Science Fiction from the Global South: Vandana Singh |Kainaati Chai|

Prof. Salman: Hello Kainaatis this is Kainaati chai Our guest today is Professor Vandana Singh she is a speculative fiction writer but she is also a physicist, Professor of physics and environment at department of environment society and sustainability Framingham state university Massachusetts. According to me she is not very far from me and another interesting thing for me is she is on the advisory council for METI (Messaging Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) we will talk about that also. You ha

ve written poetry books, kids fiction and a lot of science fiction called speculative fiction. I have your book ‘The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and other stories'. I would have shown it to you but I have it in electronic form. The second one is ‘Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories’. These are your different books. Professor Vandana Singh Welcome. Prof. Singh: Thank you thank you I am very honoured that today I am with all of you to talk about my favourite things science and science fict

ion. Prof Salman: Thank you very much and you said you did not get much opportunity to talk about science fiction in Hindi so today we will debut on it, in a way. But before we talk further about that how did this inclination come to you. You are in physics, you are in speculative fiction, you are a writer, also so how did this desire of physics and science come to you? Prof Singh: This is about my childhood I was born and grew up in Delhi but we used to go to Patna where my grandfather lived. T

hat time we cousins used to sleep sometimes on the roof brothers and sisters all together. And we used to see the sky, there was no light pollution then, we would see the stars the Milky Way also sometimes like a long scarf unfurling. We children used to feel that somebody is looking at us from the stars as we are looking at the stars. Is it possible that from other worlds somewhere in the universe somebody is looking towards us. so that dream what is it called that awakening from inside stayed

with me. Unfortunately, when we grow up many people forget what their thoughts were during childhood and those feelings but somehow, I was very lucky that these thoughts and feelings stayed with me. So when I started reading science fiction in my childhood aged 10, 11 years there used to be small, small fat books in Hindi which used to have stories in a mixture of fantasy and science fiction and I used to enjoy them very much. Then I read Asimov, Clarke, Ray Bradbury that also created an urge in

side. Our universe is full of wonders and part of our job as human beings is to be responsive to that wonders. That’s the reason why I became a writer that’s also the reason why I chose a career in science. Prof Salman: In a way this happens we are very lucky, in academia or sciences the childhood desires, I also had this inclination in my childhood, this is luck that you are doing the same things when you are grown up and reading speculative fiction, writing is terrific. I think you are extendi

ng that desire of yours and this is a good omen and I think this is actually really good. I shall ask you did you start writing from the beginning stories, poems or the thought came afterwards, let’s build on that. How did physics and fiction move together? Prof Singh: Ok this is a very interesting question. I started writing from my childhood. I studied in an English medium school, at home everyone spoke Hindi but first I tried to write in English and used to write a little for my own self in m

y childhood, and narrated it to brothers sisters and parents and that’s all. It so happened that when I came to US in graduate school for Phd in Physics this feeling I had never experienced before that I had come like an alien to another planet. I felt like that. And there was no description of that in literature in normal literature. So, I felt that the science fiction I used to read years ago, that contained those feelings so I again started reading science fiction and during that reading I fe

lt that I should write also something because the science fiction I had read uptill that time was being written by mostly Western writers and that too mostly male writers in their own perspective I thought my story or people like me from South Asia, why are people not writing about their experience, why don't they feel about that. That is why I started writing the science fiction stories. By the way when I was 10 years old I tried to write a science fiction story and thankfully its lost to the d

ustbins of history. That was my one attempt in the early years. Then the second time I tried was in late 1990’s and at that time I had lost my job and I was out of academics for 10 years. I needed intellectual stimulation so that was one of the other reasons I turned to science fiction tried to write it so that’s how it came about. Prof Salman: No for archival, for that your ten year story will be needed so we have to dig up where is it. Prof Singh: Thankfully, I don’t think it can be found anyw

here. Probably the papers have been given to the scrap dealer (Kabari wala). Prof Salman: I don’t know if you are familiar with Dastan-e-Amir Hamza. Prof Singh: Yes yes Prof Salman: As much as I know (I grew up in this) that has fantasy element quite a bit The children version of that was written by Maqbool Jahangir. The children version had 10 parts and that’s how I got into reading because these ten parts, absolutely love them and I think I read them at least 20 times. When I came to America,

