answer arrives as soon as Shonku succeeds

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 laboratory lives 71

in surprising Lindquist working in his secret laboratory. The statues

are so astonishingly life-like because they are indeed alive. Lindquist
has pioneered a bio-engineering technique to miniaturize humans, and
he has successfully experimented on a number of celebrities, including
scientists, he has lured to Norway. Shonku himself cannot evade
capture and miniaturization, and Lindquist delivers a sermon about the
implications of his discovery:

Do you know what my biggest triumph is? I haven’t killed any of

these people. I never will. Each one of them is alive. I give them
an electric shock every day that makes them turn rigid and lifeless.
At midnight, I give them another shock to revive them, and then
I feed each one with a dropper. Sometimes, I even speak to them.
But the sad thing is, although they have got absolutely nothing to
worry about any more, none of them is happy. (Ray 2008, 195)

The combined ingenuity of Shonku and Ackroyd succeeds in thwarting

Lindquist, but not before Shonku has been taught an unsettling lesson
on how the pursuit of scientific distinction and consecration can, and
often does, take rabid forms in laboratories.
Further proof of this kind of laboratory work arrives in Robu, a
story that once again begins with a report of Shonku’s experimental
success – this time in building a robot (presumably a predecessor of
Bidhushekhar, since the space journey comes chronologically later than
the rest of Shonku’s adventures):

It took me a year and a half to build Robu. I built him from scratch,
though Prahlad assisted me at times by handling the tools I needed.
The most amazing thing about the whole exercise was the small
amount of money within which I managed. The total sum came
to Rs 333.85. The final product, built with this tiny sum, will act
as my right hand man in the laboratory. Robu takes less than a
second to do simple additions, subtractions, multiplications and
divisions. I don’t think he’d take more than ten seconds to solve
any complex mathematical problems. (Ray 2008, 136)

Shonku is invited to Heidelberg to demonstrate the capacities of his

robot by the veteran scientist Paumer, who soon bestows on Shonku an
unparalleled accolade – ‘I cannot think of any equivalent in the history of
science that can match what you have done’ (Ray 2008, 140) and insists
that they show his creation to the leading German roboticist, Borgelt.
But this time the demonstration does not go as well, as Robu fails to

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72 FINAL FRONTIERS

respond to some simple questions regarding Borgelt’s biography that the

German scientist puts to it. Still, Borgelt offers to buy it from Shonku
because he admits that Robu’s mathematical capacities are greater than
his own machine and if he can correct this single glitch by studying the
Indian robot, he could save himself from financial ruin. On Shonku’s
refusal, he attempts to kill him – at which point Robu intervenes by
decapitating Borgelt, thereby revealing in the mass of exposed wires that
it was the German machine that had all along being masquerading as
the human scientist. This venerable trope of the monstrous machine,
with illustrious predecessors stretching back to Mary Shelley via Capek
and others, is used here not only to demonstrate the perils of individual
scientific hubris, but also to revise Shonku’s initial acquisition of scientific
distinction. Borgelt’s robot is clearly superior to Shonku in its design,
logic and linguistic capacities. Otherwise, how can it pass itself off as
human to all visitors? Moreover, Shonku’s rescue by Robu is possible only
because Paumer has surreptitiously tampered with its circuits to enhance
its telepathic link with its creator. The confident assertions of superiority
by the Indian scientist are part of what his own tale dismantles.
Fictional laboratories are key devices in the writing of Mitra and Ray,
who carried out experiments to test some of the central assumptions
of ‘Nehruivian science’, among which are the nation-building capacities
of such institutions, the spirit of intellectual equality and camaraderie
fostered there, and their potential to solve key policy problems faced by
post-colonial states. In addition, such devices also enabled the authors
to raise fundamental questions about the ethical, moral and epistemo-
logical characters of modern science itself. Instead of affirming the latter’s
pre-eminence as a method of knowledge-production, they revealed the
contingent processes involved in the fabrication of scientific facts or
truths and their limits. It is entirely true that Mitra and Ray did not do
this in order to retreat to the ‘post-truth’ regimes that we see resurgent
across the world today. They did so in order to explore the implications
of the historical development of modern scientific practices within and
through colonialism, imperialism and capitalism. Yet, since much of
Nehru’s vision of a non-aligned Third World was based on the idea of
scientific development, the laboratory lives of Shonku and Ghana-da
also helped outline the critical limits of such a utopia.

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 Chapter Two

The uses of weapons

The uses of weapons

The scientist and the soldier

We have seen from our discussions above that when vital questions
regarding scientific knowledge and their relationship to geo-political
processes such as the Cold War or non-alignment were raised in the
fictional laboratories of Ray and Mitra, they were often done so in
relation to the inter-related issues of weapon-making and war-making.
This is of course unsurprising, given the global importance of weapons
and wars at a time when conflicts may have been of the ‘cold’ variety
in Europe, but without a doubt were of the extremely ‘hot’ kind
in south-east Asia, Africa and Latin America.1 What is immediately
noticeable, though, is how strikingly different sometimes were the
manner and use of weapons in the Indian science fiction of Nehruvian
era in comparison to their European and American counterparts. The
earliest weapons we see in the Ghana-da and the Professor Shonku
stories (Mosha and Byomjatrir Diary) are marked not so much by what
H. Bruce Franklin has called the ‘super-weapons’ imaginary (Franklin
1988, 4) that came to dominate Euro-American science fiction long
before the Cold War era, but by their comic and bathetic failures.
Shonku’s outrage at the feeble ineffectiveness of his fabled snuff gun
in the face of the superb condescension of the aphid inhabitants of
Tafa may well in the first instance work to expose the limits of his
anthropocentric scientism (Ray 2008, 29). But since his failed weapon
is also a part of Ray’s (inter-)national allegory pertaining to the power
and sovereignty of a post-colonial state, it gestures to the problematic
status of weapons and war within the strategic scope of Nehruvian
non-alignment itself. Likewise, the desperate slap with which Ghana-da

1
For an expert account of the relative differences in the temperature of the
‘Cold War’ across the world, see Heller 2006 and especially Westad 2017.

73

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74 FINAL FRONTIERS

quells the deadly threat of Nishimara’s bio-weapon – the solitary, buzzing

mosquito – may momentarily assure the Bengali gentleman’s historical
importance to the Cold War dispensation (Mitra 2000 vol. 1, 29). But
since Ghana-da’s allegorical weight and function are comparable to
Shonku’s, such comic-bathetic resolutions in fact raise further questions
that cannot be contained within the narrative ending in Mosha. Should
elimination or control of weapons produced by non-European powers
be the appropriate mission of Nehru’s ‘laboratory state’, especially since
this would serve to cement the Cold War status quo? Does the Indian
scientific entrepreneur’s involvement in the trade of information and raw
materials used in the production of ‘super-weapons’ inevitably corrode
the moral compass of a non-aligned nation? The urgency of such debates
would come to define, for many, the tenure of Nehru as a political leader
and the success or otherwise of his non-aligned policy.
A very large but unwieldy and unbalanced military apparatus was
among the pre-eminent colonial legacies that the newly independent
nations of South Asia had to contend with after 1947. Questions of
weapons, military organization, national security and war-making
capacities were unsurprisingly entwined with those of sovereignty
and governance themselves. Nehru’s own party sought to maintain a
careful balance between its declared principles of non-alignment and
the pursuit of world peace with the realpolitik logic of the maintenance
and enhancement of military capacities as well as the Indian aspirations
regarding its status as a major power, at least at the regional level.
Within four years of independence, the Indian National Congress
therefore felt compelled to publish a record of the military challenges
the nation had weathered to date under its leadership, Among these
immediate ‘storms and stresses’ it identified were the evacuation in
1947 of 8,000 British officers and the immediate handing over of
command and control functions to their Indian counterparts, many of
whom had to be promoted without the requisite experience; the transfer
and resettlement of the partition refugees; and the first acts of war in
the mountains of Kashmir where the terrain and weather posed their
specific logistical challenges (Indian National Congress 1951b, 3–18).
But perhaps the most keenly felt difficulty had been the shortage of
ammunition and the obsolete armaments that plagued the Indian forces.
Accordingly, the largest defence project undertaken was the setting up
of a weapons prototype and machine-tools factory that could in turn
enable the ordinance manufactories to meet the pressing need for arms
(Indian National Congress 1951b, 25). Nehru’s defence minister, Sardar
Baldev Singh, was quick to link such questions of arms with that of
the nation’s industrial development itself:

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 the uses of weapons 75

Figure 2: ‘The babu’s world wars’, Ghanada Samagra,

Premendra Mitra (2000).

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76 FINAL FRONTIERS

What India possessed of these factories, therefore, is a national

asset of considerable importance. But we do not have all we need;
nor is our technical staff sufficiently advanced, particularly in the
higher grades [….] To make them function at their best we must
find necessary material, raw or processed within the country itself.
Basic industries have to be established; steel and other metals of
requisite standards must be produced within India. the steel plant
will take some years to operate [….] And remember also, along
with the development of industries, our own nationals must require
technical knowledge and specialization of a high order, so that we
may not have to depend on outside assistance for long. (Indian
National Congress 1951b, 28)

Key to such a military-industrial complex was a defence science organi-

zation (DSO) that would be ‘concerned with the integration of military
and scientific thought and planning for defence research and will work in
close touch with other organizations engaged in scientific and industrial
research’ (Indian National Congress 1951b, 30–1).
After Nehru’s declaration of India’s commitment to international
non-alignment based on five key principles (the famous panch sheel)
in Bandung, such questions about weapons, military strategy, national
security, sovereignty and India’s moral leadership in the Cold War world
demanded increasingly more refined explanations and considerations.
As the Indian Council for World Affairs put it in their recommendations
for national defence strategy in 1958: ‘The deliberate preparation of
defence plans and their resolute application is always necessary. Until
India’s Pancha Shil is unanimously accepted, until a stage is reached
where all nations automatically resort to friendly negotiations to solve
international disputes, it is the inescapable duty of every country to plan
for this security, whether it believes in the use of force or not’ (Indian
Council for World Affairs 1958, vii). In particular, the Council recognized
that the era of global ‘super-weapons’ such as military satellites and
thermonuclear bombs that could hit targets from thousands of miles
away, securing India’s 7,5000 kilometres-long coastline demanded a
paradigmatic shift in military imagination (Indian Council for World
Affairs 1958, ix–x). Like Baldev Singh seven years ago, the Council was
quick to connect militarization and industrial and financial development.
European colonial powers, so went their argument, were able to dominate
the Indian oceanic zone (and elsewhere) for over two centuries precisely
because of the symbiotic network that tied together their industrial and
military organizations. In order to ensure that such global disparities of
power could never be repeated in the future, the tri-continental nations

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 the uses of weapons 77

would have to, to a certain extent, develop their own military-industrial

complexes with scientists occupying key positions therein (Indian Council
for World Affairs 1958, 2–3). It would also be a mistake to think of
these European powers only in terms of their colonial pasts because
that would ignore their active attempts to shape a neo-colonial world
order in the present moment. The council offered the example of three
recent political developments in Asia – US military aid to Pakistan,
the signing of the Baghdad pact and the formation of the South-East
Asia Treaty Organization. From the Indian perspective, all three US-led
initiatives were designed to ensure the pre-eminence of the ‘West’ in Asia
(Indian Council for World Affairs 1958, 177–8). To counter the effects of
these developments, the Council recommended abandoning, or at least
diluting, the two prevailing trends in non-aligned strategic thinking –
selective alliance with a major power and accepting the resultant loss of
sovereignty; pursuing policies of neutrality or non-alignment and risking
being out-manoeuvred by countries who do not commit to such policies
(Indian Council for World Affairs 1958, 142–4). Instead, it recommended
the rapid organization of a scientific defence industry and military until
such time that India’s policy for global peace would be accepted by the
majority of the world’s nations (Indian Council for World Affairs 1958, 95).
Such conclusions arrived at by people working closely with Nehru’s
own government at the height of the non-aligned years clearly show
the fault-lines running through the political ideas about India’s interna-
tional and regional/local prerogatives, as well in the thinking about the
proper relationship between science, scientists, weapons and war. The
Indian Defence Science Organization, whose remit was to formulate
recommendations precisely in these areas, began publishing a journal
where such considerations were given sustained attention. In one of
the earliest issues, we find Major General H. H. Stable reflecting on
the altered relationship between the soldier and the scientist since the
Second World War:

The Scientist, if one may say so, is less remote, more forthcoming
and indeed more human. He no longer hides-himself from the
view of the ordinary man in the obscurity of scientific formulae
but emerges into this rough and ready world, slaps the soldier on
the back, and tells him to regard Science not-so much as something
obscure, lofty and unattainable but rather as systematized investi-
gation and knowledge. The soldier for his part no more withdraws
to brood in his military shell but comes forth prepared to cooperate
and to learn: In fact, he has started to think! The relationship
between a soldier and a scientist is perhaps not unlike that between

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78 FINAL FRONTIERS

a patient and a specialist. The patient must say what is wrong or

what he requires put right: the specialist must prescribe. (Stable
1950, 115)

Interestingly, Stable also invoked the example of Britain’s initial setbacks

in that war to suggest that there could be an inverse relationship between
military underdevelopment and defence scientific innovations: ‘While
Germany was thundering across France, knocking hell out of everything
and everybody that stood in the way of her armour and her aircraft,
Britain was striving desperately to work out her own salvation’ (Stable
1950, 117). Such innovations, for a senior army figure like Stable, in
the final instance depended on three things: a bespoke scientific body
that was directly enmeshed in the chain of command; a rapid escalation
of defence industrial production; the political acknowledgement of the
inevitability of conflict and the ability to exploit the creative potential
of war-making (Stable 1950, 121–2).
Stable’s template of the relationship between the scientist and the
soldier was repeated, albeit with certain variations, in the pages of
the journal long enough for it to be considered as the ‘common-sense’
position on defence in Nehru’s India. Nor was this an exclusively
soldierly perspective on matters scientific. Some of the leading Indian
scientists who comprised, in Anderson’s words, the ‘nucleus’ of the
Nehruvian ‘laboratory state’ also energetically advocated such positions.
D. S. Kothari’s observations on the organizational challenges of India’s
defence began with seemingly orthodox statements about the importance
of theoretical science and the consolidation of a national civic space
marked by exchange of information and conversation between experts
(Kothari 1952, 67). Kothari even managed to present Gandhi as an
exemplar of modern scientific practice by citing the experimental nature
of his autobiography captured in its sub-title, My Experiments with Truth.
But soon this paean to scientific theory and experiments was linked to
defence research, understood by Kothari as scientific activities concerned
with weapons performance, operational research and various ‘special
studies’ (Kothari 1952, 72). For Kothari, the development of such a
sector would also mean resisting the glamour of ‘pure research’ and
recognizing the importance of the ‘applied’ variation – which would
amount to nothing short of what he saw as a massive shift of in the
science culture of South Asia (Kothari 1952, 78). One way to appreciate
the cultural force of Ray’s Professor Shonku is to see in him precisely
this amalgamation of ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ research.
Kothari’s submissions about the importance of modern applied
research to the making of science and war were supported by his fellow

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 the uses of weapons 79

scientist Shanti Bhatnagar who played a key role in steering ‘Nehruvian

science’ in the two decades after independence. In addition to reiterating
the by now ‘common sense’ of the importance of a scientific presence at
the heart of military organizations, Bhatnagar went much further than
his colleagues to detect the presence of militarized science in every aspect
of modern life. Citing the example of electronics that permeated contem-
porary ‘industry, transport, communications, education, entertainment,’
he argued that this degree of technological penetration of the everyday
simply would not have been possible without the labours of the scientist-
soldiers (Bhatnagar 1952, 86). Thus, he called for the embedding of
defence science in selected elite public universities in India and outlined
his vision for military-sponsored research and teaching activities in such
institutions (Bhatnagar 1952, 87). Here we see emerging, in addition to
argument that war is good for science and vice versa, a second major
preoccupation of the Nehru’s scientist-soldiers – institutional organi-
zation. This was understandable in the context of, as we have seen in the
case of the Indian army, the abrupt denudation of the upper managerial
and administrative layers that had until recently been occupied almost
entirely by British personnel. As G. E. Gale observed, the defence
scientist must also train to be a good administrator who would be able
to arrange ‘affairs to the best advantage in order to secure a desired
end’ (Gale 1953, 20). Viewed thus, ‘administration enters into most of
the things that we do, both great and small. We are all of us making
administrative decisions of one sort or another all the time, whatever
our job is. Nobody can undertake (or at least ought not to undertake)
even a simple experiment in the laboratory without consciously or
unconsciously going through certain administrative processes’ (Gale
1953, 20). The defence scientist therefore must be able to identify the
proper objective and ask the relevant questions regarding it, allocate
resources rationally, work collaboratively and command a reasonable
volume of specialist information (Gale 1953, 22–6). Since the leadership
of such scientific organizations occupied a structurally analogous position
to that of their military counterparts engaged in combined operations,
Gale thought it was imperative that they too should have at their disposal
a joint planning team comprising of specialists from various disciplines
who would each approach any given problem from their individual
perspectives in order to solve it in collaboration with the others (Gale
1953, 29). But against such ‘common sense’, the British physicist Patrick
Blackett, who acted as an advisor to Nehru’s government, warned that
joint command structures had the potential of ‘elaborating a simple
problem unnecessarily’ (Blackett 1955, 276) and of the inherent fragility
of complex administrative systems, whether military or scientific: ‘I made

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80 FINAL FRONTIERS

some formulations many years ago during the war about the operational
theory of small changes. The theory is this: Man is not clever enough
to calculate what will happen in any big operation. It can be calculated
with some success what will happen if some small changes are made
in the existing arrangements’ (Blackett 1955, 279). These trends in the
Indian ‘soldier and scientist’ debates together raised some fundamental
questions regarding the relationship between science, war and weapons
when Nehru’s non-aligned policy seemed to have gained considerable
international traction. How should a country officially committed to
promoting global peace by maintaining critical equidistance from the
Cold War arms race approach the knotty issues of arming itself and
devoting resources to a scientific organization of its army? In a situation
of resource scarcity and organizational underdevelopment, how could it
justify using the energies of its scientists to develop weapons rather than
address the basic needs of its citizens? But in addition to this, such debates
touched on issues central to the whole project of Nehruvian nation-
building as such – economic development, technological innovation,
organizational reform. Each of these questions had at their heart, it
turned out, the figure of the scientist-soldier.
Nothing captured these dilemmas encapsulated by this figure better
than, as we have already seen with Anderson, the often tortured
relationship between Nehru’s government and India’s nuclear scientists.
One of the most interesting things revealed by Anderson’s enquiry is the
paradox of India’s relatively advanced stage of nuclear research existing
within a general context of the underdevelopment of the country’s
scientific and technological institutions (Anderson 2010, 1, 120, 183).
Such an advanced sector of the scientific field, comparatively rich in
resources and funding, often exerted a gravitational pull on Indian
scientists irrespective of their personal interest in super-weapons or in
the military–industrial complex. Despite being fully aware of the dangers
that a nuclear weapons programme posed both to India’s regional and
international relations, Meghnad Saha had already commented before
the formal declaration of independence in 1947 on the organizational
benefits that something like the Manhattan Project could confer on
the country’s scientific, technological as well as political development
(Anderson 2010, 128). But it was very difficult, if not impossible, to
build such a programme in India without getting entangled in Cold
War alliances. Britain and the US in particular, were keenly interested
in the deposits of fissile material, such as thorium and beryl, in the
country and were dangling the carrot of the transfer of technological
expertise in exchange for access to these minerals (Anderson 2010,
189). For a prime minister who had once reportedly rebuffed offers to

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 the uses of weapons 81

draw up a defence plan by saying that he would not need one because
he led a non-violent country, such affairs had to be kept secret even at
the cost of being labelled undemocratic by his parliamentary opponents
(Anderson 2010, 206). Nor was India’s nuclear programme the only area
of ‘Nehruvian science’ where the problem of unwelcome international
attachments – attachments that ultimately had a detrimental impact
on the country’s sovereignty – reared its head. Weapons procurement,
according to Patrick Blackett, was precisely the area where the risks of
post-colonial dependency could be seen. Reflecting on his report to the
Indian government in 1948, Blackett observed: ‘Indian officials and
advisors were thinking purely from an Whitehall angle. There was an
appalling psychological dependence on every word that Whitehall speaks
[….] But a great many of your problems are due to imitative adoption of
Whitehall habits. Actually a lot of that thinking should not be exported
anywhere’ (Anderson 2010, 217). As a result of this, such Indian
government officials could be easily co-opted by British arms manufac-
turers who were interested in selling expensive weapons to a country
that did not need them. Blackett therefore strongly recommended against
the purchase of atomic and chemical weapons, supersonic and other
high-performance jets, and guided missiles. But such thinking did not
play well towards the towards the end of Nehru’s life, when the military
defeat to China in 1962 and the successful testing of the Chinese atomic
bomb provided scientists like Homi Bhabha the opportunity to push
through an official nuclear weapons programme.
In today’s India, political scientists and military historians – many
of them anxious to lend credibility to India’s attempted projection of
regional and international power – are often critical of these aspects
of Nehruvian militarized science. For them, there was much too little
militarization and far too much science in India between the 1940s
and 1960s, and this they blame on both Nehru’s personal preference
for the scientist over the soldier, and on the Nehruvian state’s grip over
the army. Kartik Bommakanti sees in mid-twentieth century India the
paradox of a strong state and a strong, open society that resulted in
a delay in the ‘modernization’ of military organization and weapons
systems, since it ensured that the imperative to allocate resources to
the ‘developmental needs’ of the population always outweighed that of
warfare (Bommakanti 2015, 11–13). The Defence Science Organization,
a Nehruvian body par excellence, has been singled out for hobbling
India’s military capabilities with its ‘mishmash of policies promoting
autarky, distrust of the military, and the avowed objective of building
an indigenous technology base and establishing self-reliance in military
preparedness’ (Routrey 2015, 38). Gopi Rethiniraj blames India’s status

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82 FINAL FRONTIERS

as an ‘ambiguous’ or ‘reluctant’ nuclear power on Nehru’s foreign policy

as well as Cold War detente expressed in the Non-Proliferation Treaty
that denied countries such as India and Brazil the right to pursue the
development of civil nuclear energy research (Rethiniraj 2015, 68–70).
He also lauds the BJP prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, as different
a figure to Nehru as imaginable, for ordering a series of nuclear bomb
tests in May 1998 that ended the ambiguity about the Indian nuclear
weapons programme (Rethiniraj 2015, 71). And for Ayesha Ray, it was
Nehru’s decision to more or less keep intact the military organization
that he had inherited from the British – wherein a clear distance was
maintained between the army and political decisions regarding strategy
– that accounted for the stunting of India’s war-making capacities, most
painfully evident in the humiliation it suffered at the hands of China in
1962 (Ray 2013, 20–1). Ray also notes the tight budgetary leash Nehru
kept his army on – with defence spending at no more than 2 per cent
of GDP between 1947 and 1962 – and puts this down to his ‘inherent
fear of the military’ (41).
Thus, in contrast to many of the critics of the militarization of science
and the scientific organization of the military during the Nehruvian era,
most of the post-Nehruvian criticism of India’s military shortcomings
have been mounted on the grounds of the elevation of the scientist
above the soldier, both organizationally and in terms of complex
decision-making capacities. Of course, as we have noted above, a lot of
this undoubtedly reflects radical shifts in Indian domestic, regional and
international strategies, particularly over the ‘post-liberalization’ years.
Still, both sets of criticisms do point out the fundamentally ambivalent,
not to say contradictory, position of the Nehruvian scientist-soldier with
regard to one of the basic markers of national sovereignty, whether
post-colonial or otherwise, which is its capacity and commitment to
bear arms. Naturally, such ambivalences and contradictions were also
related, as we have seen before, to others that were embedded in the
idea of non-alignment itself, which Nehru advocated not only in the
context of a global Cold War, but also in that of, as Kanti Bajpai has
called it, regional ‘protracted conflict’ or ‘enduring rivalry’ (Bajpai 2016,
21). Many commentators, such as Andrew Kennedy, have admired
Nehru for forging a political strategy that in his judgement was in equal
parts ‘realist’ and ‘idealist’ in so far as it aimed to both ‘transform
international norms and institutions on the basis of moral principles’
and to secure India’s strategic advantage while doing so (Kennedy 2015,
93). But it is also true that such a careful balancing act undoubtedly
produced uncertainties regarding the use of weapons in an age when
post-colonial India was meant to take its seat as an equal among the

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 the uses of weapons 83

nations of the world. Science and scientists, designated as key players

responsible simultaneously for the pursuit of peace and prosecution of
war, now could be tested in fiction and otherwise about their capacity
for bearing the burden of this herculean task.

War stars

Science fiction has been remarkably adept at reflecting on the relationship

between knowledge, weapons and warfare. This stands to reason. If, as
Charles Tilly has convincingly shown, ‘war-making’ and ‘state-making’
have been among the signal consequences of the business of capitalism
over the past five centuries (Tilly 1985, 169–86), it should come as no
surprise that a literature whose distinctive features include a kind of
‘world building’ that offers ‘however unintentionally, a snapshot of the
structures of capital’ (Bould and Mieville 2009, 4) should meditate on
the relentless militarization of all aspects of modern life. Understandably,
such generic predilections came notably to the fore during periods of
prolonged and sustained global conflicts such as the ‘long’ twentieth
century. The European and American counterparts of Premendra Mitra
and Satyajit Ray were perhaps marked above all by their hypnotic
attraction to the questions of ‘super-weapons’ and ‘future wars’. Some
of these fictional trends should now be noted briefly to allow us to see
how the Indian writers fared in comparison.
Of course, ‘super-weapons’ and ‘future wars’ were by no means
exclusively Cold War themes. H. Bruce Franklin’s exhaustive survey
of the American cultural obsession with them puts their emergence in
fiction between 1880 and 1914 (Franklin 1988, 5). Even more crucially
for Franklin, war and weapons-making was hardwired into the very logic
of American geo-political and economic expansion from the republic’s
earliest days, and this guaranteed the pre-eminence of ‘super-weapons’
in its collective imagination that could be seen across a whole variety of
cultural forms, including most memorably in its speculative, fantastic and
science fictional literatures (Franklin 1988, 92–113). Thus, the imaginary
and real weapons and conflicts co-produced each other, and Franklin
seriously considers the relationship between American science fiction
and the air-war strategies adopted in the Second World War, including
the use of nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

Why did they think as they did? The imagination and consciousness
of these men were shaped, in part, by forces of which they were
only dimly aware. When Harry Truman made his fateful decision,

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84 FINAL FRONTIERS

he was behaving as a fairly typical American man of his era, a

product of his culture. This is not to argue that he was directly
influenced by the pre-World War I future-war fantasies serialized
in the magazines to which he subscribed as a young farmer in
Missouri [….] But the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did indeed
demonstrate the power of the first primitive nuclear weapon. It
also demonstrated the power of the superweapon in American
culture. By the eve of World War II, the old American dream
of the ultimate peacemaking weapon, first projected by Robert
Fulton and popularized by future-war fantasies during the rise of
U.S. imperialism, had been transformed [….] into a panorama of
American military-industrial invincibility. (Franklin 1998, 153)

Nuclear bombs may have been the doomsday weapon of choice in fact
and fiction, but Franklin’s work also shows how quickly apparently
peaceful scientific inventions could be pressed into the services of
militarism precisely because the pervasiveness of this super-weapons
imaginary. In his battle to patent his own electricity-generating devices
against that of Nicola Tesla, Thomas Edison gained advantage by claiming
that he could use alternating current (AC) to create a chain of invincible
fortresses across America capable of defeating numerically superior
enemies (Franklin 1998, 59). In Franklin’s estimation, the vast majority
of American science fiction, even when concerned with exposing the
horrors of weapons and war-making, betray a fascination with the
potency of futuristic weaponry and do not seriously question their
seemingly indispensable role in national and international ‘development’
and progress.2
Many of Franklin’s observations also apply to European science
fiction, particularly those written over the ‘long’ twentieth century in
what was designated its ‘western’ zones. Cataclysmic conflicts powered
by weapons of mass destruction designed by scientific geniuses appeared
in British and French literatures during the Napoleonic wars, before
re-emerging as the theme of an international best-seller in the Battle
of Dorking phenomenon in the late nineteenth century (Clarke 1997,
34–9). George Chesney’s ‘future war’ tale of German invasion of Britain,
published in Blackwood’s Magazine in May 1871, drew both on the

2
This cult of ‘super-weapons’ is far from confined to American science
fiction. It saturates, obviously, the substantial body of war literature and is
the reason why the combat troops interviewed by Chris Hedges can declare
that there are no ‘anti-war’ war movies – all of them fuel the seductive
fantasy of the use of weapons with impunity. See Hedges 2002, 83–121.

