Word Count: 4659 | Reading Time: 16 min
I.
The genre of science fiction, as a whole, has a long tradition of interest in history, chronology and the passage of time. SF’s engagement with temporality is usually articulated through the genre’s vast and varied visions of the future, but the temporal imaginings of the genre also extend backward into history through narratives of time travel, alternate history and historical fantasy. In this, science fiction shares ideological and aesthetic aims with an important literary movement: modernism.
Both modernism and science fiction can be understood as parallel responses to cultural desires and anxieties of the early decades of the twentieth century. These parallel responses often took the form of defamiliarization and estrangement from reality in order to bring to the fore the limitations of realist representation, and to allow for a more critical view of social reality. Beyond the shared interest in producing estrangement, modernism and science fiction have a similar entanglement with the project of modernity, as well the structure of colonialism and imperialism which undergirds the former. Just as how modernism and colonialism are deeply entangled with one another, science fiction too has a history of complicity with the project of Western imperialism. According to science fiction scholar Johan Rieder, science fiction’s origins can be seen as a product of colonial and imperialist projects, such as those of the British and French in the 19th century. So, we can say that both science fiction and modernism were responses to the varied experience of modernity, shaped by the forces of colonialism and the uneven spread of global capitalism.
Beyond responding to modernity and its changes, both science fiction and modernist literature share a commitment to making readers’ reality of the world strange and foreign, producing an “estranging” effect that can in turn allow readers to view their world more critically. While works of high modernism bring about this estranging effect through techniques such as stream-of-consciousness, fragmentation, and experimentation, science fiction enacts this estranging attitude by articulating its imaginary, fantastical world in a realistic and plausible manner. Another characteristic that science fiction and modernist literature share is an acute consciousness of time and a specific notion of temporality. This is unsurprising given that the project of modernity conceptualizes time as irrevocably and relentlessly moving forward, as a progression which is forever being propelled toward the future—the words most associated with modernity are progress, development, growth. Modernity’s preoccupation with time-keeping and with the passage of time is in fact crucial to its self-definition as something which is new, original and a complete break from the past. This insistence of modernity to deny its own rootedness in historical time, conversely, means that ideas of history, history-making and chronology are all the more present in both science fiction and modernist literature. Both literary traditions are interested in disrupting this idea that the modern age is completely different from anything that occurred in history, which after all, is an illusionary myth.
The story of modernity that is told is that it emerged in the West (the center) and then spread from there to the peripheries (the Third World, the Global South, basically the entire Non-Western world) slowly over time. In this story, the idea is that the West is truly modern while the rest of the world are encountering or experiencing modernity belatedly or are always and irrevocably in the process of “catching up” to the center. This story of modernity is premised on the assumption that there is a singular modernity, an idea that has been critiqued repeatedly in academic and intellectual circles. The critique argues that even though modernity is a shared global condition, because it is brought about by the uneven spread of capitalism, the experience of modernity has many local and regional variations and specificities around the world. In modernist literature or science fiction that emerges from these so-called “peripheries,” such as South Asia, there is an awareness that the very temporality upon which the dominant (Western) discourses of modernism rests is one that is constructed by the story of modernity, which allows these literary texts to play with temporality in different ways.
In the case of Urdu literature, modernist literature often had surreal, fantastical, and even science fiction-esque elements that allowed these texts to explore themes of history-making, the passage of time, and an experience of modernity that was shaped and influenced by British colonialism and the postcolonial nation-state. Here, I will focus on two Urdu texts in particular, which utilize the trope of traveling back and forward in time in order to articulate some of these themes: the first is Quratulain Hyder’s short story “Raushni Ki Raftar” [“The Speed of Light”] (1982) and the second is “Fasana-e-Akbar” [“Chronicles of the Time of Akbar the Great”] (written as an incomplete manuscript in 1944 and published later in 1968) by Syed Rafiq Hussain.