I came here 30 years ago I brought it with me. I still have the Urdu versions. But what I remember is that it was commissioned by Akber for his court and he had pictures made out because he did not read and he had paintings made for the scenes. And these were found in Kashmir, when windows break they cover it by paper so somebody actually found those originals which were used for covering the windows. Then there was an exhibition on it in Metropolitan Art New York. So, something given to Kabari

wala also comes in handy sometimes. It's fascinating. Prof Singh: Yeah actually I have that volume on my shelves. I did not know that was a children’s version. Prof Salman: I knew only about that in the beginning. I absolutely love that. My son is 10 years old. I tried to read it to him. It is a bit difficult like you know it is also about age what words are being used this and that But in the same direction that you talked about there is something written separately in one of your books 'Specul

ative Manifesto’ You have written an essay on that and this is about and this is about fantasy and science fiction how you think about it. You just mentioned which is fascinating, when you came the first thing is this is an alien environment and you do not get the sort of representation (expected). I have a parallel here. I came here in undergrad and let me acquaint you. I do not know if you have seen the recent Korean film “Past lives”. If you have not seen it, it was in cinemas recently now it

is being streamed. It deals a little bit with this experience. It is fiction actually based on real life but it is not science fiction. You said somethings in speculative manifesto and the two things I will pick, in that you said its potential is immense like you know you can really, and you also said that it has not been realised yet in the right way (its Potential) What are you talking about can you clarify? Prof. Singh: I will try, actually I always talk about this in English but one day I

want to translate this into Hindi for everyone. But basically the idea is we live in sociological constructs. It may be our culture or our economic system which you can call a framework or paradigm. We can think of it as invisible structures from which our concepts come out and our values come out Like the differences in American mainstream culture and the South Asian culture. You take some things for granted. The way guests are treated in South Asian culture is different than how the more casua

l way the people in the West do. You don’t think about it when you are immersed in your culture but when you travel to that other planet or the other world then suddenly you realise there are other ways to live and be not just my own. So that’s what I mean by framework or paradigm or whatever you want to call it which helps us invisibly makes sense of the world and most of the time we are not aware we are making assumptions about the world. Similarly, with economics we think that the new liberal

economic globalized system, that’s the way to be. Take development, there is only one path of development that the west has shown us and all the rest of us have to just catch up with that, right. So these are all in a way you can think of them as a sort of trap in which we are trapped. These are invisible and mental shackles in a way. Some of the things that speculative fiction does and does very well is that it can immerse us in worlds where the fundamental rules whether they are sociological

or scientific or technological are completely different. So, suddenly you realise that the things you take for granted are not setting stone. They (are) actually constructs and that means you can deconstruct them you can change things. That’s what I mean by the revolutionary potential of science fiction of speculative fiction. Am I making sense? I hope I am making sense. Prof. Salman: Certainly, certainly and you said, I guess what you mentioned before that the voices the writers mostly although

break it but most of the breaks are still in western context but if somebody from the global south if we talk about it that would be a different way of breaking something right I mean not just providing a perspective. Prof Singh: Exactly yeah yeah and also we have to recognise of course that our societies are also very unequal and there are power hierarchies in our societies as well. So, you know at one level if you look on the global scale there’s western speculative fiction then there’s let’s

say fiction from the global south. But, if you examine that minutely then we find out that the inequalities in our global south also we need to address them too. So, in India for example teleth writers or adivasi writers their voices there way of seeing the world have become extremely important. So you know we can't just talk about large scale we have to examine ourselves as writers and see where is our positionality in this pyramid of privilege and then how do we hear and how do we signal boos

t those voices in our own context as well. And the kinds of amazing ways of rethinking the world that come so for instance I have been looking at indigenous value systems partly because I am also a scholar of climate change and it's just a completely different orientation. So that's partly but I mean by the value of speculative fiction because if you immerse yourself in a world which is so different that even the fundamental things you take for granted are changed then you start to question your

own assumptions and it is unrealized this potential is unrealized because we have not yet come to that point. Now actually it is very exciting time for speculative fiction. Nowadays these online speculative fiction conferences one future fiction which actually Francesco Verso, amazing writer, editor from Italy, he has been organizing with the help of international group of people is truly international science fiction conferences and you hear voices from different countries in Latin America and

