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Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905: Five Stories of Speculation, Resistance and Rebellion
Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905: Five Stories of Speculation, Resistance and Rebellion
Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905: Five Stories of Speculation, Resistance and Rebellion
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Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905: Five Stories of Speculation, Resistance and Rebellion

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"Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905" shows, for the first time, how science fiction writing developed in India years before the writings of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. The five stories presented in this collection, in their cultural and political contexts, help form a new picture of English language writing in India and a new understanding of the connections among science fiction, modernity and empire. [NP] Speculative fiction developed early in India in part because the intrinsic dysfunction and violence of colonialism encouraged writers there to project alternative futures, whether utopian or dystopic. The stories in "Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905," created by Indian and British writers, responded to the intellectual ferment and political instabilities of colonial India. They add an important dimension to our understanding of Victorian empire, science fiction and speculative fictional narratives. They provide new examples of the imperial and the anti-imperial imaginations at work.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherAnthem Press
Release dateMar 30, 2019
ISBN9781783088652
Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905: Five Stories of Speculation, Resistance and Rebellion

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    Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905 - Mary Ellis Gibson

    Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905

    Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905

    Five Tales of Speculation, Resistance and Rebellion

    Edited by Mary Ellis Gibson

    Anthem Press

    An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

    www.anthempress.com

    This edition first published in UK and USA 2019

    by ANTHEM PRESS

    75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

    or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

    and

    244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

    © 2019 Mary Ellis Gibson editorial matter and selection;

    individual chapters © individual contributors

    The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

    All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

    no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

    a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

    (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

    without the prior written permission of both the copyright

    owner and the above publisher of this book.

    British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

    A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

    ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-863-8 (Hbk)

    ISBN-10: 1-78308-863-X (Hbk)

    This title is also available as an e-book.

    for Charlie and Emily

    I obtained a cursory knowledge of history, and a view of the several empires at present existing in the world; it gave me an insight into the manners, governments, and religions of the different nations of the earth. I heard of the slothful Asiatics; of the stupendous genius and mental activity of the Grecians; of the wars and wonderful virtue of the early Romans—of their subsequent degeneration—of the decline of that mighty empire; of chivalry, Christianity, and kings. I heard of the discovery of the American hemisphere, and wept with Safie over the hapless fate of its original inhabitants.

    —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)

    Oh Freedom! There is something dear

    E’en in thy very name,

    That lights the altar of the soul

    With everlasting flame.

    Success attend the patriot sword,

    That is unsheathed for thee!

    And glory to the breast that bleeds,

    Bleeds nobly to be free!

    Blest be the generous hand that breaks

    The chain a tyrant gave.

    And, feeling for degraded man,

    Gives Freedom to the slave.

    —H. L. V. Derozio, Freedom to the Slave (Calcutta, 1827)

    CONTENTS

    Acknowledgments

    A Note on the Texts

    Introduction

    1.Henry Meredith Parker (1796?–1868)

    The Junction of the Oceans: A Tale of the Year 2098

    2.H. H. Goodeve (1807–1884)

    1980

    3.Kylas Chunder Dutt (1817–1859)

    A Journal of 48 Hours of the Year 1945

    4.Shoshee Chunder Dutt (1824–1885)

    The Republic of Orissá; A Page from the Annals of the Twentieth Century

    5.Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880?–1932)

    Sultana’s Dream

    Appendix: Runaway Cyclone

    Runaway Cyclone

    Index

    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    For the discovery and compiling of these texts, I am indebted first to a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship in Kolkata. For pursuing the texts, I am most grateful for the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Sawyer Fellowship at the National Humanities Center. Librarians in the Oriental and African Studies Department at the British Library have been, as always, unfailingly helpful.

    Additional support from the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow made possible further research on these texts and their authors. Generous research support from Colby College has allowed me to complete this work with the help of excellent student researchers, Javin Dana, Jane Franks and Sophie Fink.

