Decolonial Forces in Kalpavigyan

Bengali science fiction, unlike its technology-centred Euro-American counterpart, engages the posthuman as a decolonizing force and as a tool to critique the socio-political pitfalls of the society. ‘Kalpavigyan’ (Bengali Science Fantasy Fiction), while creating an air of imaginative science, dystopian settings, and utopian subjectivities, “writes back” to the totalizing narrative created by the empire. This creates a distinct genealogy of posthuman thought. Such stories are inspired by the traditional scientific discourse, such as Jagadish Bose’s plant consciousness, Satyendranath’s idea of ‘boson’ elementary particles, or even America’s landing on the moon in the 1970s and anxiety about visiting aliens. Consequently, it uses the language of science to, as Ray puts it, “imagine” alternate realities. It foregrounds not only the scientific but also the postcolonial subjectivity. This paper explores the articulation of the posthuman in Kalpavigyan by studying such narratives. The term ‘Kalpavigyan’, initially coined by Adrish Bardhan, created a body of work and was a tradition followed by several authors. Foremost among such examples would be the short stories titled ‘Green Man’, a competitive exercise by Bardhan, Satyajit Ray, Premendra Mitra, and Dilip Roy Chowdhury. The stories blur the line between plant consciousness and establish a biological and philosophical posthumanist thought. In contrast, stories like ‘Sultana’s Dream’ employ the posthuman to subvert the patriarchal structure to re-envision humanity through a utopian feminist lens. Later stories by Ray indulge in advanced concepts of AI subjectivity and their otherization. However, this tradition is further complicated by the partition and the dehumanising tendencies of portraying the refugee as the “infrahuman” subject. The paper aims to establish that Kalpavigyan uses the posthuman not to achieve technological transcendence but as an aim to re-evaluate humanity in a cultural and culturally specific context.