Asia including South Asia and so on. And it's so interesting to hear all these different perspectives so that unrealized potential I think we are living in a very exciting time as the world is hurtling towards disaster which it is I mean we are already in a lot of trouble because of not just because of climate change but all the related social environmental problems you know it's people more and more people are questioning this dominant way of living and thinking that's been globalized and so s

peculative fiction has an even more important role. Prof. Salman: It is interesting you just mentioned international perspective is coming and you also said our climate change is going in a direction this year specially fires and different things floods, drought everything is happening all at the same time. I mean this can be a leading question what can be the role of speculative fiction because obviously it has a role. But I will ask a slightly different question. Do you think it can make an im

pact or for that what strategy can make it more effective because yes speculative fiction can be important yes it actually talks about these things but what do you think becomes an effective tool. We have to change the narrative because we are in serious trouble. Prof Singh: Yeah, yeah, we are in serious trouble and you know speculative fiction by itself can't do anything but I think that speculative fiction can play a role in this sort of multi-pronged you know connected networked way of engagi

ng with the problem because like you said we need different narratives we need different you know like thought experiments and speculative fiction can really help us make those thought experiments you know like I wrote a story a long time ago called Indra's Web which is about a settlement it's in that ambiguity machines collection and it's about an imaginary a different way to imagine a city and you know in that sense reimagining the world in which we want to live and one in which is not just he

lping us re-negotiate our relationship with the rest of nature but also a world that's more just more equal more peaceful this is a great joy in doing that and so for the duration of writing the story or reading the story you're actually in that world and that shifts you from the inside but of course it's not enough so one has to you know and I'm not an expert in this but I know people have talked about how certain kinds of literature influence movements you know or Inspire movements and thought

processes and so on and so forth so I can I can speculate that speculative fiction can perhaps Inspire or be part of some kind of large-scale movement that's reimagining the world and in that sense I can see the possibilities in fact you know I do exercise with my students to help them shift their way of thinking about the world you know like what can the future look like or you know and we we talk about colonialism which of course South Asia has experienced it for almost three hundred years of

British rule but also most of the world for 300 to 500 years was under European colonialism so a lot of our ideas and we are not actually I don't think we're in a post-colonial world the colonialism is just shape-shifted in fact some Scholars think it's colonialism by corporation but anyway that aside the fact is that our ideas our thoughts our concepts so many of them come from the legacy of colonialism and so if we think about you know if we imagine different worlds and try to live different

worlds not in isolation because we don't have time for individual you know impact to scale up but through movements and collectives you know then I think that speculative fiction can play an important role and so it's a hard task but it's possible I think. Prof Salman: And again as you just mentioned. There is an English channel of Kainaat and there is a series there ‘Chai on the moon’. I will bother you with regard to that in a few months because what I worry about you talked about it economica

lly the structures of corporations and things like that they are another form of colonialism and that is going on and now in space also its like sort of exported into space and we will replicate it with same problems. I will have a long conversation about that separately because I mean that’s a fascinating and depressing topic at the same time. But here I know about your time too it's valuable. If your one or two stories the ones that struck me, one which I absolutely love ‘The Woman Who Thought