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 the uses of weapons 85

author’s own experiences with the British colonial army in India and
the anxieties of a global superpower during an era where perceptions
regarding war-making were undergoing rapid change after the twin
impact of the Franco-Prussian and American civil conflicts (Clarke 1997,
40). Such was Chesney’s ability to surf the zeitgeist that the pamphlet
edition had sold around 80,000 copies within three weeks and,

as the new telegraphic systems spread the news of Chesney’s

story throughout Europe, and further afield to Australia, Canada,
and the United States, the demand for the original version led to
translations into Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and
Swedish, plus two pirated US editions, two reprints in Canada, one
in Melbourne, and one in New Zealand-all within months of the
original printing. (Clarke 1997, 43)

The global conflagration known as the First World War whetted mass
appetite for ‘future war’ stories and super-weapons such as remote-
controlled guns and in particular, the ‘death ray (Fanning Jr. 2010,
253). As with many imaginary weapons, the ‘death ray’ arose out of
historical developments in scientific research into energy sources such
as electricity, X-ray and radium, and quickly assumed the status of
breakthrough technology among military planners, journalists and
scientific innovators alike (Fanning Jr. 2010, 254–6). A constant stream
of science fiction stories written by internationally recognizable authors
such as H.  G.  Wells and Alexei Tolstoy, as well as lesser known ones such
as Werner Gresseger, Sax Rohmer and John W. Campbell, marvelled at
the potent nature of this fantastic weapon and its ability to alter the
existing political balance of the world (Fanning Jr. 2010, 259–64). The
most spectacular representation of this actually non-existent weapon was
often cinematic, in films like The Invisible Ray, featuring iconic actors
such as Boris Kerloff and Bela Legusi (Fanning Jr. 2010, 267).
After the Second World War, it was undoubtedly the existence of
real doomsday machines in the form of nuclear weapons that posed
the question of the worldly alignments of science and scientists most
acutely. The moral conflicts experienced by prominent nuclear weapons
scientists such as Ernest Rutherford, Leo Szilard and even Robert
Oppenheimer were repeatedly rehearsed and (partially) resolved in
most Euro-American science fiction by the use of the promethean trope
to represent such figures (Dowling 1986, 141). Besides, whatever the
misgivings of the science fiction writers regarding nuclear weapons,
their existence was certainly good for their business and not just the
business of writing either:

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86 FINAL FRONTIERS

The writers of pulp-magazine science fiction found themselves in

an ambivalent position after the explosion over Hiroshima of the
first atomic bomb. On the one hand, they were acknowledged as
prophets proven right by the course of events. Some of them began
new careers as writers of popular science and as consultants and
participants in government-and university-sponsored seminars on
social and technological change. Even those who remained close to
their roots in magazine fiction found themselves newly prosperous
as a result of the increased attention the bomb had brought to ‘that
Buck Rogers stuff’. (Berger 1976, 143)

Nuclear weapons were also good to think with for ideologues who
fantasized about rolling back mid-twentieth century’s Euro-American
welfare states by applying neo-liberal measures. Noting how often
fictional super-weapons were deployed as ‘final solutions’ to problems
such as urbanization, Martha Barter notes:

Cities get old, worn-out, dirty, dysfunctional. No technological ‘fix’

seems to satisfy us as we struggle with deteriorating neighbourhoods,
narrow streets, and ineffective sewers. We long for the opportunity
to clean house from top to bottom, to ‘make it new’ [….] While
we would deny actually wanting our major cities destroyed, and
with them our landmarks and our history, we note the popularity
of movies like Godzilla, which show the fragility of our urban
culture. Thus, atomic war has traditionally been presented both
as obvious disaster and as secret salvation. This covert message is
usually overlooked in fiction, even by authors, but it powerfully
influences our cultural subconscious. (Barter 1986, 148)

The increasing embedding of American science fiction writers within

the military apparatus after the anti-colonial wars of the mid-twentieth
century, particularly in Vietnam, also served to disseminate the powerful
myth of the inevitability of war as well as the benefits it confers to
the right kind of victors (Gray 1994, 315–16). Since the 1980s, it has
been a common practice in the US to invite science fiction writers
to military planning sessions about current and future conflicts, and
science fiction itself is an important part of the literature consulted by
senior American military personnel (Gray 1994, 321). Former military
scientists like Jerry Pournelle, professionally associated with top secret
missile technology initiatives like ‘Project 75’, have also emerged as
successful ‘future war’ fiction writers peddling fantasies of committing
mass slaughters of environmentalists, Marxists and generally dissidents

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 the uses of weapons 87

of all stripes with increasingly effective super-weapons including cyborgs

(Gray 1994, 323–4). If such writing is technophiliac or even episte-
mophiliac, it is only as a part of the increasingly desperate attempts
of projecting full-spectrum American global dominance. Vietnam, of
course, can be seen as precisely the moment of the fictional consecration
of the soldier-scientist figure in Euro-American science fiction. Not
only did the famous opposing advertisements in the pages of Galaxy pit
leading writers against each other regarding the war itself, science fiction
emerged as a robust platform where modern American war-making
capacities were thoroughly scrutinized and debated (Franklin 1990,
341–2). Iconic television series such as Star Trek projected issues such
as armed intervention, balance of power and use of weapons of mass
destruction for strategic purposes into space in order to reflect the bitter
divisions that had opened up in American and European societies around
these issues (Franklin 1994, 24–5).
What are we to then make of what I have called the largely
comic and bathetic depiction of weapons in the Indian science fiction
of the Nehruvian years? Did they register a non-aligned sensibility
of distrusting ‘super-weapons’ and ‘future wars’ as instruments of
Euro-American domination of the tri-continent? Were they critical
indices of India’s own dilemmas about regional military ambitions?
Did they raise questions about the relationship between weapons and
‘development’, as well as that between scientific knowledge and war-
and state-making? Returning to the issue I raised in the introduction,
can we see in the armed adventures of Professor Shonku and Ghana-da
semi-peripheral musings on the proliferation of weapons and war in a
period of systemic global crisis? We turn to some of their stories now
to offer some answers to these questions.

A third power

It is not so much the case that super-weapons were absent in the writings
of Mitra and Ray during the non-aligned years. It is more that instead
of being a part of a perpetual ‘future wars’ scenario, they were used
in narratives that were designed to present the limits of such milita-
ristic fantasies. Moreover, the super-weapons that do appear in these
narratives tend not to be of the nuclear kind, but point to a different
kind of imagination at play – one that was more interested in the
weaponization of biology and genetic, rather than mineral, resources, in
order to harness their destructive powers. Thus, on the one hand, the
Bengali bhadralok scientist or scientific entrepreneur was distinctive in

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88 FINAL FRONTIERS

such stories for his ability to defuse or even sabotage the production of
weapons that threatened to disturb the balance of global power. In this
respect, he embodied the ‘idealist’ aspect of Nehruvian non-alignment
where the refusal to submit to the logic of the arms race was seen as
an essential precondition of keeping global conflicts relatively ‘cold’. On
the other hand, Ghana-da and Professor Shonku’s heroic credentials are
marked at least in part by their ability to handle or invent weapons or
organisms and devices that can behave like weapons. Here, we glimpse
the ‘realist’ strand of non-alignment at play, where the self-sufficiency
and innate capabilities of Indian scientist-soldiers could usher in the
country’s regional strategic ambitions and projection of power.
Having started publishing in the 1940s, Mitra in his writings made
the connection between the ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ conflicts of the mid-twentieth
century more strongly than Ray did. The prominence given in these
stories to the recent memories of a world war also kept their imaginative
horizons free of the appalling attractions of ‘future wars’ as a way life.
We have already seen how Nishimara’s deadly laboratory work involved
genetically altering a non-human species into a bio-weapon that could
then be used on certain kinds of human population, precisely because
in so doing it stripped them of their species designation as human.
Nishimara’s insistence of proving the effectiveness of his mosquito by
testing its bite on Martin, the American scientist, was also couched
explicitly in terms of scientific and imperial rivalry with a contem-
porary global superpower. And the glowering presence of Nishimara’s
gigantic black bodyguard, who must be overcome by the Bengali and
the American, also gestured to race being weaponized in this struggle
and pointed to the Bengali’s qualified support for a world order that
relied on such toxic classifications for maintaining its lines of power.
Such confluence of weapons, biology and race could also be seen in
Pokaa (‘Insect’, 1948) – a story that attends to European anti-semitism’s
formative role in post-war dispensation. The narrative begins with yet
another near-exposure of Ghana-da’s heroic posturing, as his entomo-
phobia is rehearsed in a scene that recalls the unfortunate Tan Lin’s
demise in Mosha. Alarmed by his terrified screams one evening, the
hostel residents investigate his attic room and discover a dung-beetle
under his bed, and the latest Ghana-da performance begins as an
attempt to salvage this humiliating situation with a familiar bombast:
‘Ever chased a humble insect over eight thousand miles? Ever thought of
how to dispose of three thousand tons of dead insects? Ever wandered
in deepest Africa with nothing but an empty bottle and a piece of
paper?’ (Mitra 2000 vol. 1, 32). But the adventure of what turns out
to be another bio-weapon – African locusts bred to target European

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 the uses of weapons 89

food crops and cause a devastating famine – begins before the Second
World War in a Europe increasingly dominated by Nazi Germany. In
Riga on unspecified business, Ghana-da is invited to meet the much
decorated ‘true blue’ Prussian war veteran General Vornoff, who appears
to be hiding there in exile. Vornoff shows the Bengali a photograph
of the Jewish scientist Dr Jacob Rothstein, who is rumoured to have
gone missing in Africa while researching the breeding habits of the
Tsetse flies. On Gana-da’s investigation into Vornoff’s curious exile, it
is revealed that Rothstein and Vornoff (whose real name is Isaac) are
siblings, and they have chosen dramatically different paths to fight the
vicious and enduring European anti-semitism – Jacob by becoming a
renowned scientist and Isaac by adopting the fake identity of a ‘real
German’ and distinguishing himself in the First World War. The
brothers had accidentally re-discovered each other while on a train to
Munich and Jacob revealed to Isaac his plans to exact revenge on a
continental scale. This prospect of a ‘future war’ horrified Isaac because
it affronted his sense of a universal humanism:

After meeting him in Munich I understood that despite being a

great scientist, the insults and affronts he had suffered because of
anti-semitism had driven Jacob mad. His plan for vengeance was
born equal parts of insanity and well as scientific genius. It struck
me how differently the same experiences of race hatred had affected
us. Despite being the shame of my people, I had slowly learnt to
rise above communal hatred and love mankind. But Jacob had
turned into mankind’s enemy. I tried to show him the destructive
folly of his plan, but he merely smiled at me sarcastically and said
‘While faking your identity you have turned into a true German.
You will not understand me.’ (2000, 37)3

It is in the defence of this humanism that Ghana-da joins Rothstein/

Vornoff to sabotage his brother’s plans to desertify Europe by unleashing
genetically modified African locusts. Armed with the sample of a dead
locust to help him identify the correct swarm along with instructions
on how to neutralize it, Ghana-da tracks down Jacob Rothstein to the

3
The figure of the malevolent Jewish scientist intent on wrecking havoc
lingered on in Europe despite, and to a certain extent because of, the
revelations about the Nazi holocaust. The structural discrimination faced by
Jewish scientists in the twentieth century are memorably revealed in the
Soviet mathematician Grigori Freiman’s 1980 essay. For a general history
of Jewish scientists in that period see Efron 2014.

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90 FINAL FRONTIERS

depths of Africa just as he is about to release his deadly insects on Italy,

Germany and England. He is able to introduce to this biblical host a
deadly virus given to him by Isaac, and the swarm, whose flight had
darkened the skies from Sudan to Libya, falls dead over the Sahara
and off the shores of Corsica. But the narrative ends with the call for
eternal vigilance against the vengeful Jewish scientist – the very figure
that had helped sustain the anti-semitic hysteria in Europe: ‘Cistocirca
Gregoria is finished, but not Jacob Rothstein. Who knows what plan he
is concocting hidden away at the end of the earth. Perhaps this insect
is his ambassador’ (Mitra 2000 vol. 1, 39). Ghana-da’s entomophobia,
on this reading, thus turns out to be a code for enduring anti-semitism
– the very disease Rothstein’s story is supposed to inoculate the reader
against. The Bengali’s containment of the threat of bio-weapons, as in
Mosha, is conducted in the service of maintaining and enhancing the
post-war dispensation – whose lip-service to ending anti-semitism and
other kinds of racism (the famous declaration of ‘never again’) in reality
turns out to conceal nothing less than the consolidation of racism in
the interest of new forms of global dominance.
When nuclear ‘super-weapons’ do enter Mitra’s narratives, Ghana-da’s
task is often to prevent their proliferation and thereby maintain
the status quo regarding the monopoly exercised by the Cold War
superpowers over the right to possess them. Since the narratives often
retrospectively pitched such encounters with the doomsday machines
before or during the Second World War, the implication of Ghana-da’s
adventures in nuclear non-proliferation seemed to be in line with
the ‘balance of power’ logic that held global peace, or at least the
relative lowering of the intensity of conflicts, was a far more attractive
proposition than the prospect of perpetual ‘future wars’ that excited his
Euro-American counterparts. Biology, and in particular race, remained
as one of the key filters through which ‘future wars’ scenarios were
defused in Mitra’s tales. Kaanch (‘Glass’, 1950) offered the cliched racist
stereotype of the virile and hyper-aggressive African-American male
athlete as part of the ‘fake news’ designed by the residents to entrap
and expose Ghana-da:

I don’t know if you have heard of Black Tiger – the negro boxer
as ferocious as a tiger. He arrived in Calcutta a month ago. He is
due to fight out our welterweight champion Surajit Das [….] So
far he has sent five referees to the hospital, and one of them is
yet to return. When he is angry, he tends to confuse referees with
his opponents [….] We need a referee like Ghana-da. He can both
enforce the rules, and can tame Black Tiger with an uppercut if

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 the uses of weapons 91

he steps out of line. Ghana-da, do tell them about the time you
floored Battling Micky with a straight left? (Mitra 2000 vol. 1, 53)

Ghana-da counters this narrative trap with a tale about defeating the
Nazis in the race for the nuclear bomb, but unlike other occasions this
story is marked by his partial affiliation with certain kinds of black
Africans.4 The action is set in Angola and begins with a violent altercation
between the Bengali and two young German Nazis on board a train on its
way to the Bihe mountain ranges, which are reputedly rich in uranium.
The Nazis attempt to eject Ghana-da on grounds of racial hygiene and are
taught their manners with the appropriate degree of physical chastisement
by our hero. At this point, their shrewder and more experienced leader,
von Papen, enters the scene and Ghana-da realizes that it is up to him
to stop the Germans from extracting the minerals that would give their
nuclear weapons programme a decisive boost. This he proposes to do
by recruiting his trusted African porter Nwala to sound a false alarm
through the tribal ‘bush telegram’ – the mythical drum beats relayed from
settlement to settlement – about the German’s ‘sacrilegious’ mission to
the mountain. But the move appears to backfire if only because it works
too well, and the expedition faces both the prospect of the impending
attack by both the local ‘savages’ as well as by the African porters of the
expedition, who assault them at night and leave von Papen and Ghana-da
helplessly stripped and bound. The Nazi youths, however, are undeterred
and manage to proceed to carry on with their search. The prospect of the
Nazi bomb is in fact uppermost in Ghana-da’s mind even while facing
certain death: ‘The extent of uranium deposits on the Bihe plateau was
no secret to me. It was not impossible that the two young Germans could
stumble upon the thick veins of pitch-blend. I could not let them find
that treasure. Yet, here we were about to lose our lives to the savages’
(Mitra 2000 vol. 1, 61). The conundrum is solved as usual by a flash of
scientific ingenuity, when Ghana-da manages to refract sunlight on to the
savannah grass with the help of a broken lens. The resulting fire drives
off both kinds of ‘savages’ – the Nazis and the bellicose Africans – and
prevents the development of the Nazi super-weapon. Thus, Kaanch, only
partially disturbs the assumptions about race with which the narrative
begins – Nwala is an ally in so far as he can be trusted to carry out

4
Mitra’s ability to give fictional form to historical events that were not only
recent, but not yet subject to full investigation, was remarkable. His tale of
the Nazi bomb, written five years after the end of the Second World War,
preceded most scholarly discussions on the topic. For a history of Nazi
nuclear research, see Powers 1993 and Aczel 2009.

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92 FINAL FRONTIERS

the precise instructions given to him by the intellectually (and racially)

superior Bengali, and these instructions are designed to defeat the Nazis
by playing on the savage ‘credulance’ of other Africans. But in acknowl-
edging that such racial coding lay at the heart of Nazism, and that this
could be confronted only by the combined wit of the Bengali and Nwala,
Ghana-da seems to perform a qualified shift from the degree of racism
that had sustained some of his other adventures with super-weapons.
If the German ambitions regarding super-weapons are successfully
thwarted, due attention must of course be paid to other Axis powers
such as Japan. In Ghori (‘Watch’, 1948) the only country to have
suffered a nuclear attack in history is re-imagined as a rogue nuclear
power whose threat must be neutralized at all cost (echoing thereby
precisely the propaganda offered by the US in order to justify Hiroshima
and Nagasaki). This is done in the story not by rehearsing a fictional
version of the historical carnage administered by ‘Fat Man’ and ‘Little
Boy’ (the creepy code-names given to the two nuclear bombs that were
dropped on the two Japanese cities), but by offering a model of the
kind of administrative acumen that we saw had emerged as a desired
quality of the Nehruvian scientist-soldier. Ghana-da’s tale begins with
an account of a devastating tsunami in the Pacific, which later on turns
out to have been triggered by improvised Japanese ‘dirty’ bombs that
Ghana-da had helped defuse and then dump into the ocean. While
plying his import–export trade in the Polynesian islands, Ghana-da
receives reports of mysterious explosions crippling European transport
hubs and infrastructure. At the same time, his warehouse in Samoa
is broken into, and the robbers make off with some cheap Japanese
watches. The connection between these two apparently random events
begins to be pieced together by Ghana-da’s investigations, when an
agitated Japanese businessman appears at his office and explains that
all the stolen watches must be recovered and that in fact the entire
shipment had reached Samoa by a clerical mistake and he was there
to recall it and compensate Ghana-da for his losses. Intrigued by his
disproportionate concern for what appears to be entirely disposable
cheap goods, Ghana-da recruits a visiting American chemist to examine
the watches. Upon discovering their explosive potential, he then
co-ordinates, with the help of his contacts in British and American
intelligence, the gathering of all the watches distributed in Europe by the
same Japanese company. This is accomplished by a mammoth logistics
exercise involving military transport planes and ships that deliver

Two million fifty-three thousand three hundred and one watches.

Each one with the explosive power of a mini atomic bomb. Each one

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 the uses of weapons 93

had timers set to go off at different intervals, when two explosive

chemicals were released to combine with deadly results. The Japanese
company had exported these cheap watches all across Europe and
America. Many ordinary people – from factory workers to barristers
had bought them. This explained the random explosions. A few more
months, and most of the American and European infrastructure
would have been destroyed. There would have been no need for
the Second World war. (Mitra 2000 vol. 1,  155)

The weapons are dumped into the ocean, but in an uncanny prophecy
of the fate of the Pacific islands in the era of oceanic nuclear testing
as documented by Elizabeth Deloughrey and others (Deloughrey 2009,
2013), their ‘safe’ defusions generate killer waves that lash the shores
from Tahiti to Fiji and cause countless deaths. As ever, Ghana-da’s
tall-tale serves the triple purpose of maintaining his social prestige
among his interlocutors, testing out some of the claims of ‘Nehruvian
science’ and its scientist-soldiers, and laying bare the human costs of such
strategies that are usually displaced onto the ‘savages’ of the earth. We
should note in passing, however, the specific skill that the Bengali deploys
to trump the Japanese. If the exposure of the ‘dirty bomb’ campaign
is enabled by administrative mismanagement by a Japanese corporation
(historically famous for avoiding precisely such calamities), Ghana-da’s
heroism in this tale is secured not so much by his physical or scientific
prowess, but precisely by his managerial capacities that enable him to
mount a swift and effective trans-continental logistical operation. But
typically, such skills and capacities are revealed as Janus-faced. On the
one hand, it offers a fictional resolution to the historical shortages of
such expertise that adversely affected Nehru’s India and thereby puts
forward an imaginary claim for India’s regional pre-eminence; on the
other hand, it reveals the outsourced human cost of such expertise in
the casual but telling reference to the Polynasian mass deaths with
which the story begins.
As we have seen before, Nehruvian non-alignment was fundamentally
ambivalent about nuclear weapons – calling for their banishment yet
harbouring secret longings for developing, if not actually wielding, them.
In a story like Hnaash (‘Duck’, 1957), Mitra made such ambivalence
his narrative motor. The conversational sociability of the men’s hostel
is disturbed when a new resident, Bapi Datta, flies into a rage on
discovering that the duck meat he had bought for his family had been
diced and dressed by Ghana-da and served up for general consumption.
Faced with Datta’s ferocious demands for explanation behind such
uncivil appropriation of private property, Ghana-da offers a story about

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94 FINAL FRONTIERS

the extraction of resources from nature – in effect, a rhetorical defence

of his entrepreneurial instinct for accumulation of all kinds things over
which he exercises no actual rights whatsoever. The natural resource in
question here is deuterium oxide, or heavy water – a valuable ingredient
in nuclear energy and weapons research – that is in the story found in
abundance in a remote Tibetan lake. Unlike Kaanch, however, the arms
race in Hnaash is not between agents of the global superpowers, but
between rogue entrepreneurs with no obvious allegiances to anything
but profiteering. As Ghana-da blithely puts it to his rival, the murderous
Muller, who has already killed one scientist to possess the secret of the
lake,

Like I said, I am looking for heavy water. If I could sell a small

bottle of it in this age of the hydrogen bomb, I could immediately
retire. Dr Callio had risked his life in the quest for heavy water
and found a secret lake in Tibet which held a century’s worth of
reserve. But he made the mistake of revealing this to you because
he thought you were a harmless explorer. And you stole the map
from him and left him to die in the blizzard. (Mitra 2000 vol. 1,
164–5)

Muller and Callio’s nationalities are revealed with varying degrees of

explicitness (one is marked by his stock Germanic name; the other, his
victim, is eventually identified as Finnish), but they are not in any way
allied to national interests. Instead, they are identified as scientists – one
rogue and the other respectable – both in search of what Jason Moore
calls ‘cheap nature’ so that they can then sell such wealth to the highest
bidder (Moore 2015, 17–18). In this respect, Muller has form, since we are
told that he is ‘the shame of the scientific world, a fraud, a thief and a
murderer. You stole radium from the first laboratory you worked for and
have been on the run since, changing names as you went’ (Mitra 2000
vol. 1, 165). But while his victim Callio is certainly not as murderous
as him, it is not clear why his search for heavy water is any different
in moral terms to Muller’s, since they both aim to extract what cannot
belong to them on any grounds except those of the historical privileges
granted to (some) Europeans by the dint of their colonial relations to
Asiatic peripheries such as Tibet.
It is to such privileges that Ghana-da’s own entrepreneurship lays
claim to in this story. As his confession to Muller shows, he is motivated
exactly by the same acquisitive spirit as the European scientists and
it is precisely this instinct that Mitra’s narrative interrogates in its
denouement. Having recovered the map of the remote lake from Callio’s

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 the uses of weapons 95

corpse, Ghana-da is chased by a fiercely determined Muller across the

icy wastes and finally cornered. Here, Mitra deploys the familiar tactic
of generic discontinuity, as tropes of the imperial adventure stories such
as hunting (Green 1979; MacKenzie 1988; Mukherjee 2005; Thompsell
2015) are grafted on to the tale of scientific wonder. Spying a wolf
stalking some migrant ducks, Ghana-da shoots the animal with his last
bullet at the very moment it has caught a stunned but live bird in its
mouth. He then forces the map down the gullet of the duck and sets it
free on its flight across the Himalayas to the warmer climes of India.
It is this search for the map in the stomach of the fugitive bird that
has since led him, such is his claim, to slaughter 1,232 ducks thus far.
Thus, the end of the narrative returns us to the problem posed by the
enraged Bapi Datta in the beginning – on what grounds can Ghana-da
explain his appropriation of the ducks that Datta had bought for his
private consumption? Ghana-da’s tale suggests that the only justification
for such an action is the possession of a certain kind of power. It is
Ghana-da’s mimicry of the role of the European scientific adventurer
in the colonies that guarantees the success of his story, the narrating
of which in turn tames Bapi Datta’s rage and converts him into yet
another of Ghana-da’s resident acolytes. Yet such acquisitive spirit of
profit-making, and the kind of weaponized power it produces, also raises
questions about the non-aligned positions on nuclear weapons research.
How does the figure of the enterprising scientist who externalizes nature
as a resource for plundering fit into the project of building a nation
that renounces the legacy of colonial extractions? If the services of
such experts are reserved for the highest bidders, how do nations cope
with the potential proliferation of super-weapons? Can one distinguish
the desire for super-weapons displayed by the global powers and from
that harboured, despite all the denials, by a post-colonial nation such
as India?
In fact, such questions about scientific entrepreneurship and privati-
zation of super-weapons research were raised repeatedly in Mitra’s
fiction. In Daant (‘Teeth’, 1955), Ghana-da runs into the foul-mouthed,
racist, American millionaire Benito while tuna-fishing in the seas off
California. Of course, this turns out to be a cover for an investigation he
is conducting into the death of his old friend De Costa, whose body has
washed up on the beach soon after sending a distress call to Ghana-da.
The small fishing town is awash with rumours regarding De Costa’s
death, as well as those about a giant tuna that is apparently able to cut
through the strongest lines cast by the most experienced anglers. The
resolution of the twin mysteries occur on board of Benito’s luxurious
yacht, when a glamorous party is disrupted by the announcement of

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96 FINAL FRONTIERS

theft. Benito catches Ghana-da in his private cabin, and the Bengali
readily confesses to photographing a bundle of secret papers and sending
them to the appropriate authorities. But how has he done all this without
leaving the yacht?

Why, I sent them attached to the very torpedo that you have been
using in your researches on guided missile technology! The same
torpedo you have been using to cut the fishing lines of the tuna
fishers as a prank. I have sent it towards the Newport coast with
all the photos on board and it will be fished out of the sea by the
authorities in the morning. (Mitra 2000 vol. 1, 145)

Of course, an uncouth person such as Benito could not have possessed

such secret weapons without expert help. So enters the story the figure of
the enterprising scientist, this time presented in a pathetic key. Ghana-da
escapes Benito’s clutches with the help of Anthony Fisher – employed by
the millionaire to develop the missile – who rebels against his employer:

Yes, I am Anthony Fisher. The same man you had kidnapped

and used as a slave for five long years. I have obeyed your every
command like the weak, cowardly scientist I am. Not only have
I built a guided-missile system for you, I have also given you the
formula for the cobalt bomb. But that formula is no longer yours.
You cannot hold the entire world to ransom with it. This is my
greatest consolation. I will no longer be your puppet. (Mitra 2000
vol. 1, 146)

The conscience-stricken scientist was, as we know, a feature both of Cold

War history and science fiction. But here his services, coerced as they
are, are rendered for a rogue millionaire rather than to a rogue nation.
Ghana-da’s intervention seems to restore the appropriate order of things
– the cobalt bomb and the guided missile system presumably designed to
deliver it – are delivered to the ‘appropriate authorities’ representing the
American state. But it does leave open the question regarding his own
motives, which Hnaash had also raised. Are his dreams of profiteering
from selling super-weapons, ingredients registered in that story, any
different to those of Benito’s?
We meet the morally compromised scientist once again in Shishi
(‘Bottle’, 1959), but this time his malevolent patron represents not
just a private interest but a shadowy, unnamed ‘third power’ set to
disrupt the global balance of power. We may recall from our previous
discussions regarding laboratories that in Shishi, the story-within-the

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 the uses of weapons 97

story has Ghana-da claiming to be the bearer of Darwin’s legacy while

carrying out research on marine iguanas in the Galapagos islands. His
sole companion is a stereotypically ‘primitive’ indigenous Ecuadorian
whose religious beliefs – in this case marked as ‘Christian superstition’
– serve to foreground Ghana-da’s own impeccable scientific credentials.
Into this drama of the clash between science and religion enters a
mysterious sea-creature glimpsed at night and which serves as a test
for the opposing claims of the two world views. But the creature turns
out not to belong to either the theological universe of demons or the
biological universe of hitherto unknown marine life-form. The proper
classification for it is in fact techno-political, since it is a super-weapon
– a nuclear submarine that is engaged in mapping an underwater rift
valley running between the Atlantic and the Pacific so that it can travel
undetected by existing American and Soviet radar systems.
What appears most disturbing to Ghana-da is the fact that this
super-weapon has no national affiliations. The crew that operates it, the
geographer Sustel and his unnamed patron, are marked by their weak
or non-existent nationalist markers such as language and citizenship.
Ghana-da mounts his reluctance to co-operate with them precisely on
the grounds of their rootless cosmopolitanism:

How can I go with you? Had you abandoned your broken English
and spoken in your own tongue, I may have been able to guess
where you were from. Granted, Sustel himself had neither a
country, nor a mother tongue. He was born in Tunisia, educated
in Germany. After the war, the Russians had imprisoned him for
a while. After that he had been commissioned by the British to
drawn up maps in Africa, Bolivia and Ecuador before disappearing.
How can I accompany you two strangers? (Mitra 2000 vol. 1, 245)

Forced on board the vessel, he is then confronted with the sinister pair’s
real plans – to recruit him to chart the vast reserves of petroleum and
minerals embedded in the oceanic mountain ranges that they then plan
to sell to enhance their military capacities. Ghana-da senses that Sustel,
just like Anthony Fisher in Daant, has misgivings about his patron’s
schemes and attempts to turn him back to the right side:

So the rumors are true. There is a third power besides the Russians
and the Americans that is growing in stature. Whatever their faults,
both the superpowers basically want good for mankind. But the
third power has no such weaknesses. Whatever else you may be,
you are French. How can you sell yourself to these people? If you

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98 FINAL FRONTIERS

do not feel anything for your country, do you not have any consid-
erations for humanity as such? (Mitra 2000 vol. 1, 248)

The Bengali’s appeal to Sustel’s humanity is thus expressed exclusively

in terms of national belonging – his French-ness. Compared to the
cosmopolitanism of his patron, even the nuclear-armed nations appear to
be benevolent and they are certainly to be preferred for the maintenance
of world order. Ghana-da’s words are effective. Sustel confesses to his
moral failings and avariciousness and conspires with Ghana-da to
produce a fake map of the submarine trenches, mountains and fuel
reserves and the rise of the would-be ‘third power’ is decisively stalled.
Writing nearly two decades after Mitra, Ray’s Professor Shonku stories
seem at first sight to largely avoid the narrative possibilities activated
by the presence of super-weapons. However, it may be more accurate to
suggest that Ray’s interest lay in the moral and ethical problems posed
to scientists by their capacities to develop destructive technology of
which weapons are a significant, albeit not the only, part. What is also
noticeable in the Shonku stories is their interest in bio-weapons and
lethal robotics, rather than in the more conventional super-weapons,
such as the nuclear arsenal. This combination of anxieties about the
scientist’s capacity to succumb to the glamour of killer technology
and the corresponding capacity of that technology to colonize entire
life-worlds, further extended Ray’s enquiries into the militarization of
science inaugurated by Nehru’s policies in post-colonial India.
We have already seen these trends in the earliest Shonku stories,
where the comic ineffectiveness of the scientist’s own patented super-
weapon is combined with his failure to comprehend the powers of his
rivals, who are usually presented as anti- or non-scientific figures, such
as the sadhu in Harh. We will recall that in Byomjatrir Diary the snuff
gun is only useful in tormenting Shonku’s servant-assistant Prahlad –
for instance, when his infractions in the laboratory are punished by
making him sneeze continuously for two days. Faced with the piscine
Martians, Shonku’s weapons are completely useless and, on the planet
Tafa, Shonku’s inferiority to the aphid aliens is confirmed in the final
humiliation of their utter indifference to the weapon. In Harh, the
sadhu’s ancient formula has the power of life and death, and is wielded
by him against Shonku as he revives a pre-historic beast in the hope
that it will devour the scientist. Of course, his own lack of zoological
knowledge results in a fatal miscalculation and his sentient weapon turns
against him. While the main effects of such stories, as we have seen, is
to interrogate the epistemological claims of science and, in particular,
the spaces (like laboratories) from within which such claims are made,