    Personal debts are always impossible to repay with thanks alone, but I would like especially to thank Julia Kimmel for editorial assistance and Charlie Orzech for endless ad hoc research assistance. I am also grateful to Jim Fleming and Chris Walker at Colby College who read materials and responded to ideas, correcting at least some of my errors and elisions. In Kolkata, for paving the way, I thank Sanjukta Dasgupta. I thank Sue who healed my writing wrist and asked for this book for her children. And finally I thank Emily Orzech who made me see the fascination of speculative fictions of all kinds.

    A NOTE ON THE TEXTS

    Each of the stories here was first published in a periodical, as indicated in the introductions and notes to each. The copy text for each, however, is the author’s last supervised edition in English.

    The story with the most complex editorial history is Henry Meredith Parker’s The Junction of the Oceans, which he revised for inclusion in his later collection, Bole Ponjis. Significant variants are discussed generally in the introduction to Parker and are annotated. Neither H. H. Goodeve nor Kylas Chunder Dutt reprinted his story; copytext is the original periodical publication for each. Shoshee Chunder Dutt reprinted The Republic of Orissá in his collection, Bengliana, and the collected edition provides the copy text here. Rokeya Hossain translated her English story into Bangla (Bengali) some years after it appeared in the Indian Ladies’ Magazine; the copy text is the English periodical version.

    Spelling has been altered for consistency; American spellings are used throughout texts, notes and introductions. Archaisms, loan words and Indian English words have been retained as in the copy text.

    Annotations have been developed assuming an audience relatively unfamiliar with Indian colonial history, Indian loan words and Indian English. Annotations rely on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (abbreviated as ODNB). A key source is Henry Yule, Hobson-Jobson: A glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms, etymological, historical, geographical and discursive, 2nd ed., edited by William Crooke (London: J. Murray, 1903). The dictionary is abbreviated as Hobson-Jobson in the notes, and the source may, in each instance, be located alphabetically in the dictionary. For readers in search of full entries, Hobson-Jobson is easily searchable at http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/hobsonjobson/.

    The authors of these stories provided few annotations. These are retained and marked in brackets with the writer’s initials (for example, [HMP] for Henry Meredith Parker). The remaining annotations are the editor’s.

    INTRODUCTION

    Let me take you to Bengal in 1835 where a young British doctor would see his first—and only—story in print. He had been in India for just four years. He was about to be appointed to the faculty of the new Calcutta Medical College. An optimistic believer in scientific progress, H. H. Goodeve was eager to teach Indian students. He imagined an egalitarian postcolonial future, replete with modern conveniences of every sort.¹

    Goodeve set his story, 1980, some century and a half in the future, in an independent democratic India. The British empire has ended, and even summer heat has been made bearable:

    It was a warm evening in May, somewhere in the year of Grace 1980, when the wheels of the Himalaya steam mail were rolling swiftly along the polished trams of the great high rail road to Calcutta. The vehicle was one of the most elegant of modern improvements, fitted up with aircooling machines, fountains of iced soda-water, and every other convenience for those who in spite of the usual heat of the season were obliged to travel at that time. … The party was of both sexes, and of all colours and ranks, for the republican spirit of time allowed of no distinction.²

    Passengers hurtle through North India in a fine machine called a Vaporo, heading at 80 miles per hour toward the new capital. The train’s compartments and the Indian Parliament alike exemplify a new and nearly ideal world.

    When I discovered this story and others like it, published early on in British India, I felt I had stumbled into a chapter of the history of science fiction either unknown or known only to specialists in nineteenth-century Indian literature. Indeed, the standard accounts of Indian science fiction date its origins to the early twentieth century, with an occasional bow to a single story in 1879 and a deeper bow to the 1890s. The stories collected here, however, were originally published between 1835 and 1905. They stretch our understanding of the history of science fiction—both temporally and geographically. Four of the key stories in this collection were written by Bengali and British interlocutors who were engaged in imagining futures from the perspective of the promising, problematic and contentious 1830s. Two of these stories—by British-born authors published in the Bengal Annual in 1835—are virtually unknown to readers in India and in the Anglophone world beyond. Two stories by their Bengali interlocutors have been reprinted recently in a fine volume by Alex Tickell, which is not widely available. The fifth story, a feminist utopia by a Muslim Bengali woman, was reprinted by the Feminist Press (New York, 1988) and is now available in used copies and in several other anthologies. Though the stories here by Indian writers have been known to specialists in Bengali fiction, they have never been easily available to scholars and students of science fiction or to nonspecialist readers of colonial/global Anglophone literatures.

