116 – Alternative Futures: Science Fiction from South Asia

October 2, 2025
2:00 pm
Theatersaal
South Asian science fiction, addressing colonial epistemologies, dystopian anxieties, and ecological futures, has increasingly attracted critical acclaim and scholarly attention. Lively production across South Asian languages has been joined by anthologies ranging from the 19th century to the present (Chaube 2022; Saint 2019, 2021), as well as scholarly monographs (Chattopadhyay 2019; Banerjee 2020; Mukherjee 2020). While the hype is recent, South Asian SF is not; first specimens avant la lettre date back to the first half of the 19th century. More recently, positivist fantasies of development and extra¬terrestrial exploration have given way to scenarios of ecological and political turmoil. This panel seeks to engage with the study of science fiction within global and comparative contexts of speculative fiction and in conversation with modern South Asian literatures, both of which are entangled with histories of realism and colonialism (Suvin 1979; Mukherjee 1985; Rieder 2008; Anjaria 2012). Examining the emergence of South Asian science fiction in the nineteenth-century ecosystem of popular fiction; its relationship to discourses of scientific progress in the post-independence period; and its recent efflorescence as an Anglophone genre of “global SF” can intervene in a range of problems in South Asian literary history and theories of world literary systems. What are the futures projected by South Asian science fiction? How does SF production relate to other literary and extraliterary fields? In what way does recent SF function as a counter-discourse to modernist narratives of progress? And how can we produce a multilingual history of South Asian science fiction? This panel, which aims to address these questions, invites papers dealing with South Asian science fiction, its historical antecedents, or related genres, as well as their intervention in fields including the environmental humanities, the study of popular fiction, and the history of science.

Convenor

Goulding, Gregory

Presentations

On the Margins of Science and Fantasy: An Investigation into the Worldbuilding Strategies of Udayasankar, Basu and Dhar
Prasad Shreya - Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
The Ghosts of Futures Canceled: The Hauntological in Film and Literature of New India
Parson Rahul - 198-232-442, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, United States
The Robot and the Ayyar: Tracing Technologies of the Marvelous in Urdu and Hindi Tilismi Tales
Kamal Nudrat - Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States
SciFi classics in Tamil: Sujatha’s short stories
Harder Hans - SAI, Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany
Aliens, Monsters, and Flying Saucers: Indian Space Films and the Spector of the Cold War
Halladay Andrew - The London School of Economics, The London School of Economics, London, United Kingdom
“Only a mere fantasy”: Ideas of Scarcity in Hindi Science Fiction
Goulding Gregory - Department of South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States
“We will prove, the purity of our culture”: Technology and History in Anglophone Indian Science Fiction.
Das Aditi - Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar, Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar, Rupnagar, India
LIFE IN THE YUGANTIC MODE: FUTURISMS, INDIA, AND A TIME BETWEEN WORLDS
Unudurti Jaideep - -, -, Hyderabad, India
Maithri - University College Tilburg, Tilburg University, Tilburg, Netherlands