“Only a mere fantasy”: Ideas of Scarcity in Hindi Science Fiction

Abstract

Even as science fiction written in Hindi increasingly becomes the subject of acclaim and analysis, it is frequently seen in terms of lack or scarcity. For example, the recent publication of a six-volume anthology began by noting “the very slow progress of creation of science fiction in Indian languages in comparison with English and other foreign languages.” (Prasad 2022) Such complaints, usually framed in comparison to Western European and Soviet literatures, but also to other literatures in India such as Bangla or Marathi, appear in virtually any critical discussion of Hindi science fiction, forming a small body of work at the intersection of science, technology, and social reform.

This paper explores a discourse of scarcity in the face of abundance in order to explore the ways in which modern Hindi relates to popular fiction, the fantastic, and the imagination of science. Does this perceived scarcity reflect an anxiety in Hindi literary discourse towards its position in India and the world? Does it reveal a discomfort with the uneasy boundaries between popular literature and a separate body of high modernism? Or might it ultimately point towards deeper, more complicated impulses? Moving outward from this archive of complaint, this paper will propose that, at its heart, the claim of scarcity must be seen as part of a long history of anxiety around the fantastic and non-real, one that has shaped modern Hindi literature since its emergence in the nineteenth century and, while it bears much in common with similar histories in Urdu, Marathi, and other South Asian literary cultures, has a particularly complex afterlife in Hindi, one that continues to structure its relationship with speculative fiction.