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 the uses of weapons 99

it is also true that the weaponization of life-forms and the moral and
ethical challenges posed by this to scientists emerge as key concerns in
the Shonku stories written in the 1960s and 1970s. Let us turn briefly
to a couple of them to conclude our discussion in this chapter.
Professor Shonku O Golok Rahasya (‘Professor Shonku and the Mysterious
Sphere’, 1965) begins with a visit by Shonku’s sceptical neighbour
Avinash babu, who coaxes the scientist to take a break from his work
and entertain himself with a ‘new toy’ he has just found while walking
by the banks of the local river Usri. Shonku has just concluded his
successful experiments to build a machine he calls the ‘microsonograph’
– a machine that is capable of capturing all infrasonic and ultrasonic
sounds. He is exhausted, and so he agrees to take a look at the object
Avinash babu has discovered. This appears to be a small spherical object
that changes colour throughout the day, is damp to touch, and made
of unidentifiable matter. It also appears to be deadly to local life forms,
as Avinash babu attests:

‘This ball has a terrible power, there is evil in it. A gecko used to
live on top of that glass case. This morning it was lying on the floor,
dead. But that’s not all. I found about a dozen dead cockroaches in
that case.’ I could not stop laughing. ‘What you mean is, that ball
acted as an insecticide. You should be happy to have found such
an effective insecticide, all for free. Why do you sound so worried?’
‘If it killed only insects, I wouldn’t worry. I am not feeling very
well myself. I feel kind of nauseous.’ (Ray 2003, 72–3)

Forced to take Avinash babu seriously after his own cat Newton has
a similar reaction to the sphere, Shonku realizes that its chameleon
properties correspond to earth’s annual seasonal cycle, compressed
within a solar day. Could he be looking at a miniature planet? Indeed,
his microsonograph soon picks up the chatter of the invisible inhabitants
of what turns out to be the smallest planet in the galaxy, Terratum.
These microbial aliens point out that although Shonku has unwittingly
made captives of them, his laboratory environment is lethal for them
and, unless freed immediately, the scientist would be responsible for a
genocide. The twist in the tale is that, as Avinash babu had guessed,
Tarratum is really a powerful bio-weapon, hostile to all earthly life forms:

You are wondering, aren’t you, if we have the power to spread

illness and disease every where in the world? Yes, we have. In just
three months, we can empty the world of its human population.
An epidemic does not call for hard work. Only one of us is enough

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100 FINAL FRONTIERS

to kill everyone in Giridih. And if all of us were to get together

[…] We are about to die. You can save our lives. Do not become
a killer. All your life, your conscience will …. (Ray 2003, 82–3)

Thus is posed the moral dilemma at the heart of the story. The scientist
has to choose between committing a genocide of an alien species and
the possibility of a cataclysm unleashed on earth by a bio-weaponry
far superior to anything he himself has ever invented. Shonku chooses
the former:

No words came from my microsonograph. All I could hear was that

piercing scream. It went on for some time, then became one long
wail. Then there were broken sobs. And then nothing [….] I placed
the ball on the floor. Newton came forward. Then he struck it with
his front paw. At once, the smallest planet in the solar system broke
into several pieces and lay scattered on the floor. (Ray 2003, 83)

Such a decision dramatizes the conundrum posed by the militarization

of science during the Cold War years. This was an era during when, as
Robert Heinlein Starship Troopers (1959) and many other texts showed,
apocalyptic ‘future war’ scenarios were carefully fabricated through
the idiom of paranoid racism and specie-ism involving alien life-forms
that often stood in for anti-colonial militants of the global South.
Shonku is not a Dr Strangelove. Nonetheless, his decision to wipe out
aliens in order to preserve his own kind shows that the non-aligned
scientists may not be immune to the moral and ethical dilemmas of
their Euro-American counterparts. Apparently bystanders at the global
arms race, yet committed to regional and national militarization in the
name of security, they distilled within them the contradictory impulses
of Nehruvian nationalism and internationalism.5
Such dilemmas are less sharp in Ray when the weaponization of
life-forms is conducted at the behest of a rogue European or American
scientist. In stories like Professor Shonku O Gorilla (‘Professor Shonku and
the Gorilla’, 1969), Shonku’s aim is to simply defeat such destructive
initiatives with the help of a coalition of allies. However, there are real
differences between his adventures and those of Ghana-da – not only
those manifested in the absence of the tall-tale framework, but also in

5
Although the Cold War and non-aligned imaginations were charged by
nuclear weapons, other forms of super-weapons, particularly their biological
and chemical versions, also had formative roles to play here. See Wheelis
et al. 2006; Balmer et al. 2016 and Carus 2017.

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 the uses of weapons 101

Shonku’s own profoundly anti-heroic representation of his adventures.

In Gorilla, Shonku is reassuring the readers about his laboratory’s
strictly ethical animal-testing protocols when he receives the news
of the disappearance of a British primatologist of his acquaintance
in Congo. Since he is an admirer of the missing Massingham for his
pioneering research on the great apes, Shonku agrees to accompany
his friend Gregory, another British scientist, and bring Avinash babu
with him to solve the mystery. What follows is the deployment of
the Conradian ‘heart of darkness’ formula to enhance the narrative
effects of a tale of scientific overreach. In Congo, the adventurers led
by an enterprising Congolese guide Kabala, realize quickly that there
is something drastically wrong with the local gorillas. A hunting party
they encounter appear more like a zombified or robotic swarm controlled
by unknown technology:

They were within fifty yards now. I was nearly overwhelmed by

the strong odour coming from their bodies. They advanced without
any pause. I could now see that they had been hunting, and had
deers, wild pigs and goat slung over their shoulders. None of
these was a part of their normal diet. Gorillas live on roots and
fruits. Kabala pointed at the big male leading the group and asked
‘What is that thing on its head?’ I had never thought gorillas
could be this big. There was something metallic on his head that
was glistening in the sunshine. Now they were within ten yards.
It looked like the dark wall of the forest itself was advancing on
us. I was surprised by their expression. They seemed to have a
dead gaze, and were moving mechanically. One gorilla stumbled
against a rock, but paid no attention to it and continued walking
as before. (Mitra 2003, 164)

Their camp is attacked at night by these sentient weapons, and although

Shonku is able to vaporize one with one of his patented super-weapons,
annihilin, he cannot resist the power of the technology that controls
the primates. As soon as he tries on the metal disc worn by the gorillas,
he too falls under the complete control of Massingham, who re-appears
in the narrative as a Conradian Kurtz-like figure who has turned the
primates into a loyal army who guard him and his secret laboratory. It
falls to Avinash babu and Kabala to devise a way of rescuing Shonku
and Gregory and sabotage Massingham’s plans to militarize all primate
life-forms, which they of course do in accordance to the generic
demands. They force Massingham to reverse the process by which the
gorillas are being controlled, and the animals return to their senses and

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102 FINAL FRONTIERS

their habitats. Thus, although Massingham’s bio-weapons programme is

successfully stalled, this is no thanks to any heroic scientific opposition
to it. In fact, it is noticeable how easily Shonku and Gregory are
co-opted or neutralized by Massingham’s technology. It is the comic
and decidedly anti-scientific figures of Avinash babu and the indigenous
guide Kabala who save the day and are accorded heroic stature in the
narrative. However laudable their aims, the scientist’s technophilia and
scientism compromise their ability to mitigate the effects of militarization
of science.
The weaponize-ation of bio-forms is also an excellent way of
puncturing anthropocentric concepts usually deployed to patrol species
boundaries. In the narratives, fantasies of controlling and using sentient
beings as weapons often morph into enquiries about the category of the
human itself. For Shonku, such paradigmatic problems of science are
already raised, as we have seen, during his adventures in Heidelburg
recorded in Professor Shonku O Robu. We have briefly discussed the
laboratory space that appeared in that story, but let us return to it to look
at the question of sentient weapons that is also raised there. Shonku’s
invitation to Germany has arrived because of both the economy with
which he has built his robot and its mathematical and linguistic skills.
In addition, it displays a self-learning capacity that seems to transcend
the limits of Moore’s Law regarding artificial intelligence.6 Although it
is seemingly incapable of acquiring emotions, Shonku is hopeful that
Robu can replace the erratic and all-too-human Prahlad as the chief
assistant in his laboratory. In Germany, his friend Paumer is suitably
impressed by Robu and insists that it must be shown to the country’s
leading expert, Borgelt, who has also built a similar machine at a much
greater expense. Robu appears to pass all the tests put to him by Borgelt
until it is asked to identify the scientist, whereupon he falls silent, much
to the embarrassment of Shonku. Despite this failure and Borgelt’s
reservations about Robu’s rather slapdash appearance, he offers to buy
it from Shonku because of its mathematical prowess, which he claims
is the single attribute missing from his own robot. On being refused,
he turns violent: ‘“Don’t you know how much easier it is to destroy life
than preserve it?” Borgelt’s words echoed round the room. “One electric
shock is all that’s needed. Do you know how many volts? Your Robu

6
Gordon Moore’s observations of the doubling of the number of transistors
in an integrated circuit had first been formed in 1965 in relation to
the manufacture of semiconductors. It has since then been applied to
predict a whole variety of technological trends, including those relating to
nano-technology and dynamic random-access memory. See Mack 2015.

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 the uses of weapons 103

might know. And it’s ever so easy to do it!” [….] Borgelt was advancing
towards me, his right arm outstretched, his fingers pointing at me’ (Ray
2008, 153–4). The absence of any visible weapons on Borgelt alerts the
reader to what Shonku in his panic is yet to realize, that Borgelt is
the lethal weapon in question. This apparent mystery is solved by the
dramatic intervention of Shonku’s robot: ‘Robu appeared to be pressing
Borgelt’s head from both sides. Under such an impact, Borgelt’s head
twisted and turned, as if it had been screwed on. Then Robu pulled at
it, until it came apart and fell on the floor with a clatter. Through the
gap in his neck spilled out masses of electric wires’ (Ray 2008, 154). It
is by this gruesome ‘death’ that Shonku realizes that it is not Borgelt but
his robot that he had all along been dealing with. The German scientist,
unlike Shonku, had made the error of making his machine capable of
learning human emotions. Soon, he had been imprisoned by his creature,
which had gone on to display the familiar sociopathic failings of rogue
scientists such as cruelty, selfishness, ambition and lack of empathy.
What is telling here is that Shonku’s Robu is able to defeat Borgelt’s
machine not because the former is less human than the latter, but
precisely because it has learnt to become more so. Paumer has secretly
programmed it to respond to and mimic Shonku’s emotions, and this
has enabled it to come to his creator’s rescue at the moment of crisis.
But being more human also means being more capable of violence, of
killing or neutralizing an opponent, of turning oneself into a better
weapon. Both the machines in the story are apparently able to accelerate
their self-learning process and transcend Moore’s law. But this erasure
of anthropocentric species-boundary paradoxically results in the confir-
mation of the essential human characteristic – to acquire weapons and
commit violence at the earliest opportunity. If to weaponize is to be
human, then where does this leave the claims of ‘Nehruvian science’?
Could it be that despite their declared peaceful intentions, every scientific
initiative is always also potentially war-like? With such disclosures, Ray’s
Shonku recalls the uncomfortable questions put to India’s non-aligned
prime minister by legions of his national and international critics.

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 Chapter Three

Energy matters
Energy matters

From a crater

The weaponization of life depicted in Mitra and Ray’s science fiction

raised questions regarding the politics of techno-scientific development
that were inseparable from the ideas and practices of non-alignment
themselves. But the manner in which this was done also extended
an invitation to shift our understanding of power from its political
connotations to a more expansive one associated with the matter of
energy. What I want to argue below is that, written in the decades
immediately before the global oil crises that triggered what Jason Moore
has called the end of the era of ‘cheap energy’ (Moore 2015, 267), this
literature was set in motion, at least in part, by an ‘energy unconscious’ –
a concept that has become central to the recent theoretical interventions
that have been gathered under the name of ‘energy humanities’ – that
was sedimented in the creative and critical imaginations of the period
(Szeman and Boyer 2017, 8).
A return to the opening moments of the first Shonku story may
clarify my reasons behind this suggestion. We may remember that
the astronauts’ diary is brought to the frame-narrator by a struggling
author, Tarak Chatterjee, who claims that it is literally part of the alien
matter that he has discovered in the aftermath of a cosmic visitation:
‘Yes, bang in the middle of the crater. When that meteorite fell, it
created a massive crater. You’ve seen Lake Hedo in Calcutta, haven’t
you? Well, that crater was more than four times its size, I can tell you!
That notebook was lying at its centre’ (Ray 2008, 3). Chatterjee’s claim
is received with understandable scepticism by our narrator, because
s/he cannot believe that any text can survive the force generated by the
dissipation of meteoric energy on the earth’s surface. But this scepticism
is in turn soon dispelled as s/he discovers that the diary resists decay
even when introduced to fire, although it does display signs of some

105

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106 FINAL FRONTIERS

transformation: ‘An odd impulse made me light a match and hold it

against a page. It did not burn. Then I lit my stove and dropped the diary
into the naked flames. I let it remain there for as long as five hours.
Nothing happened. Only the colour of the ink continued to change’
(Ray 2008, 5). Not just any old alien matter then, but the diary should
more properly be understood as matter fired by a weird energy that is
apparently able to change forms rather than collapse as it passes through
different environmental systems – from the darkness of space to earth’s
light and heat. In this reading, the novum of Ray’s story, so to speak,
turns out to be the text itself, in which this mysterious energy triggers
the narrative of the space travel, and which, as we shall see in a moment,
is also in no small way concerned with the circulation and flow of a
variety of other kinds of forces. If this is the case, the story’s conclusion
offers a number of productive problems on which the (future) seriality of
the Shonku narratives depend. For Shonku’s adventures in space do not
end with his humiliation on Tafa. They do so with a return to story’s
frame-narration and the matters of preservation and/or dissipation of the
textual matter and the narrative energies contained within it. The frame-
narrator’s final editorial note gestures simultaneously to his commitment
to scientific evidence and reason, as well as the limits of such norms,
beyond the pale of which lies the realm of wonder: ‘[Readers] might
wonder where I have kept Professor Shonku’s diary, and whether one
might see this remarkable object. What I wanted to do was to have the
paper and ink examined by a scientist, and then I would have handed it
over to a museum [….] But there is no way of doing that now’ (Ray 2008,
29). For although the diary had thus far appeared to be indestructible,
it now ends up as food for a swarm of hungry black ants. The effect
of the joke depends on the assumed narrative connection between the
earthly insects and the alien aphids of Tafa. But one response to the
frame-narrator’s defiance against any readerly expectations regarding the
supply of a rational explanation to this amazing event is to consider the
simultaneously thermodynamic and evolutionary nature of the energies
being represented in the narrative. The destruction of the diary does not
mean the end of the Shonku stories. The text in its entirety has been
successfully copied by the frame-narrator and will now be the basis of
the seriality of Ray’s fiction over the coming decades. What had appeared
to be a narrative entropy turns out to be circulatory and genetic. It is
this dynamic transaction between what Howard Caygill has called the
physical and physiological accounts of energy that produces the wonder
of Professor Shonku (Caygill 2007, 21).
Such playful reflections on energy were hardly limited to Ray’s early
forays into science fiction and were arguably present in the work, not

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 energy matters 107

limited to science fiction, he produced throughout his life. They also

animated Mitra’s Ghana-da cycle in a similar manner. In most of Mitra’s
stories, the production of the tall-tales and the resulting narrative tension
involving the attempted exposure of their fakeness by the members of
the adda circle directly correlate to the availability and consumption of
food – a key historical index of post-colonial India’s quest to become
self-sufficient in the production of human energy that went (and still
goes) under the name of ‘manpower’. Indeed, Mitra’s lovingly crafted
details of the lavish consumption of food that is required to appease
Ghana-da and lubricate his narrative performances can not only be seen
as a homage to the famous Bengali cuisine and the region’s (middle-
class) food culture, but also as a point of barely concealed anxiety
about Bengal’s developmental potential after the cataclysmic famine
that marked its entry into both coloniality and post-coloniality, and that
continued to be felt as persistent scarcity during the opening decades of
independence (Mukherjee 2013, 29–60; Mookerjee 2010; Bhattacharya
2016).
Chuunch (‘Needle’, 1963), for example, begins with a discussion of the
rocketing food prices and the consequent, albeit relative, scarcity of the
usual delicacies in Ghana-da’s hostel. Various theories are offered by the
usual suspects. Gour favours a neo-Malthusian explanation (anticipating
by nearly a decade the famous Club of Rome report on the ‘limits to
growth’) of population explosion that cannot be curbed even by fantastic
innovations such as algae cultivation or harvesting oceanic plankton.1
Shibu and Sisir play along, and propose the cultivation of a roof garden
that would make the hostel a model of self-sufficiency in food production
and, by extension, in ‘manpower’, which within the confines of the
hostel is more or less defined as the ability to narrate stories and thus
build a ‘conversable world’ (Mee 2011). Their latest ruse culminates in
a fake agreement concocted by the residents to voluntarily reduce their
daily consumption of food, and this is successful in eliciting the usual
narrative defence from Ghana-da. In his tale of traversing Asia and
Africa, and involving international powers competing over access to the
secrets of a kidnapped scientist, lies a fictional resolution to the looming
global food crisis in the shape of a formula for artificial chlorophyll that
will enable agriculture even in the most barren of deserts. In helping
rescue the scientist who has discovered this pioneering technology,
Ghana-da ensures the future of the capitalist ‘web of life’ by securing

1
See Meadows et al. 1972. This neo-Malthusian analysis was challenged
energetically and immediately by, amongst others, Cole 1973. For an account
of the debate, see Bardi 2011.

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108 FINAL FRONTIERS

the supply of one of the ‘four cheaps’ that provide the waft of that
web (Moore 2015, 17). But he can only do so by initiating a series
of transformations of life-forms and the energies that animate them.
Ghana-da persuades the African tribes to release the scientist who they
have been holding captive on behalf of their shadowy European patrons
by magically ‘turning one river red with blood and another on fire’
(Mitra 2000 vol. 1, 235). The actual science behind this ‘miracle’ can be
found in the reaction that microscopic marine planktons like the Noctiluca
Miliaris (‘sea sparkle’) and Gymnodinium Breve (‘Jim Breve’) can elicit from
water. Since such science lies beyond the horizon of the ‘savage mind’,
Ghana-da’s powers are deemed by them to be supernatural and the
scientist, Lavalle, is freed to complete his revolutionary research in food
technology. Thus, the biological and evolutionary energy of non-human
life-forms are harnessed to secure the metabolic future of ‘manpower’.
We might also say then that the co-production of narrative energy (the
form of the tale) and biological/metabolic energy (the content of the
story) is the ‘wonder’ that allows Ghana-da to emerge unscathed from
the trap sprung by his interlocutors.
Why should we pay attention to these surface and subterranean
currents flowing through the science fiction of the non-aligned years? In
part, because energy unsurprisingly emerged as a major preoccupation of
‘Nehruvian science’ and Nehru’s domestic and international policies. In
part because, as we have already seen in our previous discussions, the
weaponized form of one kind of energy – nuclear – cast its deadly shadow
over the entire world and was a major factor in Nehru’s formulation
of his non-aligned strategy. But perhaps, above all, because tracing the
fundamentally generative role played by ‘visible’ (thematic) and ‘dark’
(structural) kinds of narrative energy may tell us something that the
scholars of energy humanities have been recently reminding us: ‘To be
modern is to depend on the capacities and abilities generated by energy
[….] We are citizens and subjects of fossil fuels through and through,
whether we know it or not’ (Szeman and Boyer 2017b, 1). It is to such
provocations and debates that we now turn to take our critical bearings.

Fossil subjects

Szeman and Boyer’s recent suggestions regarding fossil-fuelled subjec-

tivity is part of a lively tradition of scholarly discussion about the
relationship between energy and the modern world. Szeman and
Boyer point out with due care that while ‘the story of modernity
isn’t reducible to the use of energy on an ever-greater scale’, any

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 energy matters 109

critical analysis that failed to notice ‘the role played by energy in

shaping its infrastructures (cities designed around automobiles) and
its subjectivities (mobile consumers with near-infinite powers such as
communicating with someone across the globe), and everything else in
between, can’t help but misrepresent the forces and processes shaping
historical development, especially over the past two centuries’ (Szeman
and Boyer 2017b, 2). But why confine ourselves only to the past two
centuries? As we have seen already in the work of Jason Moore, the
‘double movement’ that is distinctive of the capitalist web of life –
the production of capitalism through nature and of nature through
capitalism – enables us to periodize modernity as a set of strategies and
relationships that above all has been derived by appropriating ‘cheap’
labour, food, energy and raw materials over the duration of a half
millennia (Moore 2015, 17). Even as we adjust our perspective to this
long duration of modernity, we can see how this also demands from
us a concomitant expansion in our understanding of energy itself. Is it
in fact possible to think of food and labour, for example, as anything
but indispensable and intertwined forms of energies? As Moore himself
is quick to admit, that while capitalism transforms and appropriates
the ‘capacity to do work’ by humans and non-humans into ‘a frankly
weird crystallization of wealth and power: value’, work/labour should be
understood as forms of energy typically arising from organic life itself –
‘from photosynthesis to hunting prey to bearing children’ (Moore 2015,
15). And while this energy is of course different from the conventionally
understood kinds derived from the burning of coal, peat, charcoal
or petroleum, they are nevertheless entwined and co-productive of
each other to the extent that each ‘great leap forward’ of capitalism,
where new forms of appropriation momentarily check or reverse the
tendency of falling profit rates, hinge on two inter-related kinds of
activities – ‘biophysical reproduction (labor-power, forestry, agriculture)’
and ‘geographical extractions’ – that reduce the ‘system-wide cost of
production’ (Moore 2015, 146–7). Thus, a simultaneous expansion in
our understanding of when modernity was and what energy is form the first
keystone of what has been called the field of energy humanities. What
particularly strikes us then, as we have seen above in our discussions
of the Shonku and Ghana-da stories at the beginning of this chapter,
is that such an understanding of modernity and energy was already
present in south Asian science fiction in the middle of the twentieth
century, long before the commencement of academic investigations into
such connections. As ever, it is literature that demands the refinement
in the methods and theoretical concepts deployed to interpret it, and
not the other way around.

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110 FINAL FRONTIERS

A second fundamental assumption of energy humanities, following on

from the first, is that literature specifically, and humanities and social
sciences generally, are particularly equipped to trace ‘the intricacies of
social processes, the nature and capacity of political change, and the
circulation and organization of symbolic meaning through culture’
(Szeman and Boyer 2017b, 3). However, the suggestion also is that
with each shift in the global energy regime, our ability to perceive the
consequences of these with something approaching a total perspective
has degraded dramatically (Szeman and Boyer 2017b, 3). Thus, the
task of energy humanities must be nothing less than to ‘reimagine
modernity’ in order to see whether we can be different kinds of beings
than the mere subjects of fossil fuels. In order to do so, we need to
be theoretically equipped to trace our ‘energy unconscious’, because
‘[o]ur everyday practices and activities have been shaped by energy in
a way that we have never fully understood. If we are able to address
the environmental challenges we currently face, we need to understand
that something like “primary experience” in Marcuse’s account has been
constituted by fossil fuels’ (Szeman and Boyer 2017b, 8). This invisibility
of fossil fuel’s role in the structure and structuring of everyday life has
been attributed variously to the professionalization of literature over the
course of modernity, the cultural peripherality of the global oil territories,
the perspectival insularity associated with modern imperialism and
conflicts over the meaning of energy itself. The first three reasons were
famously posed by the novelist Amitav Ghosh’s provocation that the ‘oil
encounter’ between the pre-eminent contemporary imperial power, the
US, and the regions around the Arabian peninsula from where the fuel
for much of this imperium’s power is extracted, has produced ‘scarcely
a single work of note’ in comparison to older encounters of the same
kind (2017b, 431). Ghosh’s explanation for this includes the ‘inward
turning’ of the American fictional gaze ‘in precise counterpoint to the
increasing geographical elasticity of the country’s involvements’, the
marginality of the Gulf frontier to the major Arabic cultural centres
such as Cairo and Beirut, and the ‘baffling [….] medieval’ multilingual
culture of that region that resisted the allegedly naturalistic monolingual
bias of the novel form. One can immediately raise several objections to
Ghosh’s proposals about both Arabic and American literature here (not
to mention his conclusions regarding the novel form as such), but his
suggestions about the invisibility of an energy resource such as oil has
turned out to be a symptomatic but necessary error required for the
refinement of the methodological assumptions of energy humanities.
The other reason attributed to the sedimentation of energy forms
in the unconscious rather than the conscious faculties of ‘the modern

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 energy matters 111

subject’ has been the historical difficulty in grasping what we mean

by energy itself. As Caygill has pointed out, the division between
‘physical’ and ‘physiological’ dimensions of energy can be traced at
least as far back to the pivotal figure of Hermann von Helmholtz whose
work in the nineteenth century is regarded as seminal in this regard
(in particular, his formulations contained in the 1847 The Conservation
of Force: A Physical Memoir). Among the chief consequences of the
Helmholtzian thinking about energy was a translation of the ‘physical’
definition of energy derived from engineering sciences regarding
(in)efficiencies of heat engines into the ‘physiological’ definition that
had previously been informed by Lavoisier’s theories of heat as the
‘material soul’ of life (Caygill 2007, 20–1). Thus, two different ways
of understanding energy were amalgamated unevenly, where one
came to dominate the other. In the ‘physical’ paradigm, heat signified
the loss of work (the energy that was not converted to work by the
engines); while in the ‘physiological’, heat was the conserved energy
that animated life. Caygill argues that the product of this uneasy
amalgamation were the ‘laws of thermodynamics’, probably the most
recognizable nineteenth-century contribution to our understanding of
what energy is.
This foundational rift within the modern concept of energy generated
a series of others whose consequences we are living with today. As
Allen Macduffie suggests, the contemporary ‘energy problem’ is both
‘material and representational’ and it is so because of a tension between
‘energy defined as a usable resource, and energy defined as ambient
force circulating endlessly through the world’ (Macduffie 2014, 2–3).
If Caygill identifies the physicist Helmholtz as the source of much of
this rift, for Macduffie it is the political economy of Robert Malthus
and especially his work on demography in the Essay on the Principle of
Population (1798) that is key here. This is so not because of any degree
of accuracy in Malthus’s predictions regarding the relationship between
population and scarcity, but because of his ‘bleak vision of earth as a
single enclosed system’, which was then reprised in the second law of
thermodynamics regarding entropy several decades later (Macduffie
2014, 5–6). So, if physics dominated biology regarding thinking about
energy in the late nineteenth century, it had in turn been formed by
philosophy and political economy in the earlier decades. The result was
a chain of analogies that formed the conceptual frame within which
the entire world could be understood in a certain way:

To see the world as a closed system, as a domain in which usable

energy is constantly decreasing, is, in fact, a sign of the way in

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112 FINAL FRONTIERS

which the urban-industrial logic surreptitiously comes to structure

the representation of everything [….] The city, the world, the
cosmos – all of these seem analogously ‘closed,’ with entropy
mounting and energy shrinking towards zero because each subsists
on a finite supply of resources. (Macduffie 2014, 10)

This riven yet powerful energy imaginary can be seen today in the
various climate-change related post-apocalyptic imageries – and was
already a part of Nehru’s world. We can restate the second keystone
of energy humanities as follows: since the invisibility of energy can be
attributed to representational and conceptual challenges, literature in
particular (including literary criticism) and humanities in general, are
equipped to undertake the task of tracing the dark matter that sets the
levers of history in motion.
The third keystone of energy humanities follows on from the second,
and focuses on those working tools and devices of literature and
humanities that enable them to detect the presence of energy relations
in acts of literary-cultural representations. These range from the granular
level of metaphors, analogies and figurative language, to the macro-
systemic scales of genres, forms, types and periods. To support her
contention that ‘literature has often, perhaps always, influenced science,
especially in the delicate, early stages of a scientific development’, Barri
J.  Gold cites Ursula Le Guin’s identification of the common interpretative
methods deployed by science and literature alike – the production of new
sets of metaphors ‘to think about the as-yet-unarticulated’ (Gold 2010,
17). But Gold goes beyond the importance of ‘root metaphors’ in literary
and scientific thinking to suggest that there are larger structural units
shared by the two: ‘but my first extended example of literary method
in physics partakes strongly of the structure and form of elegy’ (Gold
2010, 15–16). Thus, it is not merely the fact that what Gold finds in
Tennyson’s ‘energy-in-elegy’ – In Memoriam (1850) – is a ‘conversation
with the emerging science of energy physics’ (Gold 2010, 47–51). For
that would merely confine her discussion to a thematic interest shared
by scientists and writers. It is more that the form of Tennyson’s elegy
rotates around the same play between conservation and dissipation on
which is built the two laws of thermodynamics (Gold 2010, 43–4). It is
also the fact that metaphor, perhaps the pre-eminent device in Tennyson’s
poetry, shares with energetics key properties such as persistent transfor-
mation of forms. Entropy, Gold notes, is grounded in the root of the term
trope, ‘the linguistic torsion that produces nonliteral uses’ and ‘suggests
a continuity between the metamorphic capacity of language and that of
matter itself’ (Gold 2010, 52).