    The stories collected here are surprising in their variety and their political daring, curious in their plots and astonishing in their construction of imagined futures. They range from technological speculation to futurist utopias. The goal of this collection is to argue that these stories should be part of any canon of science fiction and part of any canon of colonial, postcolonial and/or Anglophone literatures. By way of this introduction and the introductions and annotations for each story, I hope to make these stories culturally and historically legible to nonspecialist readers.

    Lovers of science fiction in Britain and North America will discover in this anthology a group of tales that challenges the usual definitions of who writes science fiction and for whom. Readers of colonial and postcolonial literature will find in these tales an early instance of English language fiction in India. Historians will find young writers actively positing postcolonial, scientifically advanced and egalitarian futures. Theorists of modernity will find a rich resource of speculation about modernity itself from writers who were engaged in a global, if uneven and challenging, process of contestation and intellectual exchange. These stories provide a new perspective on the relationships among science fiction, modernity and empire.

    This edition is aimed explicitly at readers of science fiction—lovers of science fiction and scholarly readers too—who are not experts in colonial India. At the same time, I hope readers of colonial and postcolonial fictions will find in this collection stories that take them beyond their usual canons and notions of geography and genre history. They will find stories representing moments when both Indian and British-born writers found themselves in conversation and contestation.

    Scholars of Indian literature will note immediately that this volume does not pretend to have identified and included every science fiction or futurist fiction written in nineteenth-century India. The title of the volume, invoking India as a whole, is aimed at general readers, at scholars of science fiction and at undergraduate students who will have limited knowledge of Indian colonial history and geography. My focus here is on Bengal and the English language literary culture that arose there in the nineteenth century. This focus arises in part from my own limitations as a researcher—it would have been wonderful to have world enough and time to read every newspaper or late nineteenth-century magazine publishing stories in English across the subcontinent and to have command of the multiple languages of the subcontinent and every publishing venue. Nonetheless, I hope these stories will suggest to other scholars of Anglophone literature and of Indian vernacular literatures the potential for identifying further stories in periodicals. It would be splendid, too, to see these stories and others like them, if they are discovered, reprinted in a global anthology of science fiction in the British Empire. Such an undertaking, preferably bringing together scholars from all the former British colonies, would articulate differences across geographies and temporalities, translate from many languages as appropriate and describe whether, how and where colonized and colonizers engaged in dispute and dialog.

    At the same time, my focus on Bengal has allowed me to particularize the political and biographical contexts from which these stories emerged. As I argue in detail below, this anthology points to a particular historical conjuncture from which these stories emerged: a moment in which young elite Bengalis were well-educated in English, when intellectual currents moved back and forth between India and Britain and when writers experienced relative liberality in the colonial control of the press. I include in an appendix one story originally written in Bangla to gesture beyond the scope of my own work and to suggest that a truly comparative history or global anthology of science fiction in the nineteenth-century British Empire should also retrieve and include translations of stories from other languages, wherever they can be found.

    As to these stories themselves, even this group broadens the canon of science fiction. These stories ask us to rethink the definitions that have, from the beginning, bedeviled science fiction studies. Are they futurist fictions, speculative fictions, scientific romances, science fictions? Where are the lines to be drawn? Here I purposely elide the distinctions one might make among futurist fictions, speculative fictions and science fictions, and I treat romance in an earlier and different sense than H. G. Wells might have done.³ I use a working definition with fuzzy boundaries deliberately, in part because such terms as speculative fiction and science fiction often indicate distinctions without a difference and in part because tracking multiple genealogies would obscure the very history I want to trace.

