In Search Of Indian Science Fiction: A Conversation With Anil Menon

As taken from Ecstatic Days. This entry was written by Vandana Singh. Perhaps we can learn something from what's going on in this part of the world too. An excerpt:

When I was a kid growing up in India, my first exposure to things science-fictional (sort of) was through a series of fat little books in Hindi that could fit comfortably in my hand. The stories were an indiscriminate mix of earth-bound fairy tales and cosmic voyages, and their flashy covers and melodramatic dialog immediately caught my imagination. I’d already heard the great epics from my mother and grandmother and these little books seemed to be in the same vein. By the time I was eleven, however, I’d discovered Asimov, Clarke and Bradbury, and there seemed to be no real SF written by Indians. In my teens I came across the occasional story published by cosmologist and SF writer Jayant Narlikar, but that was it.

Now, many years later, I know that science fiction in India has had quite a history. But in a country where there are eighteen distinct languages apart from English, and thousands of dialects, it is quite easy to be unaware of traditions in other tongues.

I only read in Hindi and English, so it is not surprising I missed, for instance, the rich tradition of SF in Bengali. Good translations from non-English Indian languages to English are a recent phenomenon, as is academic work — see for instance an essay on Bengali SF, the grandmother of Indian SF, referenced here. (I can’t seem to find the original essay on the web any more).

Thus I’ve discovered that the first Indian SF story (as far as we know currently) was published in 1879, in Bengali.

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