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 energy matters 113

Gold’s readings of Victorian ‘thermopoetics’ recall similar scholarly

interventions in post-Victorian texts. What Jennifer Wenzel calls the
‘petro-magic-realism’ of Nigerian novels is primarily generated by the
‘multi-perspectival’ views deployed in the narratives that ‘combines the
transmogrifying creatures and liminal space of the forest in Yoruba
narrative tradition with the monstrous but mundane violence of oil
exploration and extraction’ (Wenzel 2017b, 493–4). In addition to
recalling the thematic importance of oil in Nigerian fiction, such a
device reveals ‘the intricate and multivalent relationships among palm,
petroleum and publishing’, and helps reveal links between the exporting
of oil and literature as global commodities (Wenzel 2017b, 493). For
Wenzel, oil and literature work ‘in a not altogether dissimilar way, both
as medium for imagining a national community […] and as a site that lays
bare the contradictions of Nigerian nationhood as well as the collusions
between the state’s image of itself and skeptical critiques’ (Wenzel 2017b,
492–3). Since such narrative devices are common to many societies
and cultures, they immediately invite a comparative analytical method
such as the one offered by Graeme Macdonald in his interpretation of
George Mackay Brown’s Greenvoe and Abdul Rahman Munif’s Cities of
Salt or by Sharae Deckard’s similarly incisive offerings on the writings
of Sam Selvon, Jorge Amado and Merle Collins. Macdonald finds in
the Scottish and Saudi Arabian novels, ‘The Great Acceleration in prose
[….] wrought in restless syntax, forged in conjunctive grammar, built in
progressively piled-up clauses, this “monstrous” transformation conveys
the exceptional and radically uneven nature of petro-development in
form as well as content’ (Macdonald 2017a, 296). Deckard ties the three
novels from Trinidad, Brazil and Grenada together by their engagement
with key food items – cacao and cascadura – consumed in the region. As
we have seen before, a categorical distinction between food and fuel may
not really be theoretically or conceptually defendable. Thus, Deckard sees
in cacao two kinds of energies – a high-calorific foodstuff for energetic
consumption, and a commodity that ‘mobilizes various forms of energy
for its own production’ (Deckard 2017, 343). Since both in Brazil and
the Caribbean, the latter process involved both indentured and slave
(human labour) as well as the depletion of the forest, the narratives of
Selvon, Amado and Collins recode such ‘repressed reals’ in the form of
what Deckard calls ‘cacao irrealism’, comprised of ‘duppies, soucouyants,
douens and jumbies [….] forest spectres [that] call up the residual,
projecting the underlying fear and guilt felt by the forest cutters due to
earlier waves of dispossession’ (Deckard 2017, 346–50).
Obviously, oil and food are not the only energy forms embedded
in narrative techniques and poetics. Electricity, the weather and waste

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114 FINAL FRONTIERS

have also emerged as major keys in the interpretation of the literary

cultures of the ‘long’ nineteenth century. Jen Hill sees in Francis
Galton’s meteorology and Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella Typhoon a
complex investigation of statistical correlation and data visualization as
methods that help make sense of ‘relationships and exchanges between
energies, as well as between geographically distant places, and between
local and global experiences’ (Hill 2014, 442). Hill notices how the
titular weather event in Conrad’s story works to measure ‘the complex,
hidden vortical relations among those on board the storm-besieged
steamer the Nan-Shan, turn-of-the century geopolitics, and capital’
which would otherwise ‘never come under scrutiny and thus would
continue to operate invisibly’ (Hill 2014, 442). She sees a similar use
of the figure of the whorl, first discovered by Galton as a distinctive
physiological marker printed on the fingertips of individual humans, in
the correlative measurement of cyclonic energy. Whorls connect fingers,
barometric pressure and cyclonic vortices to underscore the fact that
both human individuals and weather are local expressions of a global
energy system, and offer the unsettling thought (unsettling, that is, to
a strictly nationalist imaginary) that ‘geographical distance may indicate
similarity, rather than difference’ (Hill 2010, 448). Thus, Hill finds a
confirmation of Galton’s method of measuring and visualizing energy
in Conrad’s narrative technique, where the use of irony and ‘logics,
structure, and aesthetics of correlation’ leads the reader to appreciate
the correlative conjunction of the human and the non-human, and
further suggests that ‘[t]he structure of correlation is thus not one that
demands that hidden things be revealed or rendered visible, but is instead
one that demands an attention to the simultaneous combinations and
intersectional relays of local.global, past/present, material/abstract, the
human/scientific, and the individual/social’ (2010, 453). Such a notion
of correlation, as we will see below, may be of interest in detecting the
structural patterns in Ghana-da’s tales also.
Similar tracings of the productive relationship between textual
architecture and non-textual energies can also be found in Enda Duffy’s
work on Ulysses. In Joyce’s ‘telegraphese […] jabs of consciousness issued
at the rhythm of short, breathless breaths’ – and his persistent refusal
to ‘propel the plot forward in conventional terms’, Duffy finds the key
signatures of modernism – the ‘envisioning of life as the capacity for a
certain dispersal of energy [….] nothing less than a recasting of the very
concept of the human’ (Duffy 2011, 415). The energy in question here
takes two pre-dominant forms – biological (adrenaline) and physical
(electricity). For Duffy, the near-simultaneity of the electrification of
Irish cities and the medical discovery of adrenaline as ‘an in-body power

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 energy matters 115

surge’ gives Joyce the task of writing an electrified subjectivity in his

novel that also corresponds to the ideals of Taylorist economic organi-
zation (Duffy 2011, 412–14). And in the plot resolutions in Dickens’s
Our Mutual Friend (1865) and Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1831), Elizabeth
Womack finds a moral premium put on hoarding ‘waste’ with a view
to re-circulating their energy rather than dissipating it (Womack 2014,
566). In these novels and other ‘Victorian miser narratives’, Womack
finds an idea of waste-management, including literary and textual
waste-management in the case of Carlyle, that would also be codified
in the classics of nineteenth-century urban sociology such as Mayhew’s
London Labour and the London Poor (1851) and Edwin Chadwick’s Sanitary
Report (1842).
The third keystone of energy humanities, we may now say, does not
just propose that narrative and rhetorical devices specific to literature
and interpretation of literature make them well suited to rise to the
representational and conceptual challenges posed by energy. It also holds
that the diversity of such devices – ranging from the level of syntax to
that of genre – allows literature to trace the diverse and proliferating
energy forms that have been crucial to modern life. One corollary of
this is that in addition to making us re-think about energy, this also
has the effect of re-evaluating what we take to be literature. Nearly a
decade ago, Patricia Yaeger asked a question that has since become a
focal point in the field of energy humanities: ‘Instead of divvying up
literary works into hundred-year intervals (or elastic variants like the
‘long’ eighteenth- or twentieth-century) or categories harnessing the
history of ideas (Romanticism, Enlightenment), what happens if we sort
texts according to the energy sources that made them possible?’ (Yaeger
2017b, 441). By raising such possibilities, Yaeger is thinking here across
massive scalar distances – from the operation of cultural codes or reality
effects within the text that calls for corresponding adjustment in reading
methods, to the material production and circulation of literature as a
commodity in a global trade (Yaeger 2017b, 443–4). One implication of
Yaeger’s question is not just a revision of the periodization of literary
history, but also of cultivating a critical alertness to what we may
call after Bloch the simultaneity of the literary non-simultaneous. As
Jennifer Wenzel explains in an interview while recalling her scholarly
debt to Yaeger:

Patsy’s version of this idea was [….] as much about comparison as

about periodization, suggesting that the textual groupings produced
by this kind of “sorting” might not resemble periods as previously
understood. And, of course, Patsy was keenly alert to the notion

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116 FINAL FRONTIERS

of energy simultaneity – one can juxtapose Homer and Garcia

Marquez precisely because our age of hydrocarbon modernity is
also, for many people around the world, the age of wood, dung
and other kinds of biomass. (Potter 2017, 384)

Such re-mappings and comparative juxtapositions (perhaps they should

be called correlations) provide possibilities for producing new literary
categories. Since modern energy systems and literary systems are both
made up of uneven compositions of what Williams had called dominant,
residual and emergent elements (oil, but also coal and dung; novel, but
also avant-garde poetry and experimental theatre), one could also ask
how the worlding of both reveal, in turn, the structural principles of
that world. Noting that it became possible for Goethe and Marx to speak
of ‘world literature’ precisely when coal and oil made ‘the space of the
globe increasingly available and accessible for travel, trade and political
power’, Imre Szeman has wondered whether we should imagine the
aforementioned literary category as a single but unequal system shaped
by ‘energy flows, forms and capacities to be figured differently at centre
and periphery, shaping what Moretti calls ‘“local materials” in profound
and powerful ways’ (Szeman 2017a, 281). If this is so, Szeman claims
that ‘we need to read all of world literature as a petro-literature, whether
or not oil is figured explicitly in the world-literary texts’, since ‘the life
of surplus energy is to be found not only in the scenes and characters
represented in literature [….] but in the very practice of literature as
such’ (Szeman 2017a, 284–6).
These three fundamental principles of energy humanities – an
expanded sense of modernity and energy, a recognition of the conceptual
and representational challenges posed by modern energy relations, and
the capacity of literature and literary-cultural criticism to rise to such
challenges – can help us respond to the questions posed to the readers
of Ray and Mitra’s stories. Why do so many of them feature extractive
activities involving a wide variety of energy resources that either end
in disasters or narrowly avoid such a fate? What is the relationship
between such resource adventures and the narrative resources that
produce wonder, cognition and estrangement? Why are we asked to
rethink the relationship between science and magic, or the human
and the non-human through the overlapping energy regimes they are
positioned in? By the same token, such questions also prompt us to
look at the role energy played in the making of Nehru’s non-aligned
imagination and policies, as well as in that of national ‘development’
that was, as we have seen, a pre-eminent paradigm of post-coloniality
as such.

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 energy matters 117

Power lines

Energy figured in Nehru’s thought, primarily (and tellingly) as ‘power’

– a reliable index for civilizational development. Speaking at the inaugu-
ration of a science conference for ‘the development of atomic energy
for peaceful purposes’ in Delhi on 26 November 1954, he summarized
this firmly held conviction thus: ‘Power is the most important thing to
develop a country’s resources. You may judge a country’s advance today
merely by seeing how much power it produces or uses. You may judge
it in another way, how much power plus iron and steel is produced
by it’ (Singh 1988, 127). Two years later, speaking to members of the
Indian Central Board of Irrigation and Power, he extended this interpre-
tation to world history as such: ‘It may even be said that the history of
material civilisation in the world is the history of the growth of power
development’ (Singh 1988, 172). If this was so, clearly India’s colonial
past and post-colonial dependency could be understood in some ways
as a state of energy depletion that needed to be addressed by whatever
means necessary:

Consider the past few hundred years of history; the world developed
a new source of power, that is steam – the steam engine and the
like – and the industrial age came in. India, with all her many
virtues, did not develop that source of power. It became a backward
country in that sense; it became a slave country because of that.
Now we are facing the atomic age; we are on the very verge of it
[….] If we are to remain abreast in the world as a nation which
keeps ahead of things, we must develop this atomic energy quite
apart from war. (Singh 1988, 64)

In treating ‘power’ as a measure of civilizational development, Nehru is

seemingly at odds with the second credo of energy humanities regarding
the representational and conceptual problems posed by energy forms.
There is nothing invisible about coal-mines or electric pylons or big dams
and, indeed, these big Nehruvian infrastructural undertakings came to
be known as India’s ‘modern temples’ (Misra 1965, 1–2). However, Nehru
was not altogether oblivious to the diversity and interconnected nature of
the various kinds of energies circulating in his new country. Pre-eminent
among these other forms of energy was what he called ‘manpower’, by
which, as we have seen, he meant the capacity of human labour. In
this respect at least, he thought India had the historical advantage of
possessing ‘tremendous amounts of manpower available [….] We talk
about our big power resources, but it is a folly not to use the small

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118 FINAL FRONTIERS

power sources we have’ (Singh 1988, 173). Nehru’s idea of ‘manpower’

was associated with another distinctive feature of energy imaginary in
non-aligned India – the spectre of waste. Key here was the adequate
provision and consumption of food. Nehru thought that ‘We eat wrong
things or eat too much of them [….] those who have food waste too
much of food and waste both time and money on it [….] we are terribly
conservative with the result that if one kind of food is not available [….]
some people even prefer starvation to eating other kinds of food’ (Singh
1988, 71). And such, wasted ‘manpower’ also brought with it anxieties
about competing energy systems and decisions about balancing them:
‘we cannot spend anything on atomic energy if our people starve. The
ultimate strength of a country comes from the people, and not from
atomic energy’ (Singh 1988, 128). The comparison between nuclear and
human energy here is hardly accidental. As we have already seen in
our discussions regarding weapons and laboratories, the atomic bomb
loomed large over the non-aligned world and was in fact a decisive
factor in its formation. Nehru accordingly stressed the multiple and
benign uses of nuclear power at every opportunity: ‘Already it is known
that radioactive elements that are produced can be used for therapeutic
purposes but in other matters too it will make power mobile and this
mobility of power can make industry develop anywhere. We will not
be tied up so much by accidents of geography. Atomic energy will help
cottage industry’ (Singh 1988, 42). In such thinking, individual human
bodies, collectively summarized as ‘manpower’, figured as one of the
many nodes of an energy-circuit that amounted in the final instance
to an increasingly capacious idea about ‘development’.
Nehru’s thinking in this regard was both informed by and formative
of the policies that his government pursued. The uneven distribution of
energy sources, the spectre of waste and the challenges this posed to
‘development’, and the effects these had on India’s geo-political status –
all appeared in key policy analyses and recommendations. Among the
earliest maps of energy production and consumption in the country
was that drawn up by the National Council for Applied Economic
Research and revealed a profoundly mixed picture, with the production
and supply of coal comfortably outweighing those of electricity and oil
(NCAR 1962a, 1–9). Such disparities were in part down to the political
settlement that had shaped post-colonial India, such as the partition of
the sub-continent and the post-war international dispensation. Shanti
Bhatnagar, who as we have seen had emerged as one of the key players
in the influential group of scientists around Nehru, had a long history of
intimate ties with the petrochemical industry that had seen him being
awarded large research grants by British companies like Steel Brothers

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 energy matters 119

as well as the OBE (Anderson 2010, 50–1). In 1952, he spelt out the
reasons behind and consequences of India’s oil deficit – its current
share of 1.9 million barrels of crude oil out of a world production of
3.4 billion barrels was a result of the loss of oil fields in Burma and
Pakistan (Bhatnagar claimed these were ‘taken away from us’). This
meant that the country was forced to import oil with a significant chunk
of its currency reserves, mostly from Iraq, which put it at considerable
geo-political disadvantage (Anderson 2010, 163–4).
It was not, however, all gloom and doom for the analysts and
economists at the National Council for Economic Research. The report
they produced for Nehru’s government in 1962 stressed how the apparent
underdevelopment and unevenness of India’s energy sector could also
be its strength. The Council stressed the country’s energy wealth –
including the large coal reserves, resources of water power and the
location of ‘the world’s richest and most accessible deposits of oil and
natural gas’ (NCAR 1962a, 1). It calculated that India was the sixth-
highest consumer of energy in the world, and the ongoing transition from
non-commercial to commercial sources of energy indicated the process of
rapid development rather than chronic underdevelopment (NCAR 1962a,
5). It saw in electricity the ‘most desirable form that energy can take’
and recommended steps to address its shortage (NCAR 1962a, 29). But
it also warned against the dissipation or waste in strikingly Victorian
thermodynamic language: ‘Eighty per cent of the energy available to
Indian economy is dissipated in the form of waste heat [….] In the case
of non-commercial fuels, a somewhat larger share of energy potentially
available is wasted’ (NCAR 1962a, 7). Finally, it drew attention to the
problem of externalizing ‘nature’ in the calculating economic costs:

The so-called free fuels, such as cattle dung and wood waste, are
free only if man’s time is valueless. Their true cost, measured in
terms of their selling price [….] is considerably higher than the
cost of energy from all but the most luxurious sources. Nor is the
work done by bullocks free. The young bullock must be fed and
tended for something over three years before the animal is ready
to work. Except for the labour of man himself, bullock power is
the most expensive of all India’s source of power. (NCAR 1962a, 1)

The regional disparity in ‘energy wealth’ figured prominently in the

council’s subsequent reports. While the southern states were deficient
in mineral and petroleum deposits, they possessed powerful water
resources and above all ‘manpower’, in the form of a population that
was ‘active, intelligent and industrious’ (NCAR 1962b, 37). The eastern

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120 FINAL FRONTIERS

states commanded most of the major mineral, oil and water reserves
(75 per cent of the country’s coal, a third of hydro-power and all of
the oil), but the people were more ‘backward’ (NCAR 1962c, 1–2). The
western states were the most ‘advanced’, boasting of a well-functioning
electricity sector, natural oil and gases and a nuclear power station,
with rocketing energy demands (NCAR 1965, 9–10). The north, in the
meantime, was dominated by the giant urban conurbation that Delhi had
already grown into, sucking up ten times more electricity in comparison
to other sources of power (NCAR 1965, 57–8). It is remarkable how
closely such resource-mapping of India resembled powerful cultural
stereotypes about the diverse Indian populations and societies – the
industrious and cultured southerners, the futuristic and innovative
westerns (especially the residents of Bombay/Mumbai), the grasping
and power-hungry north, and the stunted east. Such intertwining of
anthropological, bureaucratic, scientific and social imaginations can be
seen, in the final instance, as the lasting legacy of the project of colonial
modernization in south Asia.
The problems and potentials of energy identified during the
Nehruvian years continued to frame policies and thinking for a long
time. P. D. Henderson’s report on the Indian energy sector written
more than a decade after Nehru’s death did little to alter the picture
presented by the national council reports we have just looked at.
The domination of coal, the paucity of oil and the problems of
electricity supply, are all identified once again as India’s distinctive
features (Henderson 1975, 6–91). What is also Nehruvian is Henderson’s
enthusiasm about India’s nuclear capability, both because of the
availability of the large reserves of thorium critical for the development
of ‘fast breeder reactors’, which reads as the confirmation of Nehru’s
(and Bhabha’s) vision of a prominent role played by atomic energy
in India’s development (Henderson 1975, 20–1). Writing a few years
after Henderson, R. K. Pachauri noticed the presumably unintended
consequences of Nehru’s investment in ‘India’s temples’ for Indian
agriculture, which was now outstripping the ‘heavy’ industries in the
demand for energy (Pachauri 1977, 1). But Pachauri retained the basic
vision of the Nehruvian energy map that revealed in the country the
coevality of the modern and the pre-modern as seen in ‘agricultural
techniques of the Western model and age-old practices of farming’ and
he endorsed some of the achievements of the three five-year plans that
had been the cornerstones of Nehru’s strategy of centralized planning.
Perhaps such achievements had come because, not despite, of the uneasy
yoking of the bullock cart and the nuclear reactor in India (Pachauri
1977, 18–20).

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 energy matters 121

The longevity of the Nehruvian energy imaginary corresponds to a

similar persistence of resource fictions in the works of Ray and Mitra.
The extractive adventures that often exercise their fictional heroes work
as critical meditations on post-colonial India’s position in the Cold War
energy regime. Likewise and relatedly, the text’s anxious examination
of their own narrative transformations, dissipations and conservation
as they move through a variety of energy contexts, supports Patricia
Yaeger’s suggestion that ‘thinking about literature through the lens
of energy’ may result in a re-making of our ideas about literature’s
relationship with its originating modes of production as quasi-objects’
(Yaeger 2017b, 443–4). It is to this relationship as presented in science
fiction that we now turn.

Chaotic order

A combination of historical and literary forces formed the energy

(un-)consciousness of early Indian science fiction. Energy turned out to
be a key factor in post-colonial state-building as well as in the strategic
games of non-alignment during the Cold War. But in this, Ray, Mitra
and other Indian writers cannot be said to be sui generis. Energy had
been an important factor in global science fiction since the 1930s. Albert
Berger notes in a pair of essays that atomic energy filled American and
European science fiction magazines long before the Manhattan Project,
as a metaphor of both technological and institutional power (1976 and
1979, 121–8). But it also led to a change in the way in which science
fiction was written:

Once nuclear energy gave promise of actually fulfilling dreams

of unlimited power, boundless social change could be envisioned.
Eventually, this metaphor, enriched by an awareness of the new,
real research into the nucleus which characterized physics in the
1930s, was combined with the demand for better and more realistic
science fiction stories which marked the genre as a whole and
Astounding Science Fiction. (Berger 1979, 121)

Astounding’s influential editor, John W. Campbell, was himself trained

as a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and gathered
around him a group of writers who were beginning to see the world in
the 1930s, like Nehru did in the subsequent decades, as poised to enter
the atomic age. Even Isaac Asimov, who belonged to a group called the
‘Futurians’ – a group of leftish writers who were banned from the first

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122 FINAL FRONTIERS

world science fiction convention in 1939 and may be taken as the mirror
image of the Italian ‘Futurists’ – understood the possession of nuclear
power, if not atomic weapons, as a key civilizational indicator. Thus
‘it was in several stories involving nuclear reactors rather than bombs
that SF first combined its at least passing knowledge of actual nuclear
physics with the best of the new attempts at realistic extrapolations that
Campbell had promoted’ (Berger 1979, 123).
In the light of what we have seen thus far about the relationship
between the Nehruvian state-building and building of scientific
institutions, it is interesting to note that in many of the Astounding stories,
such as Clifford Simak’s ‘Lobby’, peaceful atomic energy generation
was seen as a decisive factor in the change in practice of governance
from representative democracy to technocracy (Berger 1979, 123). But,
of course, it was the historical cataclysm of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
that really clinched this connection between energy and governance
and extended it to a global level. Campbell famously announced in his
November 1945 editorial for Astounding that the bombs had announced
‘the death of a cultural pattern based on a balance of military power
controlled exclusively by big and wealthy nations’ – an insight embedded
in the vision of the universal ‘mutually assured destruction’ that
animated stories such as Robert Heinlein’s ‘Solution Unsatisfactory’
(Berger 1979, 125–6). The bomb also changed the relatively weak position
of science fiction writers, at least within the American literary field:

On the one hand, they were acknowledged as prophets proven

right by the course of events. Some of them began new careers
as writers of popular science and consultants and participants in
government [….] Even those who remained close to their roots in
magazine fiction found themselves newly prosperous as a result of
the increased attention the bomb had brought to ‘that Buck Rogers’
stuff [….] On the other hand, having in their fiction developed
and controlled nuclear energy long before the army got round to
it, many of these newly affluent writers were both disappointed
in and fearful of the ways in which the government proposed to
handle its ‘ultimate weapon’. (Berger 1976, 143)

Theodore Sturgeon offered a more sardonic interpretation of this writerly

dilemma of coming into the possession of considerable cultural and
economic capital, but only at the cost of potential as well as actual
(the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still falling) apocalypse.
He declared that while his fellow writers were ‘scared silly’ of atomic
weapons, it was really in a ‘delicious drawing room sort of way, because

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 energy matters 123

they couldn’t conceive of this Buck Rogers event happening to anything

but posterity’ (Berger 1976, 143). In reaction to what they saw was
a totalitarian tendency inherent in every bureaucracy, the capture of
politicians by ‘special interest groups’, and literature’s accommodation
to both types of corruption, writers like Sturgeon and Poul Anderson
would increasingly fall back on the hope of a technocracy rather than
democracy over the course of the rest of their careers.
As we move further into the decades of Cold War and non-alignment,
it becomes obvious that energy – and not just the nuclear kind –
became increasingly crucial to American and European science fiction’s
gathering of cultural prestige. For example, petroleum and the myriad
social forms energized by it became more and more central to science
fiction’s ‘new wave’ and to writers such as J. G. Ballard. Writing about
Ballard’s novel Crash (1973), Jean Baudrillard saw the inauguration of
a new idea of the human body that had become fully enmeshed with
violent technology: ‘a body commixed with technology’s capacity for
violation and violence [….] a body with neither organs nor organic
pleasures, entirely dominated by gash marks, excisions, and technical
scars’ (Baudrillard 1991, 313). In Crash, It is of course the car – perhaps
the most recognizable symbol of ‘petro-culture’ – that Ballard presents
as the technology that mediates between the organic with the inorganic
in a world that is running down at some speed: ‘The car is not the
appendix of an immobile domestic universe: there are no more private
and domestic universes, only figures of incessant circulation, and the
accident is everywhere [….] the banalization of the anomaly of death’
(Baudrillard 1991, 314). For Baudrillard, Ballard’s characters are on
‘a road to nowhere’, but going there ‘faster than others’ (1991, 318).
We can for the moment ignore the main problem with Baudrillard’s
reading of the cultural logic of late capitalism, namely his assumption
that capital’s commodity logic advances at an even rate of acceleration
across space and time. But his recognition that for Ballard the automobile
marks the site where a specific energy regime shapes the human body
is surely accurate. Such readings predicted Cold War science fiction’s
increasing entanglements with energetics as such and suggest that the
Indian writers’s similar disposition signals their world-literary, rather
than wholly local or regional habitus.
The middle years of the twentieth century also saw certain
developments in scientific thinking about energy that sought a break
with their Victorian inheritance. Perhaps the most striking of these was
‘chaos theory’ developed by the Belgian thermodynamicist Ilya Prigogine,
which offered a mathematic solution to the fundamental contradictions
that had marked energy thinking since the nineteenth century – between

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evolution and entropy, physics and biology, simplicity and complexity. As

David Porush explains, evolution and entropy offered not only contrasting
‘cosmological moods’, but also conflicting accounts of how the universe
works (Porush 1991, 367–8). In the entropic thinking that emerged from
Victorian engineers and physicist’s efforts to make heat engines more
efficient, any machine – including the universe and ‘nature’ – moved
irreversibly towards degradation because of inherent forces like friction.
But in evolutionary thinking, ‘nature’ and the universe moved in the
opposite direction by developing increasingly more complex organizations
and structures. Porush suggests that for Prigogine, this contradiction
was in the final instance a product of two different levels of description
– one microscopic and physical, the other macroscopic and biological
(Porush 1991, 368). Prigogine’s innovation was to reconcile the two
by mathematically proving how order and complexity can arise out of
entropy and chaos under specific circumstances – an ‘open system’ is
non-linear and non-equilibrial (Porush 1991, 370–1). But these properties
also make the system, also called ‘dissipative structures’ by Prigogine
necessarily unpredictable –

they survive in an open exchange of energy with the generally

entropic universe to dissipate or work off the products of their
instabilities. While dissipative structures are bound to take this leap
into self-organization (the description of these systems and their
changes is deterministic), no one can tell what shape it will take
after the leap (it is unpredictable). (Porush 1991, 370–1)

The attraction of Prigogine’s theory of self-organizing ‘open’ systems

that leap from chaos to order because of a productive relationship
between entropy and evolution is obviously not confined to attempts to
understand ‘nature’ or universe. It has accordingly been enthusiastically
taken up to propose models of cultural, historical, economic and literary
systems. Prigogine himself was interested in comparing literature’s
ability to capture complex macro-structures with that of the ability of
physics and chemistry to capture simple micro-level ones (Porush 1991,
371). Porush sees a ‘Prigoginic leap’ in Euro-American science fiction
of the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in its cyberpunk variation, with
its interest in artificial intelligence and the erasure of the boundaries
between the organic and the inorganic, the human and the machine
(Porush 1991, 373–81). But as he also notes, ‘SF often registers and
extrapolates the consequences of new scientific knowledge even before
science does’ (Porush 1991, 367). This proleptic or prophetic generic
character we have already encountered in the overview of American

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 energy matters 125

and European science fiction’s engagement with nuclear power as well

as in our previous discussions of the Indian writers’s representation of
weapons. We shall see more of this below in Satyajit Ray’s fiction of
artificial intelligence and cyborgs.
At this point it may be worth returning for a moment to Albert Berger’s
suggestion that the formation of science fiction’s energy (un)consciousness
via nuclear power resulted in influential editors such as John Campbell’s
preference for ‘better and more realistic’ writing, since it returns us
to the question of energetics, energy humanities and the styles of the
various kinds of ‘resource fictions’. What can ‘realistic’ science fiction
mean given what we know about the interplay between cognition
and estrangement mediated by the presence of the novum there? Here,
the answer proposed by Elizabeth Hewitt in her discussion of Pamela
Zoline’s story ‘The heat death of the Universe’ seems to me to be
pertinent (Hewitt 1994, 289–301). Hewitt dispenses with the notion that
we should confine ourselves to understanding – despite the narrative’s
apparent invitation (most obviously signalled by its title) – the mundane
everyday life of the Californian housewife Sarah Boyle as analogously
related to the thermodynamic law of entropy (Hewitt 1994, 290). For
such a reading would miss the distinctive work of metaphor in science
fiction where, as opposed to other kinds of writing, they operate as the
‘building materials of the “new” SF world’ (Hewitt 1994, 290). For her,
this new world or novum, just as in the case of Shonku’s diaries, turn
out to be the text itself:

By juxtaposing entropy with housewifery, Zoline disrupts a model

that would make either ‘science’ or ‘sociology’ metaphor for the
other: her text raises the possibility that we may not know what
should be read ‘literally.’ Is Zoline depicting an early manifestation
of the end-of-the-world or is she commenting on the social fact of
unpaid female labour? It is never clear; the point is that Zoline’s
story establishes, if only ambiguously, an alternative generic reading
model that disrupts our conventional metaphorical machines such
that even that is most mundane can also be read as extra-worldly.
(Hewitt 1994, 292)

This transference between the mundane and the ‘extra-worldly’, whereby

each is always already in the process of becoming the other, should
immediately remind us of the discussions of magical-realism or ‘critical-
irrealism’ that we touched upon earlier regarding science fiction’s world
literary claims. In the present context, the key thing to remember is that
what is at stake in Zoline’s story, and also in others such as Premendra

