A few years ago at the Science Fiction Research Association’s annual conference, I was on a panel about Indian SF; as I chatted with my co-presenter afterward, I remember bemoaning the lack of an entry for India in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia – there was no readily accessible broad overview of Indian SF, despite a tradition going back to the 19th century. The last few years have seen attempts to alleviate this, with Suparno Banerjee’s Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity (2020) and now Sami Ahmad Khan’s Star Warriors of the Modern Raj.

Khan’s monograph explores what he calls ISFE (Indian SF in English), largely from 1999 to the present. Though Khan protests that his book has no pretensions to being either comprehensive or exhaustive (xii), Star Warriors of the Modern Raj nonetheless feels, at times, as if Khan were attempting to cram every work by every single writer of ISFE into the text; even individual short stories often receive multiple pages of discussion. This expansiveness drives the book’s strengths and weaknesses alike. The task he has set out for himself is incredibly difficult as little unites these works except genre and country of composition. What kind of overall thesis or perspective can one have on decades of SF from across an entire country?

Khan foregrounds this difficulty in his introduction, telling a story of two different approaches he could have taken if he had been politically motivated. The right-wing approach would be to claim that Indian SF goes back thousands of years because the Ramayana is actually SF; the left-wing approach would be to reject religion and depict ISFE as something totally new and unprecedented. He sums up all political framings as simplistic: “The right wanted to reclaim a golden past, the left wished for a red future, and the centre did not know which colour it sought” (xii, italics removed). He concludes that his book is “aware that there can be no single -ism or any grand unified theory that can explain the divergences of ISFE – and hence [it] flits across vantage points that arise out of markedly different contexts” (xiv). The strength of Khan’s book is its avoidance of a single overall frame, letting each story operate in its own context.

You can read the rest of this review at Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research.