Overview

Exploring expressions of ‘Indianness’ buried within and scattered across post-millennial Indian speculative fiction in English, this book asks questions around what it means to ‘belong’ to an India of ‘now’ and what it might mean to belong to multiple Indias of the (near) future. With dystopia, near-future, apocalyptic Indias and fantastical metropolises all imagined across this body of writing, Post-Millennial Indian Speculative Fiction in English traces economic, social and political transformations in post-2000 ‘New India’ across these various narratives. Drawing on established notions of the speculative, Dawson Varughese argues for a recognized, post-millennial canon of Indian speculative writing in English which moves beyond Western-centric frames of reference, centring instead on Indian sensibilities, expressions of belonging to India and speculative ‘Indian’ futures. Organized around key tropes and characteristics of post-millennial Indian speculative fiction in English to date - urban infrastructures, citizenship, bodies and biotech, future (Indian) histories and climate catastrophes – it takes stock of a range of science fiction, fantasy, near-future and dystopian novels and short stories and offers critical insights into the writings of Samit Basu, Varun Thomas Mathew, Gautam Bhatia, Rimi B. Chatterjee, Prayaag Akbar and Anil Menon, alongside many others. Post-millennial Indian Speculative Fiction in English examines shifting ideas of what it means to belong to India and conceptions of India as a nation and pulls these ideas together, creating a workable framework of understanding for this nascent field as we move into the third decade of the millennium.

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9781350241107

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E. Dawson Varughese is a Professor at Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal Academy Higher Education (MAHE) in Karnataka, India. She is the author of Reading New India (Bloomsbury, 2013), a seminal text in the field of Indian genre fiction in English. She is also the author of Visuality and Identity in Post-millennial Indian Graphic Narratives (2018) as well as several other monographs. She has published widely on New India and its literary and visual cultures both in internationally recognized journals and in edited volumes. She is also editor for The Routledge Companion to Indian Twenty-First Century Fiction in English.

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