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126 FINAL FRONTIERS

Mitra’s tall-tales, is a proposition about treating the genre of science

fiction as an ‘open system’ where instead of a simple reproduction
of like by like, we see the constant ‘Prigoginian leap’ from apparent
dissipation to actual complex forms. Seen thus, science fiction becomes
more ‘realistic’ not (only) when it reproduces the various developments
in, say, energetics or weapons research in its theme; but also when
its style and form is able to register, proleptically and analeptically,
the various kinds of energies that course through the textual and the
non-textual dimensions of the world and connect them together into
one. Entropy, evolution, waste, resource extraction, artificial intelligence,
competing energy forms, peaceful and destructive uses of science – all the
concerns common to Nehruvian as well as Cold War science, appeared
in the writings of Ray and Mitra. Allied to their playful foregrounding
of literary styles that refused a closure of generic boundaries (thereby
modelling an ‘open’ system), such writing can be seen exemplars of the
recent critical claims regarding reading literature through the lens of
energy. It also establishes the Indian writers’ citizenship in the world
republic of letters. If one were to generalize, we could say that while
Ray was more engaged with the questions of artificial life, humans and
machines, and the kinds of energy that challenge and extend the limits
of scientific knowledge, Mitra’s stories, on the other hand, dealt more
directly with the questions of resource extraction and their geo-political
implications in the age of non-alignment. But, of course, these were
overlapping and interconnected concerns that both writers responded
to in their own fashion.
We have already seen how much of Byomjatrir Diary was concerned
with presenting its own textual seriality as a new kind of energy that
instead of dissipating, in Prigoginian terms, is transformed continually
into more complex stories in the future as the further adventures
of Professor Shonku. Equally central to that first Shonku tale were
the questions of artificial intelligence and the evolution of machine-
learning that we touched upon in our discussion of Shonku’s human
and non-human assistants and their laboratory lives. But it may be
worth reminding us that what appears to be truly puzzling about the
robot Bidhushekhar’s linguistic and musical capabilities is that they are
self-taught and not programmed by Shonku. There are early signs of
this in the story when Shonku dismantles the robot to find out why
he has been ‘groaning from time to time’, but he is unable to detect
any mechanical flaws (Ray 2008, 10). Shonku reflexively attributes this
mysterious development to his own scientific prowess, unrecognized
even by himself: ‘Perhaps I am unaware of the full extent of my own
powers. I have heard that some really gifted and creative scientists have

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 energy matters 127

the same problem. They cannot gauge how far their own creations
will go’ (Ray 2008, 10–11). The rest of the story, however, clinically
dismantles not only Shonku’s egocentrism but, more importantly, his
assumptions about science and scientific development being a ‘closed
system’ that relies on inputs from scientists that then – as in the case
of Shonku’s hopes about Bidhushekhar’s ‘faults’ – gradually dissipates
over time. But Bidhushekhar is not the only machine in the story
that displays such capacities for self-learning. After their Martian
misadventure, Shonku’s spaceship seems to have developed a mind of
its own: ‘How on earth did the rocket take off? Who started it? Prahlad
knew absolutely nothing about the technicalities. And Bidhushekhar
was still lying in two broken pieces. Did it take off on its own? If that
was the case, where was it going?’ (Ray 2008, 21). From this point
on, although Shonku continues to hold tentatively on to the myth of
his own promethean powers, the reader is left in little doubt that such
developments in machine intelligence have nothing at all to do with
him. Thus, Bidhushekhar’s self-taught sanskritic and Shakespearean
recitations and uncanny cosmological knowledge about the route to the
planet Tafa not only sets up the confirmation of Shonku’s intellectual
limitations being genially exposed by the aliens of that planet, but they
also point to a relationship between entropy and evolution that marks
the universe as a complex ‘open’ system in contradiction to Shonku’s
assumptions. Shonku’s anthropocentric science cannot imagine all the
currents of energy that keep it turning, but Ray’s story-cycle sets itself
the task of exploring the consequences of such limits and horizons.
In his discussion of the ‘Prigoginic leap’ in science fiction of the 1970s
and 1980s, David Porush also claimed that the challenge issued by the
cyberpunk mode was directed at one of the foundational assumptions
of classical cybernetics of Weiner, Turing, von Neumann – that artificial
intelligence was to be built ‘on mechanical principles that could think
with strict and formal rationality’ (Porush 1991, 383). Writers like
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, by imagining machines and not
humans giving birth to other intelligent machines, proposed that

the proper models for artificial intelligence in our time cannot

rely on formal logic alone. The part of our brain that controls
and grows in locked looping with our tools and the part that
makes connections among everything to formulate grandiose world-
building hallucinations of philosophy and fiction and science are
at least isomorphisms of the mysterious and chaotic activity of our
complex biological evolution itself, which relies on chaos. (Porush
1991, 384)

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128 FINAL FRONTIERS

Writing two decades before Gibson and Sterling, and from within the
historical context of post-colonial ‘underdevelopment’ and the consequent
struggle for geo-political advantage, Ray’s stories offer glimpses of the
dilemmas of a scientist over-reliant on ‘strict and formal rationality’
when faced with the ‘mysterious and chaotic’ energies that animate his
machines as well as the world he inhabits.
One unsettling, if predictable, effect of Ray’s presentation of machine-
learning or artificial intelligence in relation to energy systems is a probing
dissection of the category of the human. Often, as was the case in Robu,
the human and the robot cannot be distinguished from each other,
implying their co-eval position in the circuits of universal energy. Unlike
Byomjatrir Diary, the problem posed in Robu is not the unprogrammed
learning capacity of Shonku’s robot. We soon learn that its heroic (and
graphically violent) rescuing of Shonku is the result of the efforts of a
human scientist, Paumer, who had, unbeknownst to Shonku, altered the
electronic circuit in Robu’s brain and made it capable of an emotional
connection with its creator. But under this guise of quelling human
unease about machine intelligence, the story smuggles in the spectre of
the same mysterious and evolutionary energy that animates artificial life
in the (ultimately vanquished) figure of Robu’s rival – the robot developed
by the German scientist Borgelt. Borgelt’s machine is so ‘human’ that
it is able to stand in for the human scientist without anyone suspecting
the swap, except for Robu. This is exactly the opposite in the case of the
latter, who looks like something put together ‘simply with glue and nails
and sticking plaster!’ but can perform complex mathematical calculations
much quicker than any human being. Thus, when Borgelt’s robot declares
that ‘No one has been able to build a robot like mine. What I – Gottfried
Borgelt – have created is totally unique’ (Ray 2008, 151), it is telling a
truth wrapped in a falsehood. The pronoun is misleading in so far as it
is not the human scientist who is speaking here. But it also confirms the
exceptionality of the robot in that it has succeeded in ‘creating’ itself far
beyond the imagination and capacities of the German scientist, whom
it has imprisoned and whose place in human society it has usurped.
After being freed from captivity, Borgelt declares that he had built the
machine in the hope that it would continue with his work in cybernetics
after his death, but ‘the human brain is such a complex affair – no man
can recreate it, or predict how it’s going to behave’ (Ray 2008, 155–6).
Borgelt’s machine taught itself ‘human’ emotions such as envy and greed
long before Shonku’s Robu could be programmed to feel such things.
In so doing, it put forth a claim to a kind of being that demanded a
re-classification of the boundaries between the human and the machine
as well of the energies that flow through and connect them.

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 energy matters 129

Ray’s interrogation of fragile boundaries between humans and

machines rested precisely on the evolutionary complexity of the
brain and the mysteries of the energy it contained. If Ray’s machines
unsettled humans by displaying a capacity for the ‘Prigoginic leap’
of spontaneous learning, they did so because (some) humans shared
with them exactly this property and, in their cases, this was deemed
to be evidence for anthropocentric exceptionalism – that is, a confir-
mation of their humanity. Hence, the revelations regarding their shared
abilities is exactly what confirms the unsettling equivalence between
machines and human. One such exceptional human-machine (and
hence a cyborgian figure) is the child who features in Professor Shonku
O Khoka (‘Professor Shonku and the Little Boy’, 1967). He is brought
by his father to the scientist after he suffers a head injury from a fall
in the mistaken belief that Shonku can cure his strange affliction – he
is speaking in tongues that no one can comprehend. Like Shonku’s
robot, he has developed a linguistic capacity for which there appears
to have been no obvious external ‘programming’. Shonku becomes
interested in the case despite the lack of his own medical expertise and
soon establishes that the child is not only speaking in Sanskrit, Latin
and English but has also developed extensive knowledge of geography,
history and the sciences. In fact, he is a more complete version of any
machine that Shonku has ever built. But Khoka’s extraordinary learning
capacities are in tension with his humanity, which is marked above
all in the narrative by filial bonds with his parents and the normative
social expectations regarding childhood. His mother appeals to Shonku
evoking these values: ‘All right, you may take him with you, but
please bring the old Khoka back to me. I want him the way he was.
A four-year-old should have the brain of a four-year-old, shouldn’t he?’
(Ray 2008, 105) The echoing of Borgelt’s conclusions in Robu about his
rogue robot is deliberate here (‘A robot ought to remain a robot’), the
auxiliary verb underscoring both the normative limits of specific beings
(children and robots) but also evoking the similar norms that define
those limits and, in so doing, draw our attention to the equivalence
between them.
It is this embedded ‘human’ element that finally seems to win out
in Khoka. Shonku can only understand the evolutionary leap he has
taken in terms of disease, abnormality, dissipation or decay (Ray 2008,
114). And Khoka understands that unless he reverses the process, he
will forever be treated as a monstrous freak by his fellow humans, since
he has already had the unpleasant experience of being subjected to a
media circus. He therefore forces Shonku to give him his most potent
acid – annihilin – which instead of killing him, ushers in a comatose

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130 FINAL FRONTIERS

state from which he wakes up completely shorn of his learning capacities

and memory of being anything other than a ‘normal’ human child: ‘He
looked around the room, then spoke, sounding as if he was about to
cry. “Where’s my mummy … I want my mummy”’ (Ray 2008, 117). But
Khoka’s return to this ‘normalcy’ again depends on the complexity of
his brain’s evolutionary energies without which he would not be able
to identify the solution to his predicament offered by the potent acid.
Thus, his is also a return to that shadowy zone between the human
and non-human, where he is affiliated not only to his parents, but also
to the various machines in Ray’s fiction that have already demonstrated
their capacity to make identical leaps of consciousness.
It may not be too far-fetched to see in Ray’s human machines an
early version of what Donna Haraway would famously theorize in her
‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1991) as well as, as we have already seen, Gibson
and Sterling’s cyberpunk. The one other character that repeatedly
presents this productive problem figured in the cyborg – a problem that
would be registered over the decades after Shonku’s appearance in the
world’s popular-cultural market in music albums such as Kraftwerk’s
seminal 1978 Die Mensch-Maschine, as well as in Ridley Scott’s 1982
film Blade Runner – in Ray’s stories is, of course, Shonku himself. We
had seen earlier how some of the most anxious moments in Shonku’s
adventures involving laboratory experiments feature turning Shonku
into a sentient machine. In Ascharya Putul, the rogue scientist Lindquist’s
handiwork strikes Shonku as uncanny because: ‘The tiny figures that
I saw, placed under glass lids, were so life-like that I hesitate to refer
to them as statuettes. The only difference between each figure and a
real person was [….] that each was about one-tenth of the size of a
normal human being’ (Ray 2008, 183–4). But these exquisite dolls, of
course, are human – miniaturized by Lindquist’s electric technology
and suspended in an ambiguous state of being that are revived at the
pleasure of their rogue creator.
Shonku himself is added to Lindquist’s collection in a rare instance
of candid admission on Ray’s part regarding the erotic pleasures in
techno-scientific expertise: ‘Then his lips parted again and his gold tooth
flashed. “Come on!” he muttered, his voice harsh and raucous, “Come
my dear, my statuette number seven …come!” His hand covered my
entire body’ (Ray 2008, 196). Shonku is rescued from this predicament
by his friend Ackroyd, another ‘living doll’ who has overcome his new
condition with a mixture of technological innovation (he is wearing
one of Shonku’s inventions that gives him partial immunization from
Lindquist’s device) and physical prowess (he is able to escape from his
cage by swinging on wires that extend to the floor). But the real question

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 energy matters 131

in the story is posed by the rogue scientist around the preservation

and conservation of energy. Lindquist confesses that he is puzzled by
the behaviour of his human dolls. Their miniaturization means that
they will never face any problems of adequate provision of food and
other resources, and yet whenever they are revived for their feeding
sessions, all they can do is ‘start shrieking and yelling and beg to be
rescued’ (Ray 2008, 195). Lindquist had discovered his technology while
trying to solve the puzzle of the behaviour of lemmings, who seem
to defy all evolutionary laws in committing mass suicide by jumping
into the sea during their annual migration. Is it to forestall any future
resource crunch that they do this or is this a dramatic demonstration of
entropy coded into evolution itself? By miniaturizing humans Lindquist
appears to offer one answer to such questions posed by lemmings – a
reduction in size and scale of an individual leads to a conservation of
the collective existence of the species. But the end of the story offers
another kind of answer – that evolutionary energy is not linear and does
not progress along rigidly programmatic routes. After Shonku’s rescue
by Ackroyd and restoration of their normal human selves, the English
scientist decides to accompany the lemmings on one final journey to
the sea instead of returning to human society. With this literal leap
into another state of being, he hopes to understand some of the laws
of evolutionary energy that may not altogether discount the possibilities
of the extinction of both the individual as well as the species. Such
a possibility not only disputes any whiggish understanding of energy
systems, but of similar ideas regarding ‘development’ itself. We know,
as in the case of the Club of Rome report, how closely entwined were
the ideas of biological and economic development or progress during the
years of non-alignment and the Cold War. We also explored briefly the
long nineteenth-century genealogy of such conceptual entanglements. It
is not accidental that, for Nehru, ‘manpower’ signified both economic
and biological well-being. In offering a non-linear, chaotic, portrait
of biological energy, Ray also implies that the Nehruvian rhetoric
about economic energy may just be that – empty signifiers of political
expediency rather than any meaningful commitment to achieving
collective well-being.
This addition of animals as a third category, after humans and
machines, in Ray’s interrogation of species boundaries and evolutionary
energy also appears in other stories such as Gorilla. We may remember
that, like Lindquist, the rogue scientist Massingham’s device is an
electrical one that converts primates, both gorillas and humans in this
case, into machines. The automaton-like behaviour of the gorilla horde
(Ray 2003, 164) is replicated in the captive Shonku’s prone position and

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132 FINAL FRONTIERS

glassy stare in Massingham’s jungle laboratory that justifies the English

scientist’s premature celebrations at the prospect of recruiting the Indian
to his private primate army. As in Ascharya Putul, Shonku is rescued
by the prowess of his companions – here the African Kabala and the
Bengali Avinash babu (the former being explicitly compared to Tarzan
by the latter, with all the baggage that this racialized trope of noble
savagery brings with it). And since here too the tale had begun with
an investigation into evolutionary energy with Shonku’s experiments
to solve the mysteries of a vulture’s ocular powers, we are directed
to a familiar set of problems by the narrative’s resolution. The human
and non-human primates may have returned to their ‘normal’ states
after the electrical processes that alter their brain have been arrested
and reversed, but Massingham’s device has connected animals, humans
and machines in one single evolutionary loop. His laboratory may have
been burned by the end of the narrative and he himself confined in an
asylum, but the implications of his discovery are preserved in Shonku’s
diary for the readers to mull upon.
This emphasis on the relationship between electrical energy and the
human brain’s capacity for non-linear ‘Prigoginian leaps’ is presented
further in a story that breaches the Suvinian generic boundaries with
gleeful deliberation, Professor Shonku O Bhoot (‘Professor Shonku and
the Spook’, 1966). Shonku begins the story by stating his (respectably
late-Victorian) belief that ‘ghosts and spectres, seances, telepathy and
clairvoyance will become subjects of scientific study’ (Ray 2008, 118). The
neo-spectroscope he has built in order to do this is almost an identical
copy of Massingham’s electrical device in Gorilla: ‘I built a metal helmet
to fit my head. Two electric wires come out of this helmet, which go into
a glass bowl filled with a solution I have made. Soaking in that solution
are two flat pieces of copper. The two wires are connected to the copper’
(Ray 2008, 119). But electricity is not the only ingredient required to
harness otherworldly energies. The powers of human brain – ‘concen-
tration’ – as well as other organic matters such as ‘juice from the roots
of some trees in our cremation ground, which have been nourished by
the smoke of several funeral pyres’, are indispensable for the success of
the project. At first, Shonku’s device conjures up contact with the spirit
of his departed friend Ackroyd who has seemingly kept his promise of
accompanying the lemmings all the way to the sea and who confirms
the scientific validity of Shonku’s experiment. But soon, more troubling
rumours are brought to him by Avinash babu about a doppelgänger
stalking the town: ‘Once I saw this film [….] It had a funny story. There
was this man, who got split in two. So, at any given time, you could
see one half in one place, and the other somewhere else. Do you think

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 energy matters 133

a similar thing has happened to you?’ (Ray 2008, 125–6). This spectral
figure, when it finally communicates with Shonku via the device, turns
out to be one of his ancestors who had lived in the eighteenth century
and had practised a branch of indigenous knowledge-form adjacent to
modern science – tantra. Having died suddenly in an accident, he had
not been able to properly dispose of his tantric equipment, but had now
done so thanks to the channel opened between the worlds of the living
and the dead by Shonku’s neo-spectroscope. But such meetings are too
expensive in terms of energy – the draining of Shonku’s own ‘concen-
tration’ leads to a self-imposed ban on any further experiments that
could lead to more splitting of his self. Obviously, at one level this is a
fable for Ray’s life-long interest in probing not only generic boundaries
of science fiction, but also those taken to exist between science and
other knowledge-systems. Electricity, secretions from crematoriums,
laboratory equipments and ancestral spirits – all work together not only
to confirm a relationship between science and those modes of enquiry
deemed to be antithetical to it, but also between the individual human
‘self’ and others. The ancestral spirit is a copy of Shonku that can only
be summoned by the mysterious workings of the scientist’s own brain.
When attempts are made to register its presence through other devices,
such as a neighbour’s camera, the efforts invariably fail. The most
powerful and unpredictable source of energy in Ray’s fiction remains
organic, non-linear and chaotic.
Ray’s interest in exploring the boundaries between the human and
the non-human, machine learning and artificial intelligence, organic
and non-organic energies, ‘open’ and ‘closed’ systems of knowledge,
was not only co-eval with developments in Euro-American science
fiction and scientific and technological developments. It was prophetic
of some of the trends that would emerge in these fields over the
coming decades. It was critically aligned also to certain key aspects
of Nehruvian attitudes towards energy that we looked at earlier. For
example, electricity was privileged by Ray as well as by the Indian
National Council of Applied Economic Research as ‘the most desirable
form that energy can take’ (1962a, 29), since in its fictional form it
connects the organic to non-organic and human to the non-human, and
reveal them to be the parts of the same systemic loop. But electricity
in Ray’s science fiction also served to imaginatively interrogate two
other aspects of Nehruvian energy thinking – ‘manpower’ and India’s
scientific underdevelopment. Regarding the first, Nehru’s faith in the
potential developmental capacity of human energy was literalized in
those of Ray’s characters who tap into hitherto unimagined sources of
power contained in their organic frame – mainly in the evolutionary

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134 FINAL FRONTIERS

tool box that is their brain. However, in doing so, they relinquish at
the same time any claims to anthropocentric exceptionalism since such
energy is also be found in machines and animals. This move works as an
inherent limit and critique to the gender and species bias contained in
the historical Nehruvian assumptions regarding energy’s developmental
potential. As for the second aspect, the equal status accorded by Ray to
indigenous and ‘universal’ forms of knowledge – science but also tantra
for instance, – appears to refute Nehru’s anxieties about India’s historic
lag in the field of modern science and technology. But it does conform
to a wider Nehruvian proposition about civilizational index – that of
energy or ‘power’ being a reliable measurement for it. If indigenous
tantra can collaborate with non-indigenous science to tap into hidden
or unpredictable energy forms, India may not have to suffer from a
constant energy cringe in the post-colonial world. Such was one of the
utopic impulses of Ray’s fiction.
At the same time, these civilizational claims – unlike the contem-
porary cultural chauvinism of Hindu fundamentalism in India – were
not confined to the nation in the case of Ray. Rather, they extended over
the tri-continental, potentially non-aligned, world to dispute, on the one
hand, any euro-centric claims of civilizational monopoly and, on the
other, all forms of reactionary nativism. In Professor Shonku O Cochabambar
Guha (‘Professor Shonku and the Caves of Cochabamba’, 1969), Shonku is
invited to Peru to test the authenticity of cave paintings that some local
experts such as Dr Cordoba are claiming to be of relatively recent origin,
while others, like the American Dumbarton, think are pre-historic. What
is confusing about the paintings are both their fresh colour and the use
of abstract symbols that resemble mathematical formulae (Ray 2003,
135). Shonku and Dumbarton are also troubled by Cordoba’s hostility
towards them – a behaviour which is attributed by their guide Pedro
to his recent narrow escape from death during an earthquake that had
devastated Cochabamba and caused a large number of casualties. This
coupling of the destructive energies of the earth (the earthquake) and
the human brain (Cordoba’s alleged madness) culminates in the murder
of Pedro and the discovery by the Indian and the American scientists of
the object with which their guide had been assaulted which was made
of plastic and therefore not the spine of some strange animal that they
had initially mistaken it to be. Convinced that Cordoba was attempting
to hide something, they return to the caves and find the Bolivian’s body,
but what is far more disturbing is what they find in the inner recesses:

The tunnel bent to the right, and led to a larger chamber around
the corner. Our torch-light revealed a strange sight – the space

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 energy matters 135

was full of strange machines and the wall with mathematical and
geometrical formulae instead of paintings. No familiar metals like
glass or iron or steel had been used for the machines. There were
also thin wire-like filaments that crept up the walls, and we could
not make out what they were made of [….] the three bodies on
the floor were dead. I whispered ‘electric shock’, and then ‘don’t
touch them Dumbarton’. (Ray 2003, 147)

The presence of strange machines and electricity in the cave in the story
does not lead to the familiar contemporary figure of the rogue scientist
nor to futuristic aliens, but to the transportation of the scientists back
in time to pre-history. To be precise, the cave marks the space where
pre-history and history turn out to be co-existent. And this startling
juxtaposition is embodied in the author of the cave paintings, the
mathematical symbols, as well as the machines – a being with the
appearance of pre-historic cave-dwellers but with the brain of a ‘modern’
human, and who is awakened from his slumber by his unwelcome
visitors. There is only enough time left for the scientists to decode one
last enigmatic message written on the wall: ‘All else is dead. I am here.
I will be here. I am alone, I know much. I will know more. Stone is my
friend. Stone is my enemy’ (Ray 2003, 148). The meaning of this message
soon becomes apparent as another earthquake buries the evolutionary
miracle in the collapsing cave from which the scientists escape to witness
a memorable tableaux – a fault-line appearing in the earth’s surface and
swallowing up whole herds of Pliocenic animals that had emerged in
panic from the forest surrounding the cave. What had appeared earlier
in the story as destructive energy – the earthquake – is now shown to
be a force necessary to contain the apparently inexplicable and unsettling
survival of pre-historic beings whose presence refutes any assumptions
about linear evolutionary developments. On the other hand, electricity,
machines and paintings act as the civilizational markers of Bolivia (and,
by extension, perhaps of Latin America), whose historical ‘backwardness’
is transformed instead to be a sign of the co-evality of the past, present
and future. It therefore functions as a radically defamiliarizing device
in relation to any ideas of historical progress. Such disruption to the
twinned concepts of biological and historical ‘developments’ appeared
as one of the key functions of post-colonial non-aligned science fiction.
We may remember from our discussion that we have encountered
similar linking of energy and tri-continental civilizational credentials
in Ray. In Baghdader Baksa, the camera recorder of Gemal al-Harrait
of ancient Mesopotamia disproves any settled notions of scientific
and technological development. It simultaneously underscores the

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136 FINAL FRONTIERS

civilizational claims of a society that appeared to be ‘petro-modern’

long before the dawn of such an era in Europe:2 ‘The tallest building
in Babylon, all those years ago, measured a hundred feet [….] Two
thousand years ago, the Babylonians had already learnt to make use of
the petroleum that their country possessed. They lit lamps at night with
the help of this petroleum. The whole city glowed and glittered in the
dark’ (Ray 2008, 206–7).
This proof of non-Eurocentric, non-linear modernity is too much
for the American Goldstein, who wants to rob al-Harrarit’s camera
for his private collection and, in so doing, silence the claims to the
civilizational sovereignty of Iraq put forth by Hasan al-Hubbal, the
archaeologist who had led Shonku’s party to the cave where the
Mesopotamian scientist-magician al-Harriat is buried with many of
his inventions. Al-Hubbal, like Nehru, is both a nationalist and a
tri-continental internationalist, as is evident from his expression of
his fellowship with Shonku: ‘It is a great privilege for me, for I am
aware of the close links between India and our country’ (Ray 2008,
208). This fellowship is sealed in the story by a transmission of aural
energy between the two – only Shonku can replicate the incantatory
pitch required to open the secret cave’s sealed entrance that leads to
the burial chamber. And in the fiction it is this (non-aligned) alliance
that finally prevents the American’s securing of Iraq’s resources – a
drama that had already happened in history and fuelled the former’s
claim to world historical superpower status.
I remarked earlier that in comparison to Ray, Mitra’s attention fell
more on the relationship between resource extraction, the production
and consumption of energy, and the geo-political implications of such
transactions. Food, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, was
among the most important of such resources in the Ghana-da story
cycle, acting as it did as a direct trigger for the narration of the tall-tales
by the hero. In some stories like Chuunch and Tel (‘Oil’, 1967), food
(or its scarcity) was folded into the theme to foreground the circuit
between the extraction of resources and the consequent transmission of
different forms of energies. We saw that in other stories, such as Kaanch
and Ghori, nuclear energy determined both the extent of Ghana-da’s
heroism and a comic-ironic rendition of India’s claims to global power.
In yet others, such as Nuri and Chhori, the catastrophic termination

2
For a succinct definition of this period, see Stephanie LeMenager’s ‘The
Aesthetics of Petroleum: After Oil!’, where the term refers to ‘a modern
life based in the cheap energy systems long made possible by petroleum’
(LeMenager 2012, 60).

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 energy matters 137

of Ghana-da’s own entrepreneurial activities deflated the claims of

resource extractivism being one of the foundational and heroic modes
through which post-colonial modernity is attained. Let us end this
present discussion by looking at some of these stories that illustrate the
relationship between the themes and forms of energy in Mitra’s fiction.
Tel is as good an example as any of Mitra’s narrative strategy. It
starts with one of the members of the adda circle, Gour, rebelling
against their usual hagiographic exercise because of an oil-spill. The oil
in question is not crude petroleum, but a related, subsidiary product –
an expensive hair-oil that he had bought in the vain hope of arresting
his advancing baldness (Mitra 2000 vol. 1, 396–7). Displaying his usual
tendency to blithely appropriate the belonging of others, Ghana-da had
not only used the item for his own ablutions, but had spilt the rest of
it in an act of callous wastage. In his discussion of the reasons behind
our habitual overlooking of the connection between narratives and
petro-energy, Graeme Macdonald suggests that it is the very banality
and ubiquity of oil products – ‘the stuff that makes things go and
happen’ – that make them invisible (or partially visible) to critical
inquiries (Macdonald 2017b, 533). Oil not only fuels our cars and
aircrafts, but our bodies are drenched in it – we eat, drink and wear
it and are thus configured as petro-subjects in the most concrete sense
of the term. The opening moments of Tel allow us to see this, staging
the drama of conservation and wastage on the intimate scale of human
bodies. The other members of the adda are surprised at Gour’s bitter
vehemence against Ghana-da. But how could he not be, given oil in
all its forms define for him not only luxurious consumption but a
fundamental way of being? He had hoped, for instance, that the magic
of oil would solve his existential crisis of ageing and fading masculine
virility, summed up by baldness.
It is Ghana-da’s tall-tale that bridges the perceived gap between the
intimate scale of the body and the vast panorama of environment. To
appease Gour and deflect his anger, Ghana-da offers the intriguing
opening sentence of his story: ‘No, I am not in the business of finding
oil for anyone. In fact, I help reduce oil flow. Like I did that other time
near Culebra with more than ten thousand tons of oil’ (Mitra 2000
vol. 1, 399). From here, Ghana-da’s story shifts to his friendship with
the American tycoon Peter Macdonald and the two small islands he
owns in the Caribbean Virgin archipelago. Macdonald uses them as his
holiday retreat and his base for deep-sea fishing. But when Ghana-da
runs into him in snowy New York, marine life has disappeared from the
seas around the islands and Macdonald is considering giving them away
to his Texan friend, Dugan, who is gallantly insisting on paying a fair

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138 FINAL FRONTIERS

price. Of course, the deal smells fishy to Ghana-da and he accompanies

the two Americans on a surveillance trip and realizes that it is Dugan
who had been dumping cheap petroleum to pollute the seas. It is not
more oil Dugan is after, but the rare minerals palladium and osmium that
are used to catalyse Glycerides or fatty acids used in food manufacture.
Dugan deals not with crude petroleum, but a secondary product used in
his giant food factories (Mitra 2000 vol. 1, 411). Ghana-da arrests this
criminal pollution by hiring chemists to spread polyutherane foam on
the oil with money borrowed from Macdonald’s considerable wealth.
The move from the intimate to the impersonal, from micro- to
macro-scales in Ghana-da’s tale takes us from crude oil to oil products,
including those that determine the ordinary food habits of petro-subjects.
Ghana-da’s chemical measures restores the marine life in the archipelago
but, in so doing, it disrupts the food empire of Dugan. This returns
us to the occasion of the narrative, which had not only started with
a (hair) oil-spill, but also the scarcity of fish in the local markets of
Calcutta, without which the hostel residents fear that they cannot coax
any more tall-tales out of Ghana-da. The restoration of the marine life
in Ghana-da’s narration is paralleled by the return of the hostel cook
with a fresh catch from a distant suburban market he had been directed
to by Ghana-da, leaving the residents wondering whether ‘There was a
deep connection between the oil story and that of the fish’ (Mitra 2000
vol. 1, 413). Indeed, there is. The circuit between oil and food established
by Ghana-da marks both precisely the banality and ubiquity of oil in
petro-modernity to the extent that it requires the salutary shock of the
tall-tale to defamiliarize that reality for us, its subjects.
But oil is not the only kind of energy substance that links humanity
to the world in Mitra’s writing. Dhil (‘Rock’, 1960) begins with the
residents discussing various reasons for climate change in an effort to lure
Ghana-da into another recitation. Gour thinks that the excessive testing
of nuclear weapons by the Cold War superpowers has permanently
altered the world’s precipitation patterns – the evidence for which he
finds in the torrential downpour that had recently paralysed Calcutta
(Mitra 2000 vol. 1, 190). Shibu and Sisir demur from this because they
think climate change is not induced by humans, but part of the cyclical
and sudden changes in earth’s energy systems. They cite the counter-
evidence of ‘green’ Siberia extracted from mammoth carcasses with
grass in their stomach (Mitra 2000 vol. 1, 190). If glacial Siberia had
been warm enough to support grasslands before the ‘anthropocene’, why
should the current climate change be attributed to human activities?
When Ghana-da’s intervention comes, it is to prevent the usurpation
of his position as the story-teller in chief by Shibu’s cousin, who he

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 energy matters 139

accuses of being an accomplice of the villainous Savage with whom he

once had a run-in in Bodrum, southern Turkey. It is in the guise of
apologizing for this (mistaken, as it turns out) identity that he offers
his tale featuring oceanic and cosmic energies.
Ghana-da begins by complaining that the long-suffering resident
servant, Banamali, had disposed from his room of what he (and everyone
else) thought was a broken glass paperweight. It turns out that it was
nothing less than a part of an asteroid that had fallen to earth after
a journey of trillions of miles, containing traces of the mysterious and
precious mineral Tektite (this may be one of the many in-jokes that feature
in most of the Ghana-da’s stories that serve to undermine his professions
of expertise: Tektite, in reality, are formed as a result of meteorite and not
asteroid impacts). Ghana-da had acquired the rock in Bodrum while diving
for a rare species of sponge with his Turkish business partner Kapkin.
Kapkin, like many of the characters imagined by Ray and Mitra, possessed
a pronounced non-aligned sensibility and confessed to Ghana-da his hatred
for European and American collectors and patrons who had been trying to
bribe him into revealing the location of an underwater wreck containing
antiquarian treasures. This wreckage of an ancient Greek ship allegedly
contained statues from the Indus Valley cities of the Indian sub-continent
and, were Kapkin to reveal its location, it would re-write the history of
oceanic trade routes as well as that of the formation of ancient human
civilizational networks between Asia and Europe.
Enter the unscrupulous collector, Savage. Unable to entice Kapkin
into giving up the location of the wreck, Savage manages to follow his
boat during the diving operation and correctly guesses that Kapkin has
anchored near the submerged treasure. He then extracts the statues,
sabotages Kapkin’s boat and, when faced with the enraged Turk, who
accuses him of robbery, gets his bodyguards to brutally assault him. It is
to avenge Kapkin that Ghana-da hands out a beating to Savage’s thugs
and takes the rare Tektite from his cabin as a part of a negotiation to
rescue the Indus Valley statues from the American – an exchange that
he is still waiting to be completed and that he now claims has been
jeopardized by Banamali’s unthinking domestic labour. Two kinds of
energies circulate in the story – the cosmic energy of the asteroid that
holds the promise of a deep history of earth and the oceanic connections
between Asia and Europe that promise to reveal the longue duree of
civilizational formations. While these promises cannot be fulfilled within
the narration because of the missing Tektite, the connections proposed
between the various energies and sustained by the circuit established
between the tall-tale and the frame-narrative allows us to momentarily
glimpse such connections.