She Was a Planet’ right, and now you were talking about different countries gender and science, you are in sciences in physics and gender issues sort of like stem fields. Can you tell a little what is that story about and how was its motivation and how did you imagine it. I think that’s a fascinating story the way you imagined it, brilliant. Prof. Singh: Well thank you, that story is a very strange one because you know most of the time when I write I start from the first sentence and at that t

ime I don’t know what is going to come after that, to find that out, I need to write the second sentence and while writing that sentence like a path discovered in a jungle, the words take me towards the story. But this story, when one day I woke up in the morning I felt like someone is speaking in my head wants to tell me its story and I swear to you, I just sat down and typed out the whole story in one go it just came to me complete. Normally, like I said I start with a sentence. Sometimes I ha

ve a vague idea that in the middle there should be a scene like this like this or perhaps the end should have this word or that phrase. Prof. Salman: Vandana one second Prof. Singh: Sure Prof. Salman: You have to go back again it got stuck though again you were saying that normally it comes down that's what, that's where you were saying and then you froze Prof Singh: Okay sorry sorry about that Prof Salman: Yeah that's okay yeah so you did say you did it all in one go right Prof Singh: Yeah so,

I think what you didn't catch perhaps was when I was talking about what I do normally right Prof Salman: That's right yeah just the last few seconds of it I think you just you were saying and then you started writing it and you wrote it in one go and then Prof Singh: Yeah I wrote it in one go and you know what I was saying was that when I normally write a story then like I said I may have a first sentence and so on and I may have a vague idea of what is going to happen in the middle or what shou

ld happen in the last scene that sort of thing but I don't have the complete story and I have to write it to find out. For this particular story I don't know why it does not happen normally but it just came to me complete and you know the second round of editing was very minor so it was it was very strange experience. Prof Salman: Why I mean for what reason the characters in the story Ramnath Mishwa and his wife Kamala is that right Kamla or Kamala. Prof Singh: Kamla Prof Salman: Kamla right. W

hy do you think that story resonated with you or its process was different. Prof Singh: I don't know, you know it's one of the mysteries of the unconscious mind. The previous experiences, the images suddenly they crystallize into this into a story into a narrative you know and I didn't I have not had any direct experiences like that story but of course we've all observed patriarchy for instance and especially earlier Generation you know relationships there between the genders and which are still

true in many contexts so I've observed those sort of things and so somehow you know and again I did not I find it extremely hard to explain how that story got written because I don't know myself you know it's one of the mysteries of writing. Prof. Salman: It is another fascinating thing for me that when you write science papers specially the papers in that actually you exactly know where the story is going but it’s very interesting that for your fiction writing it's exactly the opposite. When y

ou're writing one sentence you do not know where the story will go so in some sense it's a really beautiful contrast. In science papers you exactly know in fact you tell them in abstract this is what's going to happen and then you lay out how is it going to happen whereas fiction is different so that's actually really interesting to me as well. Prof. Singh: Well you know in theoretical physics things are not so clear-cut so which is my background is in theoretical physics because the universe be

comes even stranger the more you try to understand it so you know there's no cut and dried reality in that sense but yeah but that's a whole other story. Prof. Salman: Okay one another story which caught my eye and after that we will wrap it up that like you know as I said coming from Pakistan I was intrigued by infinities and in that the character of Abdul Kareem it's seeped in a sense if I remember correctly there is mention of Urdu literature in it there is mention of infinities. I'm just cur

ious the genesis of that story, It also has political commentary again it's a fantasy so there is an element I shouldn't say it's not time travel it's sort of like you know dimensional aspects of fantasy I mean I'm just curious that had again that resonated quite well with me, I was just curious. Prof Singh: Yeah well you know this among the things that (I) have always been concerned about is you know and especially now but even at that time how easy it is for politicians to divide communities l

ike you know Muslims and Hindus or between castes in India and you know I grew up with the grandparents who were had taken part, my grandmother on my father's side had taken part in the independent struggle and so on and my grandfather had during partition actually helped to prevent riots along with a Muslim friend of his so I was brought up in this very open-hearted open-minded atmosphere so whenever there used to be any kind of communal disharmony it used to really and still does really really

