Science Fiction Studies, vol. 43, no. 3, 2016. 435–458.

Abstract

Using literature from India in three different languages—Bangla, Marathi, and English—this essay engages in thematic analysis to present a theory of Indian kalpavigyan (sf). This theory is based on the concept of the mythologerm. Adapting Barthes’s description of myth as a type of speech, I link the mythic to the historical understanding of science on the Indian subcontinent stemming from colonial-era reabsorption and transformation of indigenous scientific traditions within the broader systematization of scientific knowledge. The essay explores how some authors writing in these three languages have negotiated the categories of the knowable, the known, and the unknowable in their fictionalization of the aims, possibilities, and products of scientific activity.