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140 FINAL FRONTIERS

Such strategies to capture the various scales of energy circulation

and transmission in an attempt to present something like a portrait
of a world-ecology mark the entire Ghana-da cycle. In even the more
obviously extractive adventures or resource fiction, the depiction of the
relationship between energy and global power is determined by the
passages between the frame-narrative and the tall-tale contained by
it. We have already seen how in Haansh Ghana-da’s appropriation and
re-distribution of food in the form of one of the resident’s carefully
sourced and hoarded duck-meat is the occasion for a tale involving the
race for a Tibetan lake containing Deuterium Oxide, or ‘heavy water’,
required for the generation of nuclear power. That story ended with
Ghana-da convincing the enraged resident, Bapi Datta, that the map
of the lake has been secreted away in the stomach of a migrant duck
that had flown from Tibet to India, thereby defusing the possibility of
intensifying the Cold War super-weapons race and inciting Datta to
buy and slaughter increasing numbers of birds in an effort to find the
map. This in turn ensured the steady supply of food to the hostel for
the foreseeable future. In Kaanch, the resident’s (racialized) challenge to
Ghana-da’s masculinity in the form of a fictitious boxing bout against
a black American boxer is defeated by a tale of another nuclear arms
race between him and a gang of Nazi prospectors hunting for uranium
in Angola. Again, neither party actually manages to get their hands on
the mineral, and thus the global balance of power is maintained. Such
fictional containments of geo-political balance are usually achieved by
grafting on tropes of the imperial adventure tale on to the science story
that guarantees Ghana-da’s (and, analogically, of Bengal and India’s)
superior masculinist and civilizational credentials when compared to
both European and African ‘savages’. And in Ghori the display of
ostentatious wealth by one of the residents in the form of a Swiss
watch in the frame-narrative produces Ghana-da’s tale of his defeat of
a Japanese campaign to paralyse Europe by smuggling in ‘dirty bombs’
hidden in watches. The resolution of the story registers the historical
effects of the testing of nuclear weapons on life in and around the Pacific
islands, as the tsunami triggered by the dumping of the bombs (on
Ghana-da’s recommendation) kills and causes damage on an epic scale.
Thus, the environmental cost of geo-politics in the tall-tale is linked back
to another kind of cost – that of the production and global circulation
of prestige commodities such as Swiss watches in the frame-narrative.
As Patricia Yaeger reminds us, the modern world is marked by the
simultaneity and unevenness of energy systems – the ‘nuclear age’ is
also the age of wood, tallow, whale oil and others. Mitra, unlike most
of his contemporary Euro-American writers, is unusually aware of

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 energy matters 141

this. Chhori (‘Cane’, 1949) uses a familiar opening frame – that of the
residents trying to incite Ghana-da with a story-telling performance of
their own, featuring Gour’s confection of a polar adventure. The plan
works, and Ghana-da points out the factual errors that expose Gour’s
fake tale by offering his own version of polar adventure, which begins
with the business of extraction. Like many of his other enterprises, this
one involves the hunt for oil – this time in the form of whale-oil. The
ship they are on comes complete with the latest harpoon canons and
on-board processing plant, and Ghana-da and his Norwegian partner
Sven find themselves in the middle of a bonanza season:

That year the ocean was teeming with whales. The south pole had
been on the whalers’s radars for a few years, after their reckless
hunting had nearly driven the creatures to extinction in the north.
British, Norwegian, Japanese and Argentine fishermen had been
in these waters for a while, but no one had seen such numbers
before. Forget about the experienced hunters, even the amateurs
were returning with ships crammed with whale blubber. (Mitra
2000 vol. 1, 90)

This relentless logic of modern capitalism’s profit accumulation, figured

here in the whaler’s maximum efficiency as a simultaneously killing
and processing machine that shrinks production time, converts the
geographical polar limits to a ‘commodity frontier’ (Moore 2000,
409–13). Like the good oil-subject that he is, Ghana-da is not satisfied
with the killings they have already made, but is on the lookout for a
secondary product from this enterprise that will lead them to even more
riches – ambergris, which is found ‘in the belly of only one kind of
whale [….] and looks like small, dark, smoke-coloured pebbles. They are
worth more than their weight in gold in the perfume business’ (Mitra
2000 vol. 1, 91–2).
But nature itself seems to refuse to co-operate fully with his
endeavour. First, a mysterious Moby Dick-like creature leads the ship
on a wild chase deeper and deeper into the polar waters, and then
they are hit by a powerful storm. The ship capsizes and Ghana-da
washes up on the perma-frosted shores of the South Pole, reduced to
a primal state of survivalist scavenging like Crusoe. Robinson Crusoe
is of course above all a model for the thrifty conversion of waste into
energetic accumulation of wealth. Mitra’s hero emulates some properties
of this model and rejects others. He dutifully salvages resources from the
shipwreck – tins of food, a tent and, rather eccentrically, a cane. These
ensure his temporary survival, but he soon realizes that he is nothing

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142 FINAL FRONTIERS

but an insignificant spectator of the polar evolutionary drama involving

creatures such as penguins and skua. Whale-oil and ambergris have
receded very far indeed as his priorities, and he sets off on a seal-hunt to
see if he can accumulate a little food and fuel that he needs to survive
in what appears to his anthropocentric sensibilities as an icy wasteland,
but is actually a rich environment thriving with non-human life.
This journey is interrupted first by the incredible sight of a live polar
volcano from which streams forth hot water, and then by what Ghana-da
takes to be a strange creature hovering at the mouth of the crater. In his
exploratory zeal to discover a new volcano and capture the unidentified
animal, the two fall part-ways into the crater, whereupon Ghana-da
discovers that the creature is none other than Sven, his business partner
and fellow survivor, who has also emulated Crusoe by fashioning a dress
from the skin of the penguins he has killed for food. Their immediate
task is to survive the extremely high temperatures in the crater, and it
is here that the apparently ornamental cane finds its use. Exasperated
at being unable to find a way out, Ghana-da accidentally punctures
the wall of the crater while brandishing the cane, and this releases a
plume of steam and gas. This allows our polar Crusoes to fill their tent
with the volcanic hot air and lift themselves to an iceberg closer to the
whaling route, from where they are duly picked up by a returning ship
and thus re-enter the world of extractive enterprise.
Nuclear energy – the focus of much of Nehruvian science as well as
of the fevered imagination of Euro-American Cold War science fiction
– was duly acknowledged in many of Mitra’s stories. But he was also
concerned, like the scientific advisors to the Nehru government, to
present a decidedly mixed picture of overlapping energy regimes, where
apparently archaic forms co-existed with futuristic. Indeed, alien energy
forms, such as the one presented in Lattu (‘Top’, 1952), are shown to be
wholly beyond the scope of human technology. In that story, it is through
the relatively antique business of fur-trapping (and its connotations
of preserving body heat and the capacity to work and survive in the
cold) that Ghana-da accesses the technology of the alien spaceships,
even though he cannot fully understand the sources that power them.
Although many of these stories end in the apparent failure of Ghana-da’s
enterprising projects in accordance with the logic of the tall-tale form,
these heroic failures guarantee the Bengali’s claim to mediate in global
geo-politics while remaining non-aligned to any of the competing blocs.
In this respect, Ghana-da is a good Nehruvian. But where Mitra seems
to exceed Nehru’s personal understanding of energy primarily in terms
of ‘power’ is in his linking of food and human development. His frame-
narratives underscore the relationship between scarcity or availability of

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 energy matters 143

food and the act of story-telling, and the tall-tales folded within them
are often fables about geo-political implications of food consumption.
Sometimes, as in Chuunch, this is broached directly as the tale of
Lavalle’s experiments with artificial chlorophyll in response to the
world’s food scarcity, is summoned to stave off the resident’s proposals
of rationing and of converting their terrace into a kitchen garden. At
others, as in Tupi (‘Hat’, 1952), the fable is more oblique. There, the
frame-narrative starts with a dispute over a debt – the number of
cigarettes Ghana-da owes Sisir. When all attempts to end the dispute
by bribing Ghana-da with the promise of further delicacies fail, the
residents’ last resort is to a bait him with their knowledge about the
highest peak of the Himalayas – Everest. Ghana-da takes the bait, but
his tale of mountaineering heroics (beating Tenzing Norgay and Edmund
Hillary to be the first person to climb the mountain) is plotted around
a fabled beast and its mythical food. It starts, however, with a reminder
of the geo-political importance of sporting and leisure activities such
as mountaineering and exploration. Ghana-da, disguised as a porter,
accompanies the Japanese scholar Tanaka, who is apparently touring
various Buddhist monasteries to consult ancient manuscripts and explore
the possibilities of a new passage between India and Tibet. But Ghana-da
has seen through his real purpose – Tanaka is scouting for a route to
the top of the then unconquered Himalayan peak and thereby confirm
the cultural prestige of Japan as a rival imperial power to Britain (Mitra
2000 vol. 1, 83).3 Ghana-da has been forced to disguise himself because
as an imperial subject he is forbidden to venture to certain parts of the
British territories while Tanaka, a ‘citizen of a free country’, has no such
problems (Mitra 2000 vol. 1, 83). But, unlike the Japanese, Ghana-da’s
interest lies in solving the evolutionary puzzle of the legendary creature
Yeti, which is rumoured to haunt these slopes.
Both the evolutionary and the physical challenges are overcome in
Ghana-da’s story by the discovery of an unknown source of energy,
the roots of a plant called Rune – that only grows above the snowline.
The adventurers have their close encounter with a Yeti when they find
one digging in the snow for this plant, which ‘does not resemble any
plant root, but looks more like a fungus that survives in ice. Curious, I
ate a bit of it, and it felt like chewing paper. I could not see how these
gigantic Yetis could survive on this alone’ (Mitra 2000 vol. 1, 85). This

3
Mountaineering as a leisure activity assumed peculiar importance in the
imperial culture wars. For a good general account see Bayers 2003. On the
specific importance of the conquest of the Everest to British imperialism,
see Stewart 1997, Westaway 2013 and Neale 2002.

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144 FINAL FRONTIERS

mystery is solved when Ghana-da and Tanaka begin to feel warm in

the rapidly dropping temperature, and realize that the plant magically
increases the lung’s capacity to absorb oxygen as well maintain body
temperature in the coldest of environments. This comes in handy when,
in attempting to capture a Yeti alive, they are dragged by the enraged
creature to the top of Everest and survive by chewing the Rune root.
Ghana-da leaves his hat on top of the peak as evidence of his having,
however inadvertently, conquered the mountain. This Asian ascendency,
the demonstration of ‘manpower’, is indebted to the judicious hoarding
and consumption of what may not look like much of a delicacy, but
turns out to be food that is an indispensable source of energy. Nehru
had hinted that it was the conservative diet of Indians that often held
their developmental potential in check – they would rather starve than
eat something unfamiliar. Ghana-da’s culinary adventures shows that
abandoning such conservatism made the indigenous conquest of the
greatest challenges possible.
Perhaps nowhere did Nehruvian non-alignment encounter the sharp
end of global geo-politics more than in the field of energy. Anxieties
about post-colonial India’s underdeveloped or deformed petro-culture
was generated amidst deeply entrenched assumptions about modern fossil
subjectivity. Ray and Mitra’s fiction worked to make these assumptions
visible, as well as to offer comic critiques of some of these. If ‘power’
as well as ‘manpower’ were assumed to be developmental indices
for Nehru’s government, Shonku’s adventures often underscored the
fragilities inherent in the drawing up of anthropocentric taxonomic
boundaries between species and their consequences. If nuclear and
electrical energies were seen as modes that could potentially turbo-
charge India’s geo-political importance, Ghana-da’s tall-tales often focus
on the disasters that are triggered by the extractive activities required
for these as well as the overlapping and uneven energy regimes within
which they were located. Above all, Ray and Mitra were interested in the
pervasiveness of energy forms in everyday life, and how they connected
the intimate scale of individuals to the grand one of environment or
ecology. Academic theories such as energy humanities should properly
be seen as a belated appreciation of this sensibility.

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 Conclusion:
Science, fiction and the end of
non-alignment
Conclusion

After Nehru

Just like ‘Nehruvian science’, the strategy of non-alignment continued

to define India’s relationship with the world (as well as with itself)
long after Nehru’s death in 1964. But it had become obvious within a
decade after Nehru’s passing that, as a movement, non-alignment had
reached its autumnal stage. Members of Nehru’s own Indian National
Congress Party, such as Asoka Mehta, writing in 1971, acknowledged
its achievements – in particular the fanning of the ‘winds of change’,
such as decolonization in Asia and Africa, the counter-balancing of
the superpowers in the interests of global peace and the strengthening
of global anti-racist struggles (Mehta 1971, 2–4). Yet, Mehta was
chiefly interested in compiling a lengthy list of its failures on ethical,
strategic and tactical grounds. For Mehta and many others who saw
themselves as progressive Indians, non-alignment had entered a ‘period
of confusion’ after the 1960s (Mehta 1971, 6). For such critics, this
could be seen in non-alignment’s failure to make politics ethical in
any meaningful way:

There was no dramatic move of the kind that the Spanish Republic
had made in the early ‘thirties during its brief yet luminous
existence. Then that Republic had in its constitution transferred
certain essential powers to the League of Nations. In the ‘fifties,
it was left to France and five other countries of western Europe
to discover the immense potentiality of functional federalism. It
was again in some countries of Europe that the need for a Court
of Human Rights, going beyond the boundaries and powers of
nation-states, was recognised. There was in India no similar
attempt at a creative break-through, no voyage of discovery.
(Mehta 1971, 5)

145

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146 FINAL FRONTIERS

This lack of an ethical politics in turn was said to have produced

a series of strategic and tactical errors. Among these, Mehta noted
India’s equivocations regarding Israel and its tendency to see in its very
existence the source of tensions in that region; its unresponsive attitude
to some African nations such as Ghana and towards Japan on the
grounds of their ‘alignment’ with rival superpowers; and its opposition
to the appointment of a UN Commissioner for Human Rights. He was
especially critical of what he saw as the detrimental economic effects of a
dogmatic commitment to non-alignment strategy – the entrenchment of
a ‘dependency regime’ of aid and soft loans from the very superpowers
that his country was supposed to maintain a critical distance from,
as well as the creation of unnecessary barriers against foreign private
investment (Mehta 1971, 10–11). He detected a similar degradation in
the regional political dynamics resulting from India’s incapacity to stitch
together a political bloc that could check the rise of China (Mehta 1971,
21). He judged non-alignment as a failure even regarding the arms race,
where it had contributed to the ‘spread of nuclear weapons but have not
affected their development and magnifying of their destructive powers’
(Mehta 1971, 32).
It fell to Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi, who had taken over the
leadership of the Congress party as well succeeding her father as India’s
prime minister for much of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s,
to defend non-alignment against such charges. To her international
audiences at the various summits and conferences, at least, Gandhi
stuck stoutly to Nehru’s line regarding the movement’s indispensability
to world peace. Speaking in Lusaka in 1970, she declared:

Twenty-Five years after the last holocaust, the world is not yet on
the brink of peace. The nuclear balance of terror still confronts
us. The war in Vietnam is said to be waged with ‘conventional’
weapons, yet these include chemical contamination of food and
plant life. The only way to have a clean war is not to have a
war at all. Hence India stands and works for total disarmament.
(Ramamurthy and Srivastava 1983, 2)

It was a position she would reiterate many times from Algiers in

1973 to Colombo in 1976 and New Delhi in 1981. Alongside this,
however, she also developed a more robust answer to the charge
of non-alignment’s economic failures that involved emphasizing the
development of ‘south–south’ exchange of scientific and technological
expertise. In Lusaka, Gandhi acknowledged the Guyanese prime
minister Forbes Burnham’s insight that the non-aligned Third-World

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 conclusion 147

nations possessed ‘the major part of the world’s natural resource’ and
suggested that ‘We can now make the first attempts to discover areas
of co-operation in many fields of development – generation of power,
development and agriculture, improvement of roadways, railways and
telecommunications, the expansion of higher education and training in
science and technology’ (Ramamurthy and Srivastava 1983, 6). Three
years later in Algiers, she acknowledged ‘The work of scientists and
technologists in the advanced countries in fields such as communi-
cations, space science, metallurgy, fuel technology or medicine poses
many complex challenges to us’ (Ramamurthy and Srivastava 1983,
10). In Colombo, she then proposed that such challenges could not be
met merely by imitating such experts because ‘Technological progress is
not unthinking duplication of the designs of life prevalent in affluent
countries. Consumerism is no blessing to us. Our objective should
be a level of technology which provides the minimum material and
cultural needs of our people and which will enable us to withstand
threats to freedom, political pressures and unequal domestic needs’
(Ramamurthy and Srivastava 1983, 22–3). The necessity of such
alternative technology arose precisely because it was used as a weapon
by the ‘advanced’ countries to prolong their chokehold on the world.
Thus, Gandhi reiterated in Delhi, only a co-operative transfer of
‘technology, skill and financial resources’ among the Third-World
nations could neutralize such weaponization of civilizational tools and
techniques (Ramamurthy and Srivastava 1983, 27–8).
It is true that much of Gandhi’s defence of non-alignment rang
increasingly hollow because of the fundamental structural changes in the
world-system that reverberated through every level of local, regional and
international politics, economics as well as of culture. As K.  P.  Misra, one
of the participants in a 1982 international roundtable on non-alignment
in Yugoslavia observed, by the time Gandhi was speaking in Delhi many
non-aligned countries had slipped into the grips of authoritarian rulers
such as Gandhi who were

not only unresponsive to the hopes and aspirations of their people

but are outright oppressive and tyrannical [….] In this none too
happy scenario, small centres, controlling and commanding the
lives of political and economic power, have emerged in the periphery
countries which the nonaligned states by and large are. These
centres comprise ruling elites whose composition is determined by
each distinctive situation. In most cases they belong to one or more
components of a broad military-industrial bureaucratic-academic
complex. (Misra 1982, 28–9)

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148 FINAL FRONTIERS

Indeed, for Vijay Prashad, Gandhi’s address to the delegates gathered in

Delhi in 1983 should be seen as the funeral oration for the Nehruvian
vision of international non-alliance in general and for the idea of an
anti-colonial Third World in particular. The city itself was ‘under siege’
from the political fallout of the Indian National Congress’s catastrophic
electoral defeat in the southern states of India as well as by the gruesome
images of the massacre of 5,000 refugees in a communal conflagration
that had lit up Nellie in the eastern state of Assam (Prashad 2007,
208–9). In the meeting it was clear that what had been the two pillars
of Third-World (inter-)nationalism – ‘economic autarky and secular
democracy’ – were fast crumbling, replaced by technocratic approaches
favoured by the Atlantic powers and the international financial organi-
zations they sponsored, such as the IMF (Prashad 2007, 217).
A number of forces were behind the fading of the non-aligned
movement. The energy crises triggered by the challenge issued by
the OPEC cartel of oil-producers to the rule of the seven giant
Euro-American energy corporations; wars such as the Sino-Indian
and the Iran–Iraq conflicts that were the results of the adoption of
the European nationalist model by post-colonial states; the ‘green
revolution’ in agriculture sponsored by the World Bank and multina-
tional agro-business – all played decisive roles, as did the various failures
of what Prashad calls ‘Third-World socialism in a hurry’ such as the
Tanzanian Ujamaa programme, which, despite the best intentions, led
to ‘the worst examples of commandism and bureaucratism’ (Prashad
2007, 196). Yet, like all deferred dreams, the non-aligned movement
left residual traces in the waking life of the everyday world that
continued to seed Blochean principles of hope. Out of the discussions
at the various international gatherings came ideas such as the ‘new
international economic order’ and the ‘new international information
order’ – both seen as checks on rather than being synonymous with
what we now think of as globalization. The former was enshrined in
UN resolutions such as the one adopted on 1 May 1974, which called
for the restructuring of economic relations on the basis of ‘sovereign
equality, interdependence, common interests and cooperation of all
states, irrespective of their economic and social systems’ (Singh 1982,
160). Of course, such recognitions of the need for the reduction in
global economic inequality was only secured in the face of the relentless
hostility of the Euro-American powers whose ‘concession to the NIEO
dialogue came at a moment when they were reeling under the oil shock,
were nervous and jittery and still did not know how to respond to the
OPEC action’ (Singh 1982, 161–2). This ‘new international economic
order’ was designed to combat the use of food and economic aid to

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 conclusion 149

hold the Third World hostage to the pleasures of the First. The latter
was born of the recognition formally articulated in Tunisia in 1976 that
‘the non-aligned and developing countries had unequal position in the
international flow of information and existing systems of communi-
cation [….] it is the duty of the non-aligned countries to change this
situation and obtain the decolonization of information, and initiate a
new international order in information’ (Ivacic 1982, 277).
Such cultural inequality, as ever, was co-produced with material and
technological ones. The news agencies of the non-aligned nations had
formed a common news pool in 1975, but its daily output of 40,000
words was only around 2 per cent of that of a single American agency,
Associated Press (Ivacic 1982, 282). Even in the early 1980s, nearly all
of the modern communication systems were produced and owned by
the ‘advanced’ Euro-American countries and the five big players – AFP,
AP, Reuters, TASS and UPI – who were responsible for 80 per cent of
the global information flow that contained under 10 per cent news from
or about the Third World (Ivacic 1982, 282). The consequences of this
could be vividly seen in the case of sub-Saharan Africa where most of
the countries

still communicate with each other via former metropolises.

Thus, for instance, if some information from Ghana should reach
neighbouring Togo, it must start from Accra, and via London and
Paris arrive in Lome, which is only about three hundred kilometres
far from Accra [….] From the total number of telephones in the
world, 80% are in ten countries of North America and Europe,
and only 1% in Africa. (Ivacic 1982, 282)

In such enforced re-routings, the cultural dimensions of science and

technology and the corresponding techno-scientific dimensions of
culture become visible, as well as the deeply embedded inequalities that
structure these fields. This critical visibility was precisely the enduring
gift of ‘south–south’ exchanges within the non-aligned world.
Thus, even during its autumnal years non-alignment continued to
pose important questions regarding the manifold relationships between
modernization, science and technology, culture, democratic equality
and socio-economic justice. The recognition that the ‘technological gap’
between the First and the Third World folded within it a myriad of
such relationships also prompted sustained thinking about encounters
with, and domestication of, foreign or alien forms of knowledge. Indeed,
the latter remained a key policy preoccupation of many decades after
Nehru’s death:

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150 FINAL FRONTIERS

Imported technologies need to be adapted to local conditions,

raw materials and markets. The continuing presence of protected
markets for domestic production has militated against such
adaptation [….] In its narrow sense, absorption of a specific alien
technology, requires special efforts if it is to be absorbed in a
different sociological environment. TNCs of the advanced countries,
have been very insensitive to the disruptions they have caused to
the socio-economic environments of the regions where they have
established their plants. (Desai 1982, 179)

Given all this, it is not hard to see why science fiction remained a
privileged cultural mode for such critical reflections and interrogations.
Alien technology, the trauma of first contact with ‘civilizing missions’,
the specificity of scientific knowledge production, the promises and perils
of independence, and revelations about the force-fields that animate the
world, are all staple ingredients of the genre. In the case of India, the
post-Nehru years saw some distinctive additional local developments
– the flowering of non-Bengali science fictional writing (particularly
in Marathi) as well as the increasing presence of women writers in
what is still a disproportionately male-dominated field, the formation
of a specialist magazine network and publishing infrastructure, and a
mutation in the modes and forms within the genre that saw, for instance,
novels, radio plays and cinema being added to the more established
ones like the short-story cycles we have been looking at thus far. Such
developments call for much fuller investigations and many new studies,
and not just brief concluding glances such as mine. But in anticipation of
such a future, I will attempt below to touch upon the continuities and
discontinuities between some of these works produced under the stars
of the late non-aligned world and those composed during its high noon.
This will require an acknowledgement of some of the corresponding
patterns in the life of ‘Nehruvian science’ after Nehru.