hurt me inside so it was partly because I wanted to put that in fiction and I had not done that before it was in my mind that I needed to write about those things but it also has struck me since childhood especially because the universe is just so amazing and so full of wonder that why do we waste our time fighting with each other you know when we have a common origin from the stars you know and we are all inhabitants of Mother Earth and so is it possible that if people were exposed to how wond

erful the universe is would they be able to would that change our relationships among communities and of course you can say that's very naive but anyway what happened with that story was that Abdul Kareem walked into my mind and I didn't know him at first which is this old bitten down man very different from myself you know different religion, different age, different generation all of that and small town you know I grew up in a big city so and he walks into my mind and he just stays there for a

while and then I learned that he's very interested in mathematics that his whole life has been devoted to other needs of his family and so on but his passion is mathematics and so then there were some vague images like he's playing chess with a friend and then somehow this notion of mathematics coming back to him in old age and so and then you know at the same time there's you know all these Hindu Muslim tensions and so on and so forth has a kind of backdrop which he hardly notices when he's on

his journey because it's like it's so amazing the universe is so amazing and we humans are so fortunate to live in it that it just seems entirely alien to him right and so I started to write about him and I had other than those vague images of possibilities. I had no idea what was going to happen in the story and so writing sentence by sentence then I realised okay now this is going to happen and now this happened what will Abdul Karim do after this. So you know it was such a strange and it was

so difficult to write it's one of the most painful things to write that I've ever written but I had this compulsion from inside that I have to write this down and it was also joyful to write you know And I asked myself what right do I have to make an elderly Muslim gentleman the main character of the story you know and I did a lot of research you know it was on mathematics on religion and so on and so forth. And the historian Salim Kidwai was very kind and looked at the story and so did Danish

Hussein I was so grateful to both of them. Of course any faults in the story are my fault not their fault but it was and then I consulted I talked to friends who are mathematicians did a lot of reading on Ancient mathematics as well as the mathematics of infinity and it was a real Adventure writing that story but yeah I'm very fond of Abdul Kareem he's one of my favorite fictional characters and he lived for a long time in my head before I wrote the story. Prof Salman: Really it popped out for m

e also I mean that is why I was trying to find out like it's such a rich character and it's such a richly visualized character like you know a realized character I really appreciated it so fascinating to know the story behind it. So I'm gonna wrap things up and I know you as I mentioned, are in the advisory council for messaging extraterrestrials. But I wanted to go the other way or like you know in your mind if we do detect a signal of course Seti is functioning and not sort of like we actual

ly see people or something like that or aliens but if you just detect a signal how do you see our society, earth, or people yes I mean just as I guess sort of like you know how would they change sort of like you know over 100 Year 150 year timeframe again for me Arthur C Clarke’s book the childhood's end I mean in some sense that is I mean I love that because there is no hurry in it it's not like Hollywood. It has a scale of 50 years or 100 years. How do you see if we actually only get a signal

which we know is alien intelligence and that's all we know do you think we go back to what we are doing or do you think there will be some structural change or do you think there will be some impact? Prof Singh: I think there will be there's got to be some impact I mean I think a lot of things will stay the same as long as it's just a signal but you know and we're going to see different kinds of reactions from different sets of people you know so you know if you compare ET with some of the Bolly

wood Blockbusters you know like where the aliens come to land and then they all take part in a dance number right it's very different from the Western conceptualization. So I think that you know we're going to have people who are in power for instance will be interested in what kind of new technologies of control can we learn from an advanced civilization right others will be interested in well you know now that we know that they're people on other worlds what does that mean for us humans, that

means that there is such a thing as a common Humanity because there is the other and so some people will be thinking along those lines and what it's going to end up being depends on a lot of factors of course you know whether the aliens actually do more than just send messages maybe do they come to visit or you know also the other internal issues that are taking place in within human societies on Earth. So yeah but that's a very very interesting question. Prof Salman: Okay we will be in contact

with you again and thank you so much for your time and for this very rich conversation. Prof Singh: Thank you I really enjoyed it and we'll keep in touch.