Simrat Kaur Dugal & Charu Maithani

For research into the construction of the genre of science fiction in Hindi by shedding light on how writers have used their own understanding of both science and the potential of science to perceive, comment on and reinvent their past, present and the future. It will also look at how productions, articulations and manifestations of science fiction influence aural and visual cultures in India.

Simrat Kaur Dugal and Charu Maithani are independent researchers and curators based in Delhi. This grant supports them to understand how writers of science fiction in Hindi have used their own understanding of science and its potential to perceive, comment on and reinvent their past, present and future, borrowing from both mythology and everyday life. It will also research the diverse ways of articulations of Hindi science fiction in contemporary Indian art through a range of aural and visual forms such as radio plays, theatre plays, comic books, book covers, pulp novels, etc. produced in the Uttar Pradesh region since the 1990s.

The researchers will focus on the intersections between daily life, mythology and science fiction to understand the ways, both collective and individual, in which it has activated social, economic, and political thinking about the past, as well as envisioning an imagination of the future. This will help them understand how characters in science fiction interact with science. It will also ask the critical question whether science could be used as a tool to bring out the essence of equality, freedom and justice; or is it a harbinger of destruction and extinction of the human race as we know it. In many ways, this quest will lead to moral enquiries about our existence.

One of the significant considerations of this project is also to look at the understandings of the aesthetic articulations of Hindi science fiction, investigating the forms in which it is produced, and the experiences of textual, sonic, and visual representations activating the imagination of its consumer. Science fiction has more recently manifested in other visual and theatrical forms like nautanki, comic books, and popular posters ensuring that it reaches a larger audience; and in doing so, has attracted an interest from new readers. This project seeks to understand how sonic, textual, and visual science fiction productions in Hindi are bringing changes in aural and visual culture of the region.  Also, the research will take into account how science fiction produced in Uttar Pradesh has not only contributed towards the development of the genre but has also preserved the nuances of the language.

Thus, the researchers will not only collect relevant data material for study from secondary sources like journals, articles, academic papers and other writings, but also speak to writers, publishers and readers of Hindi science fiction to understand its current status. They will also speak to artists who have been engaged in the various creative manifestations of the textual science fictions. The outcome of the project will be a paper presenting the findings and a database of the productions (radio plays, theatre, poetry, television, and film). An exhibition of the posters, book covers and illustrated pages from the publications will also be attempted to be mounted at the end of this project. The work may later lead towards an anthology of science fiction writing in Hindi.

IFA has made another grant to Khusboo Ranka, a filmmaker who is looking at Hindi pulp fiction writing and its publishing industry in Meerut. The two projects complement each other in many ways, the most significant of which is that they are both located in the same region tracing the labyrinthine trajectories of two literary art forms in the Hindi language that developed simultaneously.