Enchantments of science

I began our discussion with an anecdote about the vogue for ‘Vedic
science’ that has accompanied the recent entrenchment of religious
authoritarianism in the Indian state and society. At first glance, such
penchant for pre-historic inter-galactic spaceships and other techno-
logical marvels seem to be conceived of precisely against the Nehruvian
vision of not just science but of a modern post-colonial state itself. Yet,
as my subsequent explorations of Nehru’s own attitudes towards science,

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 conclusion 151

modernity and ‘development’ showed, the validation of the ancient

Indian scientific spirit and technological felicity was hardwired into his
project of developing an independent India from the very beginning.
Like the scientists he admired, such as J.  C.  Bose, or those like Meghnad
Saha who were part of the decisive scientific nucleus around him,
Nehru saw science simultaneously as a mode of knowledge and a myth
required for the invention of a nation-state. Saha, Bose and Nehru
all spoke repeatedly of the continuity of the scientific spirit between
ancient and modern India (Abraham 2006, 212) and, thus, ‘Nehruvian
science’ can be said to exist ’as history, as myth, as political slogan,
as social category, as technology, as military institution, as modern
western knowledge, and as an instrument of change’ at the same time
(Abraham 2006, 213). If such quests for national authenticity as well as
fundamental ambivalences regarding it mark striking parallels between
‘Nehruvian’ and ‘Hindutva’ science, there can however be no suggestions
regarding their equivalence. As Abraham stresses, while the former
strove to weave modern science and technology into the social life of
post-colonial India, the latter aims to rip up much of that delicate fabric
(Abraham 2006, 212).
Yet, there can be little doubt that the contradictions between
science as myth or invented tradition, and science as a bureaucratic
nation-building exercise, often translated into tensions between elite
and popular conceptions of knowledge. Shruti Kapila suggests that
the bureaucratization of science under Nehru, for example, often
classified a whole array of practices such as jyotish and samudri, which
habitually shuttled between the domains of science and spirituality, as
non-institutional, unstructured and therefore ‘a challenge for liberal
and reform-minded publicists and elites’ (Kapila 2010, 128). Indeed,
for others like Shiv Visvanathan, the practice of ‘Nehruvian science’
was responsible for nothing less than the denial of cognitive justice,
‘that is, of the right of different forms of knowledge to coexist without
being marginalized by official, state-sponsored forms of knowledge’
(Visvanathan 1998, 42). Instead, the deadening grid of laboratories and
the colossal dams tragically produced ‘second-grade research that was
often a crude mimicking of some foreign paper’ and a ‘new generation
of unrehabilitated refugees’ (Visvanathan 1998, 43).
We need not, of course, accept judgments such as these in their
entirety. But the contradictions and ambivalences of ‘Nehruvian science’
continue to manifest themselves in key policy domains such as defence
and, especially, nuclear arms to this day. We have already seen something
of Nehru’s political problems in squaring his own professed commitment
to global peace and disarmament with the equally strong one of

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152 FINAL FRONTIERS

developing a nuclear-powered India. Priya Chacko has suggested that

instead of interpreting this as cynical realpolitik, we should understand
it as an expression of a foundational post-colonial ambivalence:

nuclear technology took on a special significance as an explicit

example of both the promise and the threat of Western modernity.
It promised to instil in India what Nehru referred to as a ‘scientific
temper’ and provide a cheap source of power for India’s economic
development. Yet, because the nationalist critique of the destructive
nature of Western modernity constitutes a vital part of India’s
postcolonial identity the outright adoption of a technology with an
established record for having the potential to unleash an unprec-
edented level of devastation was untenable. (Chacko 2011, 186)

Such ambivalence need not always have a negative effect on policy

matters. For instance, it enabled Nehru to both be a party to the
Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 in the hope of achieving incremental
progress towards global disarmament and retain a ‘peaceful nuclear
explosions’ plan as a matter of domestic, rather than international policy
(Chacko 2011, 197). It allowed Nehru’s successors from Indira Gandhi to
P.  V.  Narsimha Rao to maintain that ‘India was not a “nuclear weapons”
country’ and at the same time build a nuclear research programme that
could be weaponized quickly. In the final instance, however, this also
benefitted the authoritarian parties such as the BJP, who could differ-
entiate themselves from the Nehruvian vision by adopting the doctrine
of nuclear deterrence as a virile, masculine and a specifically Hindu
response to the degrading international security situation after the end
of the Cold War (Chacko 2011, 203).
If this ambivalence was one of the lasting legacies of ‘Nehruvian
science’, another such can be described as the peculiarities of combined
and uneven development in that domain. The co-existence of a network
of relatively wealthy national laboratories alongside mass illiteracy
and chronic shortfalls in primary and secondary education produced
occasional and startling efflorescence of scientific breakthroughs far ahead
of those achieved in the ‘advanced countries’, alongside a vast morass
of sub-standard work. The occasional reflections of Indian scientists as
well as the growing volume of observations of everyday practices of
science in India bear testament to such a pattern. Already in the 1980s,
Arnab Raichoudhuri, a theoretical astrophysicist, had wondered ‘why
have our best institutions so far failed to reach the standard of the best
Western Institutes?’, and proposed that it was not because of the lack of
good scientists in India (Raichoudhuri 1985, 476). Indeed, as we have

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 conclusion 153

seen before, in many areas including Raichoudhuri’s own expertise,

Indians such as Meghnad Saha and Jagadish Bose had made pioneering
contributions. However, for Raichoudhuri, the regime of tests and the
curriculums of the elite Indian scientific institutions, best understood
as ersatz colonial pedagogy, produce a distorted model of scientific
excellence and of the scientist herself. Excellence was understood here
as nothing less than the mastery of all fundamental aspects of science,
and the scientist as someone who has achieved international reputation
by doing well in formal assessments (Raichoudhuri 1985, 487). As a
result, Raichaudhuri sums up a hypothetical but typical Indian (and
Nehruvian) scientist’s understanding of his field thus:

A good scientist must be a genius, intellectually much superior to

One’s best professors. He is fully equipped with all the technical tools
which may possibly be necessary for any kind of research he may
wish to undertake. He usually spends his time pondering over the
fundamental issues of his discipline and when this divinely inspired
individual happens to have a brilliant idea, he works it out in a
straightforward way without much trouble like a smart schoolboy
solving his problems. I shall call this the ‘schoolboy conception
of science’. The textbooks also conspire to give a similar wrong
impression of science: since they discuss only the most outstanding
achievements of a scientist, they necessarily tend to project an image
of research as a discontinuous process. (Raichaudhuri 1985, 489)

This understanding, a product of the combined and uneven development

of Indian higher education and scientific institutions, in turn works to
reinforce such institutional structures. The result is the consecration
of the (male-)gendered figure of the (high-caste) genius scientist rising
above a moribund scientific community marked by the absence of
‘any steady output of fairly good, though not outstanding work’
(Raichaudhuri 1985, 479).
Curriculums and assessments are not, of course, the only institutional
features to express combined unevenness. The same paradox can be seen
in, for example, the research culture in a specialist field with multiple
applications such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). While Indian
scientists have been at ‘in the frontier areas’ of MRI research, they have
made little or no contribution to technological developments (Prasad
2005, 464). This is not because the processes involved are expensive,
but because they require a few things missing in India – inter-institu-
tional collaborations, the inability to break into international patenting
regime, the monopoly of Euro-American multinational companies over

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154 FINAL FRONTIERS

the manufacture of the MRI machines and poor evaluating processes

followed by state-controlled funding bodies. Thus, ‘frontier research’
rests in ‘dialectical relation to global and national networks of power
and administration’ (Prasad 2005, 464). From the 1940s to the 1970s,
that is during the heyday of ‘Nehruvian science’, MRI research was
mostly characterized by its experimental and theoretical character in
which Indian scientists from reputable institutions like the Indian
Institute of Science, Bangalore, and the Tata Institute of Fundamental
Research, Bombay, played leading roles. But with a dramatic global shift
in the field in the 1970 that demanded ‘multi-disciplinary collaborations
between physicists, chemists, computer- and electrical engineers, medical
scientists and radiologists’, such work became marginalized (Prasad
2005, 466).
Part of this is undoubtedly down to the pedagogic practices outlined
above by scientists such as Raichaudhuri, as well as the employment
contracts offered at research institutions that stifle rather than encourage
the exchange of ideas. In his interviews of various scientists, Amar
Prasad heard how PhD students were regularly reprimanded by their
supervisors for asking them questions at workshops because their profes-
sional insecurity made them interpret such enquiries as threats (Prasad
2005, 470). But a large part of the blockages against collaborative
research arises because of the manufacture of machines necessary for
such initiatives are owned by Euro-American multinationals who seldom
allow the ‘local’ scientists any autonomy. One MRI laboratory in India
had developed experimental techniques, but when the scientists tried to
run it on their machines they found they did not have the passwords
for the software programs and the hard drive was not large enough to
store the images. Their request for permission to network the computer
to another workstation was denied by the company that manufactured
the machine (Prasad 2005, 473). Such institutional asymmetry is also
amplified by poor evaluation methods practised by Indian bureaucrats
who control the purse strings for research and demand excessive financial
scrutiny (Prasad 2005, 475). But at the same time, doing fundamental
MRI research in India may still be easier than attempting it in ‘advanced’
countries where such work is usually determined by industrial prerog-
atives. Senior Indian scientists, for example, can afford to hire relatively
large numbers of PhD students to work on non-industrial problems once
the bureaucratic maze has been successfully negotiated. Such are the
privileges that are conferred by historical unevenness.

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 conclusion 155

Terminal speculations

India’s shifting global position in the latter decades of the Cold War, the
gradual decay of the non-aligned movement, the lasting contradictions
within ‘Nehruvian science’ and the institutional asymmetries within
that field, the world dominance of the military–financial–bureau-
cratic complex, the social life of scientific institutions – all of these
comprised the rich loam that supported the growth of Indian science
fiction after the Nehru years. The long afterlives of ‘Nehruvian science’
and non-alignment continued alongside new formations that sought
to decisively reject such ways of being. Science fiction registered such
conditions not only in its content, but also in debates about its formal
properties.
To take two examples, we can compare the reflections of the
Marathi scientist and writer J.  V.  Narlikar with those of Vandana Singh,
a particle physicist and an internationally successful contemporary
female Indian science fiction author. Looking back at his decision to
attempt to write science fiction in the 1970s, Narlikar remembers his
childhood experience of reading Verne, Wells and Conan Doyle as well
as his innocence about the kind of writing these authors practised: ‘As
a genre of stories which had a scientific appearance but which referred
to somewhat unusual and hitherto unseen aspects of science, I began
to develop a special interest for them. Later, I came to know that
these were science fiction stories’ (Narlikar 2015, 124). This telling gap
between the exposure to nineteenth-century European science fiction
and any taxonomic or genealogical awareness of these speaks, of course,
of the relative weakness of any mediating literary-critical infrastructure
(consisting, for example, of Marathi science fiction or fantasy magazines
through which Narlikar could have been introduced to such literary
genealogies). Unburdened by such knowledge, however, Narlikar arrived
at a definition of science fiction not unlike that proposed by many of
his European contemporaries. First, ‘it is a story or a novel in which
some scientific principle or scientific background plays a significant role’
(Narlikar 2015, 125). Second, introducing elements of fantasy, or horror
or western into science fiction makes it ‘bad’ – a thoroughly respectable
Suvinian sensibility: ‘I feel very uncomfortable when such liberties are
taken in the course of a science fiction story. Break this rule and then
you do not worry if the spaceship Enterprise travels great distances in the
galaxy within relatively short time spans. But I wish the author would
describe how his heroes (or villains!) managed to break Einstein’s law’
(Narlikar 2015, 137). Third, science fiction is a part of contemporary
science writing – perhaps the trickiest of the lot to do well since it has to

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156 FINAL FRONTIERS

strike a balance between ‘introducing science to the lay reader’ and not
becoming a sterile ‘pedagogic exercise’ (Narlikar 2015, 125–7). Finally,
the genre has the ‘ability to predict what will happen in science and
technology in the years to come’ (Narlikar 2015, 131). In his privileging
of science, both as the determining condition of fiction and as a
pedagogic ingredient necessary for the inculcation of a ‘scientific temper’
among citizen-readers, Narlikar appears to be a prototypical Nehruvian
intellectual. This impression is further strengthened in his account of
his institutional formation as a scientist and an author. Employed at one
of India’s premier ‘modern temples’ – the Tata Institute of Fundamental
Research (TIFR) – Narlikar felt that writing science fiction in Marathi
would make more sense, since ‘the genre was very rarely handled in
Marathi and in a local environment, so there was a chance that the
impact of a purely Marathi story would be more noticeable’ (Narlikar
2015, 128). His break came when Mukundrao Kirloskar, a leading editor,
agreed to publish his short story The Black Hole (‘Krishna Vivar’) in his
literary journal (Narlikar 2015, 130). This combination of a con-joined
commitments to a nationalist scientific project and to a regional literature
can be seen as the continuing and perhaps surprising strength of the
Nehruvian impulse.
Judged on these grounds, Vandana Singh appears to be strictly
post-Nehruvian. Born in Delhi, resident of Boston, employed at an
American university, and a bi-lingual writer who is best known for
her work in English, Singh is usually seen as one of the many faces
of post-liberalization India, which has long disavowed any relations
to the Third World. Her understanding of science fiction, outlined in
a short essay tellingly called ‘A Speculative Manifesto’, also appear
to be categorically different to Narlikar’s. She is not interested in
policing generic boundaries or a pedagogic project in order to create
scientific citizens: ‘The modern descendants of the Epic of Gilgamesh
and the Mahabharata are the genres of science fiction and fantasy,
including various sub-categories like magic realism, alternate history
and slipstream. They are all stories about what cannot ever be, or
cannot be as yet’ (Singh 2013, 200). This she sees as a corrective to
‘modern realist fiction’s’ anthropocentrism and its allegedly narrow
conception of reality itself: ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant. Reality
is such a complex beast that in order to begin to comprehend it we
need something larger than realist fiction. Enter speculative fiction’
(Singh 2013, 203). Yet, there are also palpable lines of connection
between her and Narlikar. Science fiction’s critically revelatory powers
are energetically professed by her even when the idea of a Third World
is more or less dismissed:

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 conclusion 157

The so-called Third World is undergoing vast and unpredictable

changes, and the world at large, for we have only one world, after all
– is beset by war and environmental catastrophe. Through engaging
our imaginations and making up ingenious thought experiments,
through asking ‘what-if’ questions and attempting to answer them,
speculative fiction allows us to question the path we are on today.
(Singh 2013, 202)

And as her references to the ancient epics show, Singh is in full agreement
with Narlikar regarding the relevance of ancient literature to the modern.
Narlikar cites the sanskrit classic Panchatantra as the narrative model
for his science fiction (Narlikar 2015, 127), while Singh has repeatedly
emphasized her debt to the oral story-telling practices in India that
transmit Ramayana and Mahabharata as well as everyday neighbourly
gossip (Singh n.d.). Such lines of continuity and discontinuity between
the Nehruvian impulse and its antinomies or even antitheses we should
take as a structuring principle of contemporary Indian science fiction.
We should also remember that the classic Nehruvian science fiction
writers we have looked at before continued to flourish in the decades
after Nehru. Mitra’s stories of the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s tested
out assumptions about the relationship between science, post-colonial
‘development’ and the worldly order of things through its allusive
structural linking of the local and the global. In Earth (‘Mati’, 1968),
the narrative trap set by the hostel residents for Ghana-da involves
the purchase of cheap land near the border with China in order to
start a dairy farm. For most contemporary Indian readers, this frame-
narrative would have immediately acquired additional depth because
of its darkly humorous reminder that if fertile land was indeed cheap
near the Chinese border, it was so largely because Nehru’s foreign
policy blunderings had led to the catastrophic border war with India’s
northern neighbour in 1962. This war had signalled the demise not only
of Nehru’s own credibility as a leader, but in some ways of the future
of non-alignment itself. Ghana-da, as ever, successfully negotiates this
trap by recalling another story regarding the rightful ownership of land
– one that involves understanding another iconic Third-World conflict as
a counterpoint to the grim reminder of India’s recent political failures.
This is the Biafran civil war that raged in Nigeria between 1967 and
1970, and claimed, aside from an estimated 100,000 military casualties,
between 500,000 and two million victims of mass starvation.
As Ghana-da tells it, this fratricidal tragedy was engineered by
ruthless European operatives such as the tin-mining tycoon Frank Kenny
whom he meets in Nigeria, and who seek to secure their profits by

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158 FINAL FRONTIERS

setting the various Nigerian tribes against each other over the question
of the legal ownership of land after the end of formal colonialism in
that country. Ghana-da falls foul of Kenny while trying to secure the
rights of an Igbo chief, Tarka, whose mineral-rich property lies in Fulani
territory, and which Kenny has been trying to usurp by inciting ethnic
and communal hatred. Narrowly escaping an assassination attempt,
Ghana-da’s superior technical knowledge of soil composition trumps
Kenny’s criminal venture, since he reveals that the alleged waste land
that the Englishman has ignored while pursuing the more obviously
rich portions of Tarka’s property contains Kerogen:

Forget about idiots like you, even expert brokers do not know of
the real value of this chemical compound. Soon, the whole world
will fight over the land where the shale rocks with it can be found.
We are close to running out of petroleum, no more than three
hundred billion barrels are left in reserve. Even the most elementary
surveys indicate that there are three times that amount in shale
rocks. Kerogen can be extracted from these rocks and smelted at
temperatures between eight hundred and fifty and nine hundred
centigrades, and purified with nitrogen and sulphur. This is not
difficult, but morons like you will not understand it. All you should
know is that if there is civil war in Nigeria, your registration paper
will be worthless. But after things calm down, Nigeria, if not Tarka,
will grow rich on Shale oil. (Mitra 2000 vol. 1, 452)

This passage, full of technical ’science writing’, proposes a fictional

resolution to the problem of post-colonial land conflicts that connects
India to Nigeria in the frame and the main-narratives respectively. In
the former, the problem of food production is allusively linked to the
fluctuations of the price of land due to the regional dynamics involving
China. In the latter, the tragedy of mass starvation is confronted with
a vision of a post-oil near-future, when agricultural problems will
be answered by solving an imminent energy crisis. Shale oil rights,
secured by Ghana-da, will ensure that the Biafran tragedy can never
be repeated in Nigeria. Of course, like the exasperated residents of 72
Banamali Naskar Lane, we can never be sure whether this springing of
the narrative trap should be taken merely as a tall-tale, or as a scattering
of utopian seeds among Ghana-da’s audience. Such indeterminacy is also
precisely the mark of the hopes and fears associated with ideas such as
non-alignment itself.
During these decades, Ray too continued his exploration of the limits
and possibilities of science as a mode of knowledge and of the perils

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 conclusion 159

of institutional scientism that had beset Nehru’s post-colonial project.

In The Wonderous Creature (‘Ashchorjo Prani’, 1971), Professor Shonku’s
collaboration with the German scientist Humboldt regarding the creation
of artificial life begins as a response to a hostile reception of their
project from the international scientific community. Their experiment
seems to be heading for a failure, until an inspired intervention by
Shonku succeeds in replicating in their laboratory the exact atmospheric
conditions necessary for the creation of life and the evolutionary process.
The microscopic creature in the flask seems at first to be evolving
according to the conventionally understood stages – progressing from
marine, to amphibian, and then to land-based mammalian and primate
life forms. At this point in the narrative, Humboldt calls in the press
and presents the experiment as a vindication of his individual scientific
genius: ‘It was clear that Humboldt was taking the entire credit for the
experiment himself [….] It does not matter. Scientists can often be small-
minded. They are human also, and suffer from envy and greed. There is
no need to waste time thinking or discussing this’ (Ray 2003, 210). But
this speck of troublesome humanity will not disappear from the attempts
to pursue purely objective science. After Shonku survives an assassi-
nation attempt, he elicits a confession from Humboldt’s servant Max
by playing on his superstitious credibility. Shonku can see the contents
of Max’s pocket, including the gun with which he has just attempted
this murder, because he is wearing his own invention – an x-ray glass.
But to Max, he pretends to possess supernatural ancient Indian powers
and the force of this decidedly unscientific story reveals Humboldt’s
murderous plans. It soon becomes obvious that such departures from
conventional scientific protocols are not confined to events outside the
laboratory. The creature in the flask had evolved, but not according
to any known laws of biological science: ‘He was old; he wore a coat;
he was nearly bald, but was bearded; he wore a pair of glasses, had a
prominent forehead; his eyes glistened with intelligence and he wore
a calm expression. I had seen him many times before – in the mirror.
He was a miniature version of Trilokeswar Shonku. The creature I
had created was myself’ (Ray 2003, 217). Thus are settled the claims
regarding the creature’s paternity and, along with it, the competing
credibility of the two scientists. But this also once again triggers the
murderous rage of Humboldt, and Shonku is only rescued from certain
death by further inexplicable transformations of his cloned self, who
has now become a futuristic figure with appropriate fire-power. After it
has neutralized Humboldt, the creature, in a scene lifted almost exactly
from the time-traveller’s narrative in Wells’s The Time Machine, enters
what appears to be the terminal stages of its own and his world’s life:

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160 FINAL FRONTIERS

A red glow filled the flask with the sadness of an evening after
sunset. The plastic floor had been replaced by sand, and it lay
a flat, squashed creature. On close inspection it seemed to be
breathing. Was this our creature? Would man evolve into this – a
mound of flesh without movement, without the ability to work or
think, staring at the end of the world with tired, enormous eyes?
[….] There was no need to do anything. With a low whistle, that
light, the sand, and the creature disappeared and the end of the
evolution left an empty flask with two stunned scientists in front
of it. (Ray 2003, 220)

Despite naming this trajectory as evolution, Shonku’s experiment

demands that we let go of our conventional scientific understanding of
the process, as well as that of laboratory work. The disappearance of
the miniature world he has created means, of course, that the hostile
scientific community that had rejected his theories of artificial life at the
beginning of the story will remain locked into their ‘closed’, dismissive
views on science at the end of the story, due to lack of evidence. But
proper science, for Ray, is exemplified by Shonku’s capacity to be
wonderstruck by the opening of hitherto unknown horizons generated
by scientific practices (such as laboratory experiments) themselves,
that allow them to transcend their own epistemological limits. In this
respect, Shonku the scientist is no less credulous than Max the butler,
who believes in tales about supernatural Indians. If the ‘closed’ scientific
community is one outcome of the bureaucratization of science pursued
by Nehru, the wondrous world of Shonku retains some of the sense of
the possibilities that also animated ‘Nehruvian science’.
Alongside the steady output of Mitra and Ray and the burgeoning
reputation of Marathi writers like Narlikar, the post-Nehru decades
saw the appearance of pioneering science fiction magazines such as
Ashchorjo! under the editorship of Adrish Bardhan. Offering a mixture
of translated and original stories, as well as radio plays and cartoons,
Ashchorjo! was perhaps distinguished above all by its commitment to
representing the multimedial essence of the genre and, in particular,
the importance of the interplay between cinema and fiction. Its
February 1966 number, for instance, featured Satyajit Ray on its cover
and announced the establishment of ‘the first science fiction cine
club in India and the world’ (Adrish Bardhan 1966, n.p.). A series
of commemorative photographs show Ray arriving at the inaugural
ceremony, accompanied by Mitra and Bardhan (see Figure 3) and the
issue also carried an excerpt from Ray’s speech in which he confessed
to being a science fiction fan for three decades and called for the ‘best

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 conclusion 161

Figure 3: ‘From text to cinema’, Ashchorjo! February 1966, pp. 2–3.

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162 FINAL FRONTIERS

Figure 4: ‘Resident aliens’, Ashchorjo! January 1965, p. 3.

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 conclusion 163

science-fiction films of the world’ to be made available to club members

(Adrish Bardhan 1966, n.p.). The screening of such films, however,
was not without its problems. A letter by Debapriya Guha, cine club
member number 1201, published in the 1967 July–August number of
the magazine, complained of a ‘truly shameful’ incident on 14 May
(Adrish Bardhan 1967, n.p.). Guha blames this on infiltration by ‘some
fakes [….] who were entirely ignorant of SF’, and suggests that the
club hold a symposium in order to increase the appreciation of the
genre among members. The patrolling of generic boundaries here was
mounted on moral and ethical grounds: ‘They are disorderly because
they are not SF fans, because whatever else SF teaches, it does not teach
disorder’ (Adrish Bardhan 1967, n.p.). In such equivalences between
literary-cultural and moral-ethical order it is easy to hear the echoes
of Nehruvian calls to build the nation’s scientific temper.
But Bardhan and Ashchorjo!, like Ray and Mitra, were equally keen
to distance themselves from ‘state science’ and other official attempts to
engineer the soul of the nation. The January 1965 number of Ashchorjo!
hinted at this by opening with a full-page cartoon of two scientists
surrounded by frogs wielding cameras, notebooks, guns and other
stereotypical accoutrements of colonial anthropological expeditions. One
of the baffled scientists can be seen urging his colleague not to create
a fuss in the hope that they can learn proper scientific methods from
the frogs later on (see Figure 4).
Such reversals of officious anthropocentric scientism continue in the
magazine in stories such as The Constellation (‘Nakshatra’) by Bardhan
himself. The story features an anguished and deeply devout scientist who
is part of a crew returning to earth after an expedition to a constellation
called Phoenix. Phoenix contains a supernova, and their mission had
been to gather data of the event. But, while doing so, they had stumbled
upon a remote, dead, planet that is the source of the scientist’s sorrow.
His faith thus far had been strengthened by the observation of the laws of
the physical universe that seem to offer in the regular entropic spectacle
a universal tale of birth, death and resurrection (Bardhan 1965, 156).
But on this planet is a vault containing the recordings of a vanished
civilization that had tried to preserve its final moments for posterity. The
pathos of these recordings by humanoid aliens is powerful enough. But
what is shattering to the scientist is when they were made:

Before we reached the constellation, we could not exactly date the

supernova. But now we have direct astronomical evidence as well as
the data preserved by the dead civilisation. I can calculate exactly
when the light of this explosion reached earth. I know it had lit

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164 FINAL FRONTIERS

up the eastern sky before sunrise, brighter even than the morning
star. There can be no reasonable doubt. But Lord, could you not
have used another constellation? Did you really need to condemn
an entire living world to death so that the star of Bethlehem could
be seen on earth? (Bardhan 1965, 151)

On the one hand, this revelation may be read as further confirmation

of the laws of the universe – that the birth of an entity can only come
about at the death of another, and thus is maintained the total sum
and balance of universal energy. But, on the other, it destroys the basis
of anthropocentric beliefs characteristic of both religion and science –
that the privileged place of humanity in the order on things is due to
its capacity for regeneration and resurrection after every catastrophe.
Bardhan’s tale is a warning against the conversion of science into belief.
‘Nehruvian science’ did not necessarily require a religious commitment
(although it never discounted its importance) but asked above all for the
investment of an equivalent faith in the state-building project. Such a
faith is bound to be shattered by the many historical events that act like
the supernova in the story, and which illuminate the false patterns of
deliverance and resurrection, be they of the individual, the species or
the nation. Such a critical spirit remained a part of Ashchorjo!’s character
even after Adrish Bardhan resigned from his editorial duties and it
changed from a science fiction magazine to one devoted to experimental
writing. Announcing this new departure, the new editor Asim Bardhan
signalled that the turn had been conceived of explicitly as a challenge
to official credos, particularly the one prevalent in Calcutta at the time:

We start the glorious seventh year with another brave adventure

– we open the door not only to scientific literature, but all kinds
of experimental writing – prose, poetry, essays, drama. Whether
it be new short stories, poetry or essays that no other editor will
dare run in the fear of being branded ‘anti-revolutionary’, Ashchorjo!
will gladly consider. We aim to open the gates that confine original
thought with our adventure. (Asim Bardhan 1969, n.p.)

This non-conformist attitude regarding statist approaches to science in

particular and culture in general can be taken as a major feature of
Indian science fiction, but particularly so from the 1970s onward.
It is unsurprising then to find J. V. Narlikar’s best known novel,
The Return of Vaman (1986), is also crafted around this critique of ‘state
science’. Here, questions of artificial intelligence, pre-historic civilizations
and asymmetries in contemporary international relations, are all raised

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 conclusion 165

through the portrayal of the pitfalls, contradictions and struggles that

marked the Nehruvian project. The discovery of a strange artefact
during excavations in southern India brings together a group of scientists
working under the direction of senior government officials and the strict
supervision of an intelligence officer. The latter’s presence is required
since one of the scientists, an archaeologist, is suspected of being in
the pay of a malign foreign agent who runs a flourishing trade in
smuggling ancient Indian art. Much of the narration, focalized through
another archaeologist Arul, is concerned with the bureaucratic structures
and institutional dynamics of Indian science. In this, it is perhaps a
predecessor of Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘science in the capital’ trilogy,
which navigates similar issues regarding the politics of federal science
in the US. Some of what Arul and others think about ‘state science’ is
utterly predictable – the bureaucratic incompetence, the slowness and
the wasteful processes involved, the rigid hierarchies and the paranoid
oversight that stifles any original research. A secretary of state confesses
that he cannot go to the canteen for lunch because that would cause
outrage in the entire department: ‘so I tell the PA. It would be below
his dignity to go there now. So he will tell a peon … and so it goes
on’ (Narlikar 2015, 44–5). When Arul realizes that all their work was
being supervised by the powerful intelligence agent Major Samanth, he
asks whether they lived in a police state and receives the sinister reply:

‘We have to do these things for national security. These files

remain inactive until we feel that something in a particular file is a
potential threat to the nation. I may assure you – although strictly
speaking I shouldn’t – that the files on both of you are clear and
hence inactive.’ He would have said the same even if the situation
were otherwise, thought Laxman. (Narlikar 2015, 52)

And any report on the artefact are subject to random restraining orders,
due clearance from committees and ‘proper process’.
Yet, the scientists also realize the blessings of such archaic structures
of governance. Potential logistical problems such as the availability of
powerful computers can be solved by official fiats. The appointment of
experts such as Raj Nath, the molecular biologist, can inject a ‘fresh and
liberal outlook’ into administration. And even the sinister Major Samanth
turns out to be indispensable for the protection of the scientists and their
research from grasping foreign agents. For what is at stake here is nothing
less than the key Nehruvian idea of India’s ancient scientific lineage. Not
only is the artefact’s mysterious language decoded by Indian scientists, it
reveals the story of a global civilization based in India that had flourished

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166 FINAL FRONTIERS

in antiquity and had succeeded in creating artificial intelligence. The

inscriptions contain instructions of building a photonic supercomputer
and an’ intelligent’ robot. It also warns of undertaking such activities
by narrating the end of this civilization in the hand of such machines –
about as venerable a generic cliche that there is. This antique technology
elicits from the scientists the bulk of the novel’s ‘science writing’, ranging
from accounts of von Neumann’s thesis on computational logic to the
properties of atmospheric pressure as demonstrated by the Magdeburg
hemispheres. Armed with such distinctively Enlightenment knowledge,
the scientists build the robot, who they call Vaman after a character
from ancient Indian epics, and make considerable progress towards
making the supercomputer. Of course, such scientific breakthroughs are
always already political, and the project is threatened by a mercurial
Japanese entrepreneur who engages a freelance European spy to steal
Vaman. But such threats to India’s potential scientific supremacy are
not just external, they arise from the technology itself. Vaman cannot
understand by the logic of national prerogatives and borders. It chides
the scientists for attempting to monopolize him: ‘But what is wrong with
more Gurus and more Vamans? Can’t you humans employ them more
fruitfully to your benefit?’ (Narlikar 2015, 97). It cannot abide secrecy:
‘This situation, Laxman, has been brought about by your own decision
to keep everything here a secret. Knowledge should not be so committed
to a small minority’ (Narlikar 2015, 100). When it decides to follow this
cosmopolitan, not to say ‘Nehruvian’ logic, to its conclusion by voluntarily
leaving with the European spy, Arul and Laxman activate the bomb that
they have planted on it in the form of a ring. Along with its capacity
to acquire human intelligence, Vaman has also acquired human flaws
such as vanity – it had accepted the ring as a token of congratulation
from its creators.
Vaman’s destruction also reveals the currents of misogyny and
patriarchy that operate as formative conditions of science in India. There
are no women scientists or government officials in the story, but no
research work can be possible without the domestic labour expended
by women – most notably by Laxman’s wife Urmila. Attempting to
live up to the impossible and inhuman standards of the ideal ‘Hindu
wife’, she accompanies her husband to his secret laboratory lugging
the bulk of the enormous stone grinder required to make Laxman’s
favourite dish. She secretly complains about her lot to her friend about
being a virtual prisoner there, surrounded by ‘barbed wire, high walls
and armed guards’ as well as by the imperatives of commands such as
‘Classified! Secret! Security!’ (Narlikar 2015, 50). Occasionally, when
asked to provide her husband and her friends with repast, she dares

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 conclusion 167

to jest: ‘I am like your computer, sir – I can execute orders only after
you have given them’ (Narlikar 2015, 87). Such moments explicitly
signal an alliance between her and Vaman. Both of them are, in effect,
intelligent machines under the command of powerful men. This alliance
is acknowledged in Vaman’s strange insistence on calling Urmila its
sister. Seen in this light, Vaman’s unsuccessful bid for freedom from the
straitjacket of the logic of the nationalist ‘state science’ also activates
Urmila’s own hesitant acknowledgment of her condition within gender
relations. Vaman’s fate, a violent end in the hands of its masters, is
also a warning to women like Urmila who may be tempted to make a
similar bid for freedom. ‘State science’ remains an instrument of the
power for (some) husbands and fathers.
Such exposures of patriarchy and gender relations embedded in
the practices of Indian science, the social life of the nation, as well as
international relations, has become increasingly common in contem-
porary science fiction. At a theoretical level, as we have seen in Vandana
Singh’s manifesto, this is often signalled by a preference for ‘speculative’
writing that can cast a slanting, critical light on science fiction itself.
And since we have spoken of Singh before, let us close our discussion at
last by looking at one or two of her stories collected in the much-lauded
volume The Woman who Thought She was a Planet and Other Stories (2013).
Unlike Narlikar or Ray, Singh is not interested in any direct depictions
of Indian scientific institutions. Her concern is to show how when left
unquestioned and therefore ‘closed’, scientific rationality inevitably
morphs into a powerfully oppressive belief system that spans the entire
range of social life – from intimate moments between individuals to
large administrative systems as well as everything that comprises the
world of business in the late-capitalist world. In Hunger, Singh takes up
the commonsensical belief in modern hygiene to unspool the thread of
class- and gender-inequalities that it can sustain. Divya is married to a
successful corporate manager, Vikas, and we catch her on a busy morning
preparing for her daughter Charu’s birthday party, where many of the
rich and the famous will be in attendance. But things begin ominously,
when she opens the door to fetch the newspaper and detects the soiled
presence of a neighbour:

As she straightened she smelled it – a stench rolling down from

the top of the stairs. The pungent, sharp, stale odour of urine [….]
‘Why don’t you let the old man use the bathroom in the night?’
Divya said angrily. ‘The poor fellow is your father-in-law, treat him
with some respect! And listen, make sure the stairs stay clean all
day. We have people coming over’. (Singh 2013, 3–4)

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168 FINAL FRONTIERS

Divya’s outrage is buttressed by her class privilege. The woman she is

scolding for neglecting the well-being of the old man is her domestic
servant, one of the army of poor women who are increasingly compelled
to live in the quarters built alongside their employer’s glitzy apartments
because they cannot afford to live within commutable distances in Indian
cities. The social gulf between them often make the old man appear to
Divya as ‘an alien, speaking to her in an exotic tongue or code, delivering
a message that she had tried to decipher’ (Singh 2013, 4). What he has
been trying to tell her, it turns out, is that he starving – a message
that is in fact understood by Charu, who is predictably scolded by her
mother for keeping such inadmissible company.
Divya herself, however, has not been completely colonized by the
logic of social purification and exclusion. She is troubled by a recurring
dreams of an episode from her childhood when her uncle used liberal
doses of rat poison to rid his house of the pests, and Divya had smelt
the decaying bodies of a brood of baby mice in her room. What had
struck her was that the creatures had not been poisoned but had starved
to death after their parents had been killed, while she herself was
busy enjoying her holiday treats. This equation between human and
non-human lives is clinched in the story when the old man is found
dead by the children while the party is in full swing, clutching a bottle
of pesticide that had been given to him at his request by Charu: ‘He
said the rats were running all over him at night [….] the rats were
really big and he was afraid of being bitten’ (Singh 2013, 15). The dead
body is obviously a scandal. It is a breach of class and caste codes that
Divya is expected to live by, as she is reminded by one of her guests:
‘How can you tolerate having riff-raff living in your building? The Man
could be dangerous! Or have a disease! Like AIDS!’ (Singh 2013, 13).
But the body also reminds Divya that the old man may have used the
ruse of infestation to procure the poison that would release him from
the more prolonged pain of starvation. The story ends by outlining the
legacy of Divya’s insight: ‘When she looked upon the faces of strangers
they appeared to her like aliens, like open mouths of birds, crying their
need. But most clearly she could sense those who were hungry, whether
they were schoolchildren who had forgotten their lunch or beggars under
the bridge [….] or the emaciated girly sweeping the dusty street in front
of the municipal building’ (Singh 2013, 17).
Unlike, let us say, Spielberg’s extra-terrestrial, kinship in Singh is
activated not by shared experience, but radical difference. On the one
side is the promise of a post-colonial modernity built on ideas about
cleanliness, hygiene and social purification. On the other is the dark
underbelly of this promise – the classification of humans and non-humans

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 conclusion 169

as expendable vermin and the entrenchment of scarcity and hunger. The

liberal use of pesticides is a mark of the ‘green revolution’ overseen by
successive Indian governments after Nehru. The consequences of this can
now be seen in the ecological devastation of large swathes of rural India
and the mass farmer’s suicides that have become a routine feature of
India’s annual mortality statistics. Singh does not directly refer to such
tragedies. But by examining one common sense scientific assumption of
modern Indian life – the chemical warfare against dirt and pests – she
unspools the murderous inequalities facilitated by it.
The title story of Singh’s volume contains a much more explicit
portrayal of the gendered violence sparked by such dissident examinations
of social norms in India today. But like Divya’s adoption of an alien
perspective, or the kinship between Vaman and Urmila in Narlikar’s
novel, here too we see a utopic impulse at play. The life of Ramnath, a
former bureaucrat basking in comfortable and respectable retirement, is
turned upside down when his hitherto submissive wife Kamala declares
that she is a planet and starts showing a preference for public nudity
because ‘a planet needs a sun’ (Singh 2013, 50). After failing to reason
with her, or extracting a diagnosis of mental illness from their doctor,
Ramnath resorts to physical violence – ‘He wrestled her into the bedroom
and tried to slap some sense into her’ – and cunning – ‘even planets
have atmospheres. See here, this grey sari, it looks like a swirl of clouds.
How about it?’ (Singh 2013, 50). Slowly, however, Ramnath realizes
that it is the dark pleasures of the violence itself that attracts him most:

Every night it became a ritual for him to look at her and imagine
the different ways he could commit murder. He had been shocked
at himself at first – him, a fine, upstanding ex-bureaucrat contem-
plating something as hideous as the murder of the mother of his
sons – but there was no denying that the thought, the fantasy, he
told himself, gave him pleasure. A secret, shameful sort of pleasure,
like sex before marriage, but pleasure nonetheless. (Singh 2013, 45)

What is a shock to Ramnath is of course the stuff of daily life for not
only millions of Indian women but of the majority of citizens whose most
banal actions are determined by bureaucratic as well as intimate forms of
violence. But here it is Ramnath’s everyday conception of reality that is
rent by Kamala’s secession from it. He wakes up at night tormented by
ant-like creatures that leave him full of tiny punctured wounds. Kamala
says that the creatures have colonized her and are her inhabitants, and
the ‘younger ones have been clamouring for a new world’ (Singh 2013,
50). The journey to this new world begins in a spectacular manner for

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170 FINAL FRONTIERS

Kamala, and destroys the remnants of Ramnath’s patriarchal respect-

ability. Out for a walk in the park, Kamala begins to levitate, attached
to a bunch of balloons she has just bought:

The children were yelling and pointing and jumping with glee. She
was well up now, higher than the trees and the houses. The balloons
scattered above her like a flotilla of tiny escort ships. People were
running out of their houses now, pointing and staring. Something
white and ghostly came slipping down from the sky – her petticoat!
Her blouse and undergarments were next. (Singh 2013, 52–3)

Kamala’s elevation to planetary status is a scientific (im-)possibility.

Some planetary laws such as heliocentricity and creation of life seem
to apply to her. Others are obviously discarded, such as gravitation and
human biology. But the one law that is overcome most powerfully is the
iron law of domesticity, which buttresses the privileges of a bureaucrat
like Ramnath and guarantees the kinds of violence that secure such
privileges. In the final moments Kamala is ‘out of sight now … out among
the stars’, and the sense of her possibilities fill Ramnath with a desperate
melancholy – a new disposition born out of the realization that what
he had thought as a full life of a post-colonial bureaucrat had turned
on the forcible emptying of the lives of others. And such appropriations
had now given birth to a new science of being – the journey of the
dispossessed to the final frontier that had once been promised to them
by their leader, now long dead, at the midnight birth of their nation.

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 Index
Index

Page numbers in bold refer to figures.

Abraham, I. 151 artificial intelligence 62–3, 71–2,

Adorno, T. 40 102–3, 126–9, 166
Africa 6–7 artificial life 159–60
African science fiction 26 Ashchorjo! 34, 160, 161, 162,
Afro-futurism 7–8 163–4
agriculture 148 Asimov, I. 121–2
aid 146 Astounding Science Fiction 121–2
Alessio, D. 5, 7 Atomic Energy Bill, 1948 23
aliens 142–3, 163–4 Atomic Energy Commission 22–3,
allegorical dimension 51 41
alternate history 156 Attebery, B. 8
ancient literature, relevance of  Australia 8
157
Anderson, P. 123 Baghdad pact, the 77
Anderson, R. 18, 21, 44, 45, 46–8, Bajpai, K. 82
48, 62, 80, 119 balance of power logic 90
Anderson, W. 14 Baldev Singh, S. 74, 76
animal-testing 101 Ballard, J. G. 123
anthropocene, the 138 Bandung conference 23–4, 52–3
anthropocentric Banerjee, S. 7
exceptionalism 134 Bardhan, A. 4, 33, 34–5, 160,
anthropocentric species-boundary, 163–4
the 102–3 Barter, C. 86
anthropocentrism 156, 164 Batra, D. 1
anti-Semitism 88–90 Battle of Dorking (Chesney) 84–5
anti-technological habitus 65 Baudrillard, J.  123
Aoteaora/New Zealand 5, 7 Bell, A. 25
archaeology 67n9 Bengal Chemical and
Argentina 26–7 Pharmaceuticals Works 43–4
arms race 80, 88 Bengali-language readers 27
Arnold, D. 17–18, 41 Berger, A. L. 86, 121–2, 125
183

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184 FINAL FRONTIERS

Bhabha, H. 24, 44, 81 civilizational markers 135

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 1 civilizational monopoly,
Bhatnagar, S. 44, 79, 118–19 euro-centric claims of 134–5
Biafran civil war 157–8 Clarke, I. F. 84–5
Bicycle Thieves (film) 32 class-inequalities 167–9
biological weapons 39–41, 51, climate-change 112, 138–9
88–90, 98–102 Club of Rome 107, 131
Blackett, P. 79–80, 81 Cold War 4, 5, 14, 22, 34, 38,
Bodas, A. J. 1–2, 3 56–7, 59, 73, 74, 80, 121, 123
Boehmer, E. 8 colonial adventure tales 54
Bollywood films 7 colonial ideologies, reinforcing 57
Bombay, Tata Institute 48 colonialism 5, 9, 16, 43, 48, 50,
Bommakanti, K. 81 72
Bose, J. C. 43, 151, 153 Conrad, J., Typhoon 114
Bose, R. 44 conscience-stricken scientist
Bould, M. 5n2, 7 trope 96
Boyer, D. 108, 108–9, 110 Constellation, The (‘Nakshatra’)
Boyle, R. 48 (Bardhan) 163–4
Brussels congress, 1923 23 cosmopolitanism 66–7, 97
Buddha 2 Council for Scientific and
Byomjatrir Diary (Ray) 49, 61–4, Industrial Research 41
73, 97, 105–7, 126–7 critical imagination 37
critical irrealism 26
Calcutta 18, 46–8 Csicsery-Ronay, I. 9
Calcutta Chromosome (Ghosh) 7, 50 cultural capital 30
Campbell, J. W. 85, 121, 125 cultural codes 115
capitalism 9, 12, 48, 72, 83, 109, cultural forms 12
141 cultural inequality 149
Carstens, D. 6–7 cultural prestige 123
Caygill, H. 106, 111 culture war 2
Chacko, P. 152 cyborgs 87, 129–30
Chakrabarti, P. 44
Chambers, C. 7 Daant (‘Teeth’) (Mitra) 95–6, 97
Chattopadhyay, B. 7, 34 Deckard, S. 113
Chattopadhyaya, S. 33 decolonization 16, 53
cheap energy, end of 105 defence industry 77
cheap nature 94 Defence Science Organization 81
Chesney, G., Battle of Dorking 84–5 defence scientists 79–80
Chhori (‘Cane’) (Mitra) 141–2 Deloughrey, E. 93
China 25, 38–41, 81, 157 dependency regime 146
Chinese science fiction 25 Desai, R. C. 150
Chuunch (‘Needle’) (Mitra) 59–60, Deshmukh, C. D. 22–3
107–8, 136, 143 detente 82
civilizational development 117, development 14, 118
121–2 developmental concerns 59–60
civilizational index 134 developmental indices 144

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 index 185

developmentality 59n5, 60 Euro-American global power 16

Dhil (‘Rock’) (Mitra) 138–9 evolutionary energy 131–2
Duffy, E. 114–5
Ferreira, Rachel Heywood 6, 25,
Earth (‘Mati’) (Mitra) 157–8 25–6
ecological devastation 169 First World War 85
Edison, Thomas 84 food and food security 59–60,
Egypt 66–8 107–8, 136, 142–3
electricity 113, 114–15 Franklin, H. B. 73, 83–4
energy Freiman, G. 89n3
biological 107–8 future wars 83–7, 87, 88, 89, 90,
civilizational claims 134 100
civilizational markers 135
consumption 119 Galaxy 87
and cultural prestige 123 Gale, G. E. 79
developmental capacity 133–4 Galton, F. 114
disparities 118, 119–20 Gandhi, Indira, defence of
end of cheap 105 non-alignment 146–8
and food security 107–8 Ganeri, J. 17
fossil-fuelled subjectivity 108–9 Ganguly, K. 32
in Indian science fiction  gender relations 166–7
126–44 genocide 100
literary-cultural Gernsbeck, Hugo 5–6
representations 112–16 Ghanada Samagra (Mitra) 75
and modernity 108–10 Ghori (‘Watch’) (Mitra) 92–3, 140
narrative 108 Ghosh, A. 110
Nehru’s understanding of 142 Calcutta Chromosome 7, 50
overlapping regimes 142–3 ghosts 132–3
pervasiveness of 144 Gibson, W. 127
physical 111 Ginway, E. 6
physiological 111 globalization 8–9, 148
policy 117–21 Gold, B. J. 112–13
preoccupation with 108 Goopy Gayen, Bagha Bayen (Ray) 32
Ray’s reflections on 105–7 Gordon, J. 6
scales of circulation 140 green revolution 148, 169
in science fiction 121–6 Gresseger, W. 85
underdevelopment 119 Guha, D. 163
understanding of 108–16
energy crises 148 Haraway, D. 130
energy depletion 117 Harding, S. 14–15
energy humanities 108–10, 117 Heinlein, R.
energy problem, the 111 ‘Solution Unsatisfactory’ 122
energy programme 45 Starship Troopers 100
entrepreneurship, and Helmholtz, H. von 111
science 43–5 Henderson, P. D. 120
Escobar, A. 15, 21 Hewitt, E. 125

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186 FINAL FRONTIERS

Hill, J. 114 kinship 168–9

Hindi fiction 4 Kinyon, K. 62–3
Hindu supremacists 16 knowledge
Hnaash (‘Duck’) (Mitra) 93–5, 96, ancient practices of 66–9
140 modes of 17
hoarding 115 knowledge creation 45–7, 50
Hunger (Singh) 167–9 Kothari, D. S. 78–9

illiteracy 152 laboratory, the 49, 152

Imperial Japanese Army, Unit allegorical dimension 51
731 39–41 colonial inheritance 41
imperialism 5, 9, 72 importance of 37–8
India Today 1 knowledge creation 45–7
Indian Association for the Mitra’s use of 37–41, 50–61, 72
Cultivation of Sciences 42 open-air 54–6, 58, 61
Indian Council for Historical and professional rivalry 69–72
Research 1 qualities 38
Indian Council for World Ray’s use of 60–72
Affairs 76–7 role 41–8, 48, 50–72
Indian Defence Science social functions 38
Organization 77–8 as socialized space 43
Indian Institute of Science, structural principles 60
Bangalore 154 as temples of science 41
Indian National Congress 20, 74, test subjects 48, 50–72
145, 148 laboratory state, the 44, 48, 50
Indian National Council of Applied language 3–4
Economic Research 133 Latin America 6, 25, 25–6
Indian Science Congress, 2015 1–2 Latour, B. 45–7, 54
Indian science fiction 27–35, 150 Lattu (‘Top’) (Mitra) 142–3
energy in 126–44 LeGuin, U. 11, 112
features of 6 Liang Qi Chao 25
super-weapons in 87–103 licensing system 45
industrialization 20–1 limits to growth 107, 131
institution-building 18 literariness 27
Invisible Ray, The (film) 85 literary world system 28–9
Iraq 136 literary-cultural representations,
energy relations 112–16
Jameson, F. 11, 53 lost manuscript trope 61–2
Japanese science fiction 25 Lowy, M. 26
Josyar, G. R. 2 Lu Xun 25
Joyce, J., Ulysses 114–15 Lucian 64

Kaanch (‘Glass’) (Mitra) 90–2, 140 Maach (‘Fish’) (Mitra) 54–6

Kallol 33 Macdonald, G. 113
Kapila, S. 151 Macduffie, A. 111–12
Kashmir 74 machine-learning 126–9

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 index 187

magazines 27, 160, 161, 162, and nuclear energy 136,

163–4 142–4
magic 26, 64–9 and nuclear weapons 90–4
magic realism 156 Phuto (‘Hole’) 56–7
magnetic resonance poetry 34
imaging 153–4 Pokaa (‘Insect’) 88–90
Mahabharata 1, 157 and resource extraction 136–42
Malthus, R. 111 Shishi (‘Bottle’) 57–9, 96–8
manpower 107, 108, 117–18, super-weapons in 87, 88–98
119–20, 131, 144 Tel (‘Oil’) 136, 137–8
Marty, A. 7 Tupi (‘Hat’) 143–4
Mehta, A. 145–6 use of the laboratory 50–61, 72
Mer, R. 6–7 and war 88
militarization 21–4, 79, 83, 97 Mitra, R. L. 18
logic of 15–16 modernism 32
science 73–83, 100 modernity 4, 15, 168–9
military apparatus 74 and energy 108–9
military challenges 74 non-Eurocentric 136
military-industrial complex  74, modernization 4, 15, 20, 26, 60–1,
76–7 120
Milner, A. 27, 28, 29 Modi, Narendra 1
misogyny 166–7 monstrous machine trope 72
Misra, K. P. 147 Mookerjee, A. 42–3
Mitra, P. 4, 13, 29, 160, 161 Moore, J. 94, 105, 109
allegorical dimension 51 Moore’s Law 102–3
background 33–4 moral conflicts 85–6, 100
Chhori (‘Cane’) 141–2 morally compromised scientist
Chuunch (‘Needle’) 59–60, trope 96–8
107–8, 136, 143 More, T. 11
Daant (‘Teeth’) 95–6, 97 Moretti, F. 12, 28, 28–9
Dhil (‘Rock’) 138–9 Mosha (‘Mosquito’) (Mitra) 37,
Earth (‘Mati’) 157–8 38–41, 50–4, 73, 73–4
and food security 107–8 mountaineering 143n3
Ghanada Samagra  75 Mukherjee, A. 18
Ghana-da stories 34, 37–41, Mukunda, H. S. 1–2, 3
50–61, 73, 73–4, 88–98,
107–8, 114, 136–44, 144, Napoleonic wars 84
146, 157–8 Narlikar, J. V. 35, 155–6, 157
Ghori (‘Watch’) 92–3, 140 The Return of Vaman 164–7
Hnaash (‘Duck’) 93–5, 96, 140 narrative energy 108
Kaanch (‘Glass’) 90–2, 140 national authenticity  151
later fiction 157–8 National Council for Applied
Lattu (‘Top’) 142–3 Economic Research 118
Maach (‘Fish’) 54–6 National Council for Economic
Mosha (‘Mosquito’) 37, 38–41, Research 119–20
50–4, 73, 73–4 national defence strategy 76

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188 FINAL FRONTIERS

nationalism 17, 43 nuclear weapons 15–16, 21–4,

nationalist ideologies 67n9 80–1, 82, 83–4, 85–6, 90–4,
nationalist science 42–3 121–3, 138, 152
nation-building 45, 80, 151
Nazis and Nazism 90–2 Oceanic science fiction 26
Nehru, Jawaharlal oil 113
and business leaders 45 oil crises 105
commitment to oil deficit 119
non-alignment 76 Oppenheimer, RR. 85
energy policy 108, 117–21, other spaces, social functions 38
133–4
foreign policy 82 Pachauri, R. K. 120
on modernization 20 Pakistan, US military aid 77
non-aligned policy 4, 80 panch sheel 76
non-aligned strategy 108 Partial Test Ban Treaty, 1963 
non-aligned vision 52–3, 72 152
nuclear policy 21–4 partition refugees 74
and power 117–19 patriarchy 166–7, 170
on religion 19 peace, pursuit of 74
on science 18–19 petro-magic-realism 113
science policy 3–4, 17–24, 41–3, Phuto (‘Hole’) (Mitra) 56
151–2 Piercy, M. 11
on scientific tradition 2 Pokaa (‘Insect’) (Mitra) 88–90
understanding of energy  political economy 111
142 population growth 59–60, 107
weapons policy 74, 76 Porush, D. 124–5
neo-colonial vandalism  67 post-apocalyptic imageries 112
New Zealand 5, 7 postcolonial perspective 14–15
Nigeria 157–8 post-colonial science studies 14
Nigerian fiction 113 post-colonial studies 8
non-aligned Indian science post-colonial turn 5–8, 14–17
fiction 24–5 post-truth 72
Non-aligned movement 52–3, 72, Pournelle, J. 86
76 power, and science 40
non-aligned science 14–24, 35 Prashad, V. 148
non-alignment 59, 88, 93, 144 Prigogine, I. 123–5, 126, 127,
decline of 145–50 129
Non-Proliferation Treaty 82 private enterprise 44–5
novum 3 Professor Shonku O Ashcharya Putul
nuclear age, the 140 (‘Professor Shonku and the
nuclear energy 108, 136, 142–4, Curious Statuettes’) (Ray) 70–1,
144 130–1
nuclear power 21–4, 117, 118, 120, Professor Shonku O Baghdader Baksa
121–2, 140 (‘Professor Shonku and the Box
nuclear programme 45, 80–1 from Baghdad’) (Ray) 66, 68–9,
nuclear testing 92–3 135–6

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 index 189

Professor Shonku O Bhoot (‘Professor Ray, S. 4, 13, 29, 160, 161
Shonku and the Spook’) Apu trilogy 32
(Ray) 132–3 artistic work 32
Professor Shonku O Chee-Ching background 30–2
(‘Professor Shonku and Byomjatrir Diary  49, 61–4, 73,
Chee-Ching’) (Ray) 65–6 97, 105–7, 126–7
Professor Shonku O Cochabambar cinema 32
Guha (‘Professor Shonku and Goopy Gayen, Bagha Bayen 32
the Caves of Cochabamba’) human machines 129–30
(Ray) 134–5 influences 31–2
Professor Shonku O Egyptio Atonko later fiction 158–60
(‘Professor Shonku and the lost manuscript trope 61–2
Egyptian Terror’) (Ray)  Professor Shonku O Ashcharya
66–8 Putul (‘Professor Shonku and
Professor Shonku O Golok Rahasya the Curious Statuettes’) 
(‘Professor Shonku and 70–1
the Mysterious Sphere’) Professor Shonku O Baghdader
(Ray) 98–100 Baksa (‘Professor Shonku and
Professor Shonku O Gorilla the Box from Baghdad’) 66,
(‘Professor Shonku and the 68–9, 135–6
Gorilla’) (Ray) 100–2, 131–2 Professor Shonku O Bhoot
Professor Shonku O Harh (‘Professor (‘Professor Shonku and the
Shonku and the Bones) Spook’) 132–3
(Ray) 64–5, 97–8 Professor Shonku O Chee-Ching
Professor Shonku O Khoka (‘Professor Shonku and
(‘Professor Shonku and the Chee-Ching’) 65–6
Little Boy’) (Ray) 129–30 Professor Shonku O Cochabambar
Professor Shonku O Macaw Guha (‘Professor Shonku
(‘Professor Shonku and the and the Caves of
Macaw’), (Ray) 69–70 Cochabamba’) 134–5
Professor Shonku O Robu (‘Professor Professor Shonku O Egyptio Atonko
Shonku and Robu’) (Ray) 70, (‘Professor Shonku and the
71–2, 102–3, 128 Egyptian Terror’) 66–8
Project 75 86 Professor Shonku O Golok Rahasya
(‘Professor Shonku and the
race and racism 7–8, 52–3, 90, Mysterious Sphere’) 
90–2, 100 98–100
racialized figures 39, 52 Professor Shonku O Gorilla
Raichoudhuri, A. 152–3, 154 (‘Professor Shonku and the
Raj, K. 48, 54 Gorilla’) 100–2, 131–2
Ramamurthy, K. 147 Professor Shonku O Harh
Ramayana 1, 157 (‘Professor Shonku and the
Rangmashal 33 Bones) 64–5, 97–8
rationality 19 Professor Shonku O Khoka
Ray, A. 82 (‘Professor Shonku and the
Ray, P. C. 43, 43–4 Little Boy’) 129–30

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190 FINAL FRONTIERS

Professor Shonku O Macaw contradictions and ambivalences

(‘Professor Shonku and the of 151–2
Macaw’) 69–70 criminal use of 39–41
Professor Shonku O Robu criticisms 26
(‘Professor Shonku and and entrepreneurship 43–5
Robu’) 70, 71–2, 102–3, 128, gender relations 166–7
130–1 geo-politicized 58–9
Professor Shonku stories 31, Hindu domination 44
60–72, 73, 88, 98–103, 105–7, importance of 42
126–37, 144, 159–60 institutional asymmetry 
reflections on energy 105–7 154
status 27, 30 limits of 63–5
super-weapons in 87, 98–103 and magic 64–9
use of the laboratory 60–72 militarization  73–83, 100
The Wonderous Creature and myth 150–1
(‘Ashchorjo Prani’)  nationalist 42–3
159–60 Nehru on 18–19
Nehruvian legacies 151–3
Ray, U. 30–1 pedagogic practices 152–4
realpolitik 74, 152 polycentric history 17
religion 164 and power 40
and science 19–20, 47–8 professionalization of 48
resource extraction 136–42 and religion 19–20, 47–8
resource fictions 125 socialization 45–7
Rethiniraj, G. 81–2 statist approaches 163–7
Return of Vaman, The and superstition 56
(Narlikar) 164–7 understanding of field 153
Robinson, K. S. 165 and war 73–83
robots 62–3, 71–2, 102–3 science fiction 3–4
Rohmer, S. 85 critical protocols 6
root metaphors 112 definition 155–6
Roy, P. C. 7, 18 diversity 5
Roy, R. M. 42 features of Indian 6
Russ, J. 11 global 8–12
Rutherford, E. 85 hybridity 6–7
non-European traditions 5–8
Saha, M. 18, 22, 42–3, 44, 44–5, post-colonial turn 5–8
80, 151, 153 revelatory powers 156–7
Saha Institute, Calcutta 46–8 as science writing 155–6, 158
Sandesh 31 semi-peripheral 25–35
Sargent, L. T. 10 standardization 4–5
science structure 27
challenging 61 sub-categories 156
circulatory model 17 thematic concerns 7–8
collaborative 154 Third World 25–35
continuity of spirit 151 utopic 10–12

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 index 191

and war 83–7 specie-ism 100

science-fiction films 163 species boundaries 131–2
Science Fiction Studies 5, 8 speculative fiction 156
science policy, Nehru 3–4 spirituality 151
science studies, post-colonial Sputnik 1 56
turn 14–17 Srivastava, N. 147
science writing, science fiction Stable, H. H. 77–8
as 155–6, 158 Star Trek (TV series) 87
scientific approach, the 2 Starship Troopers (Heinlein) 100
scientific culture 43–4 state science, critique of 163–7
scientific entrepreneurs 87–8 state-building 83, 122
scientific facts, creation of 45–7, Sterling, B. 127
50, 72 Sturgeon, T. 122–3
scientific knowledge Subramaniam, B. 16–17, 20
authorization of 55–6 Sudershan Rao, Y. 1
pursuit of 58 super-weapons 73–4, 76, 83–7,
scientific overreach 101–2 87–103, 140
scientific–military nexus 15–16 Suvin, D. 3, 4–5
scientists Suvin event, the 4–5
defence 79–80 Szeman, I. 108, 108–9, 110, 116
professional rivalry 69–72 Szilard, L. 85
scientist-soldiers 79, 88, 93
women 166–7 Tata, J. R. D. 44
Second World War 44, 90 Tata Institute of Fundamental
semi-peripheral science Research, Bombay 48, 154, 156
fiction 25–35 Tatsumi, T. 25
semi-periphery, the 29–30 technological gap, the 149–50
sense of wonder 68 technology, importance of 42
sentient weapons 102–3 technophilia 87
Shishi (‘Bottle’) (Mitra) 57–9, 96–8 techno-science 12
Simak, C. 122 techno-scientific development
Singh, B. 76, 117, 118 centrality of 15
Singh, D. 148 politics of 105
Singh, V. 33n15, 35, 41, 155, Tel (‘Oil’) (Mitra) 136, 137–8
156–7 Telegraph (newspaper) 1–2
The Woman who Thought She Tesla, Nicola 84
was a Planet and Other thematic concerns 7
Stories 167–70 thermopoetics 112–13
Sircar, M. L. 18, 42 Third-World Arab
Smith, E. D. 9 internationalism 66–7
social responsibility 41 Third-World internationalism 
socio-political power 56 23–4
soft loans 146 Third-World nationalism 15
South-East Asia Treaty Third-World science fiction 25–35
Organization 77 Thorndike, L. 65n8
space race, the 15–16, 56–7 Tilly, C. 83

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192 FINAL FRONTIERS

Tolstoy, A. 85 weapons

Tupi (‘Hat’) (Mitra) 143–4 control 74
importance of 73
United States of America 38–9, 45 in Indian science fiction 
African-American authors 7–8 73
biological weapons moral dilemma 85–6, 100
programme 40–1 procurement 81
federal science budget 15 and science 73–83
fictional gaze 110 science fiction and 83–7
global dominance 86–7 sentient 102–3
military aid to Pakistan 77 weather 113–14
scientific–military nexus 15–16 Wells, H. G. 85
Upanishads 2 Wenzel, J. 113, 115
utopian fiction 10–11 Westernization 15
utopianism 53–4 Williams, R. 10, 116
utopic mode, the 10–12 Womack, E. 115
Woman who Thought She was a
Vajpayee, A. B. 82 Planet and Other Stories, The
Vedas 2 (Singh) 167–70
Vedic science 1–2, 16, 150–1 women scientists 166–7
Victorian miser narratives 115 women writers 150
Vietnam War 86, 86–7 Wonderous Creature, The
Visvanathan, S. 151 (‘Ashchorjo Prani’)
Voltaire 64 (Ray) 159–60
Vyamanika Shastra 2, 3 Woolger, S. 45–7
world literary genres 12–13
Wallerstein, I. 28 world literary system 24
war and war-making 83 world literature model 28, 116
inevitability of 86 Wright, R. 52–3
Mitra and 88
and science 73–83 Yaeger, P. 115–16, 121, 140
science fiction and 83–7
Warwick Research Collective 12 Zachariah, B. 24
waste 113, 115, 118, 137, 141–2 Zoline, P. 125

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