    I tend to agree with David Seed who, in surveying the competing definitions of science fiction, concludes that science fiction cannot be reduced to a unitary (and I would add exclusionary) definition. That way madness lies, Seed argues. Rather he sees science fiction as a mode or field where different genres and subgenres intersect.⁴ Many of the texts one might call science fiction are, Seed argues, hybrid. In the polyglot linguistic scene of colonial India, the interaction of literary traditions from multiple cultural sources, along with political and economic disjunctions, made hybrid modes virtually inevitable.⁵

    Given the early dates of the stories collected here, moreover, a unitary definition of genre could only function anachronistically. In a very detailed census of early science fiction Edward James points out that no one before 1929 was writing within a self-conscious genre, or had begun to formulate any kind of definition of the kind of fiction which they were writing.⁶ In his survey of nineteenth-century science fiction, James admits that even in applying the term ‘science fiction’ to a type of literature produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we are … trying to impose the idea of a genre onto what would in the nineteenth century have been perceived as a disparate and almost random grouping of several different types of story: the future war story, the utopia, the lost race story, the invention story and so on.

    Among the stories collected here, we do have future war stories, utopias and dystopias and invention stories—sometimes all at once. What is missing is the lost race story. It might be possible to imagine that from a relatively urban nineteenth-century Indian perspective tribal peoples might be considered lost races, but writers of early science fiction / futurist fictions in India, as I will argue below, imagined tribal peoples very differently when they imaged them at all. The writers of the stories collected here were creating stories for Anglophone (Indian and British) readers in India. The lost race story relied, by necessity, upon the ignorance, anxiety and fantasy of the colonial center; it was a metropolitan fiction (using the term metropolitan here, as elsewhere in this introduction, to indicate, not the urban per se but rather centers of colonial power—in this case European centers of colonial power). In India the lost race story was irrelevant, given the long and largely legible history of Indian antiquities; antiquarian researches were in the nineteeth century more appealing to British colonizers than lost race stories. Bengali writers, as will be evident here, included tribal peoples in their stories for their own purposes.

    Unlike metropolitan science fictions, these stories eschew the lost race plot; like metropolitan fictions, they do imagine new technologies and new futures. Taking these stories into account we can see that science fiction / futurist fiction cannot be understood simply as the project of technological modernity in the metropole. Rather than locating modernity in the West—or in this case in Britain—we can locate modernity equally in the empire. These perspectives from nineteenth-century India allow us to see modernity as at once underwriting and destabilizing the metropole.

    The stories I include here invent new technologies regularly—either in detail as in Goodeve’s 1980 or in more general terms as in Rokeya Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream. A steam balloon or an air car in Goodeve’s story or a solar-powered kitchen imagined in 1905 certainly pass the technological novum test defining science fiction, as postulated by Darko Suvin. Suvin has argued that the test of sci-fi is the creation of cognitive estrangement via the new, the technological or cognitive innovation. Although several of these stories contain some kind of material technological advance, not all of them do; all, however, are profoundly speculative. Each is situated in a distant future, and each, therefore, is committed to critiquing the present. As Bill Ashcroft has argued with regard to postcolonial fiction, the utopian impulse fully engages the present, unfolding critique as a means of hope.⁸ Even the one dystopian story here, Parker’s Junction of the Oceans, works as a critique of an imagined utopian future and thus engages in a dialog with the more benevolent imagination of Parker’s colleague, H. H. Goodeve.

    Who were the writers who took this speculative turn as early as the 1830s in Bengal? Four of them were young or very young. All four of the young writers imagined utopian or nearly utopian futures; the outlier, Henry Meredith Parker, was pushing 40 and had a significantly darker view. The introduction to each story provides additional biographical details, but here it is useful to at least locate the cast of characters.

    Henry Meredith Parker and H. H. Goodeve both published stories in the Bengal Annual in 1835. Both were civil servants. Goodeve is the only one of the authors among the five with any scientific training. With a medical degree from the University of Edinburgh and further training in midwifery in London, Goodeve was appointed as a medical officer in the army of the East India Company and soon was transferred to Calcutta and to the new Medical College. In his later years, he was known for his support of Indian medical students, bringing four of them to London where he tutored, chaperoned and partially supported them in their studies. At the age of 28 when he wrote 1980, he was at the beginning of a long and successful career. Parker, the eldest of the authors here, is said to have been the son of a danseuse at Covent Garden. After service in the commissariat in the Peninsular War against Napoleon, he managed to secure a place for a year at Haileybury (where aspiring East India Company employees were trained) and then an appointment in Calcutta. He had risen to a very responsible position on the Board of Customs, Salt and Opium by 1835 when he wrote his eco-apocalyptic story, The Junction of the Oceans. In this tale, the completion of the Panama Canal results in an enormous tsunami, which, insofar as the hero of the story can tell, destroys nearly all of humanity. Parker’s other literary productions—and there were quite a few—were less bleak than The Junction of the Oceans, if more satirical. He was a highly convivial man—directing amateur theatricals in Calcutta and hosting dinners that brought together Indians and Europeans of a literary bent.

    The next two stories were written by cousins from a highly literary, liberal-minded Calcutta family. Kylas Chunder Dutt and Shoshee Chunder Dutt were both educated (in different years) at the Hindu College in Calcutta, an English medium institution founded by, among others, their father, in concert with other Indian and British men. Years before Macaulay’s minute on Indian Education (1835), which supported vernacular and Indian education to the detriment of Indian classical languages, the founders of the Hindu College wanted the young men of Calcutta to learn sciences and modern languages to prepare them for success in a rapidly changing economy. At the age of 18, Kylas Chunder Dutt wrote his Journal of 48 Hours of the Year 1945, probably in response to Parker’s and Goodeve’s stories. Drawing on his classical, historical and rhetorical training at the Hindu College and responding to the radical tradition associated with its recent history, Kylas imagined a failed rebellion—an insurrection in Calcutta in which the hero opposes a colonial government which has practiced every species of subaltern oppression. Whereas Kylas’s future rebellion is brief and bloody, some 10 years later in 1845 his cousin Shoshee Chunder Dutt (then about 21 years old) imagined a much more ambitious rebellion sparked by the imagined British reimposition in 1916 of slavery in India. In the years after they created these tales of revolution, both cousins went on to careers as civil servants. Although Kylas died early, Shoshee retired after 34 years of service and was awarded the honorific title Rai Bahadur (deputy magistrate).⁹ The Dutt family, from the Hindu middle class, had in the meantime largely converted to Christianity—but this was years after the stories published here.

    Aside from the appendix, the last story reprinted here was written by one of the few women to publish fiction in the India of her day. Born around 1880, Rokeya Sakawat Hossain was raised in a conservative Muslim family in Bengal. Rokeya’s older brother had received an English medium education at St. Xavier’s College in Calcutta; afterward he clandestinely (defying their father’s dictat) taught her to read and write Bangla and taught her beginning English. He also arranged her marriage to a respected Muslim civil servant in Bihar. Though her husband, Ibrahim Sakhawat Hossain, was much her senior and in ill health, he encouraged Rokeya to publish Sultana’s Dream; upon his death he left her sufficient funds to start a school for Muslim girls in Bihar. After she confronted his family’s opposition there, she moved her school to Calcutta where it is still in existence. Rokeya became a notable figure arguing for women’s rights and women’s education; she is often known, honorifically, in West Bengal and Bangladesh as Begum Rokeya. Like the Dutt cousins’ stories, Rokeya’s story is also a youthful production, written when she was about 25. Like Shoshee Chunder Dutt, Rokeya imagines a utopian future, one in her case guaranteed not by rebellion against the British (who do not figure in her story) but by women’s scientific and technological knowledge.

    Modernity in the Empire: Colonial versus Metropolitan Science Fiction

    Each of these writers inhabited a complex social position. If, as Darko Suvin proposes, a key characteristic of science fiction is estrangement, the writers of these stories were perfectly placed to create estrangement effects—and they did so by imagining vividly different futures. They evidence the power of speculative fiction to address social, political and cultural conflict in a colonial setting, and

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