“Raushni Ki Raftar” utilizes the well-worn science fiction trope of time travel in order to comment on and complicate the linear progression of time ushered in by colonial modernity. The story explores the adventures of a young Syrian Christian scientist Dr. Padma Mary Abraham Kurien from Kerala, employed in the Space Research Centre in South India in postcolonial India. She stumbles upon a time machine and accidentally goes back in time to ancient Egypt of 1315 BC, where she interacts with Nobleman Thoth, a member of the ruling noble elite (who later in the story travels to 1980s postcolonial India with Padma), as well as Mikhael ben Hannan, a member of the Hebrew community currently being persecuted under the rule of the Pharaoh before the coming of Moses. In contrasting these immensely different historical moments of ancient Egypt and postcolonial South Asia, Hyder’s story offers a cyclical and recursive view of temporality as an alternative to modernity’s notion of time as relentlessly moving forward from tradition to progress and advancement. Hussain’s “Fasana-e-Akbar”, containing six chapters which were conceived of as part of a larger novel that remained incomplete due to his death, similarly has a character going back in time. In Hussain’s case, the story is written as a self-consciously constructed autobiography with the main character having the same name as the author, that is Syed Rafiq Hussain. In the first chapter, Rafiq relates his childhood and youth at the tail end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century in a deeply realist mode before the narrative changes shape into a science fiction story relating the events of Rafiq’s life in the period between June 1942 to July 1943, in which while touring an abandoned Mughal fort in Agra, he disappeared from his time and found himself in 1556 Mughal India during Akbar’s reign. Hussain’s story, contrasting the time periods of colonial British India with Mughal India, is therefore also engaged in grappling with notions of history-making, temporality and the passage of time, but is doing so with the ideological urge to project a golden, romanticized Muslim nationalist past in an attempt to partially excise the colonial encounter. This is in contrast to Hyder’s story, which is more interested in presenting a critical reading of her chosen historical moment, focusing more on undercutting hierarchical structures other than colonial power which marginalize and oppress according to gender or religion. Although both do this to varying ends, both “Raushni Ki Raftar” and “Fasana-e-Akbar” repudiate and challenge the view of history as a linear progress from tradition and backwardness to a golden future of perfect modernity, and instead articulate alternate visions of history and of temporality as either cyclical, recursive or overlapping. They do this specifically by drawing on the science fictional trope of time travel as a way of challenging modernity’s linear notion of time and by articulating instead, in inter-connected histories.
II.
It is not just the stories’ challenging of the Western notion of time that makes them distinctly modernist, but also how they both play with different genres—realism, modernism, science fiction, tarikh (historiography), and autobiography. Very early on in the story, Hyder’s narrator winkingly comments on the story adhering to the conventions of science fiction, and this allusion to the ways in which the story is conforming to or subverting genre tropes and conventions is carried throughout the story. As Padma is exploring the time machine which she finds out on a field on her way back from her work at the Space Research Centre, the story’s description of the moment of time travel is explained in a self-aware manner:
“It so happened when the doctor got up from her seat to come out, her right elbow touched the button that read: 1315 BC. At that instant, a flash of lightning—and a buzzing sound—within a second the rocket soared—who knows from where to where—Dr. Kurien was unnerved, her palms and feet cold, her head whirling. She closed her eyes. When her eyes opened, she saw a bright sky all around and a deep blue sea down below. And the delta, the marshland, the bullrushes, the sandy desert. She heaved a sigh of relief. Of course this was no science fiction! It was the same old familiar world” (188).
A few lines later, when Padma is still unwilling to believe that she has traveled back in time to 1315 BC ancient Egypt, she remarks to herself: “From where did 1315 BC pop up? Surely this is 1966! Oh good, this wasn’t a time machine, or some such thing, just the latest and most modern type of rocket. Must have been brought by some visiting American or Russian scientist to our land” (189). Here we can argue that Padma is utilizing the science fictional trope “cognitive estrangement” in real life, as she attempts to grapple with both the familiarity and unfamiliarity of the world in which she has been thrust into. Later on, when Padma encounters the strapping and good looking Thoth and Mekhail, the narrator comments, “In any respectable science fiction, romance should enter into the picture at this point. But no, it won’t. Padma was too hungry” (190). In this way, Hyder first lays out the genre expectations of a science fiction narrative, and then wryly denies the fulfillment of those expectations to her readers.
Furthermore, the story makes repeated claims to Western Enlightenment-era epistemologies of scientific reasoning and rationality in providing the explanation as to how Padma ended up in 1315 BC. There is the fact that Padma herself is a scientist and is participating in the scientific discourse of a postcolonial Cold War-era world (note, for example, the matter-of-fact reference to American and Russian scientists as well as to the idea of a line of ever-advanced space rockets). The story also provides rationalist rules and constraints for the world it creates, as Padma eventually reveals to Thoth: “This rocket can travel beyond the speed of light only four times” (216). This conscious effort to provide scientific explanations for the functioning of the narrative’s plot adheres to Darko Suvin’s (1977) definition of science fiction, which requires the use of cognition to enact its estranging effect, and which therefore draws on the bodies of knowledge available in the author’s own time. Hyder’s story thus makes appeals to cognition to hold in tact the realism of its narrative world.
Similarly, Hussain’s “Fasana-e-Akbar” too makes clear its awareness of participating in specific literary genres. In this case, the one that it is most consciously emulating is the genre of tarikh or historiography. As Pasha Khan (2019) reminds us, the literary genre of tarikh was closely entwined with a genre that one can argue fed into the science fiction genre in Urdu: the dastan or qissa genre: “Historiography (tārīḳh) was the most important genre in relation to which the qiṣṣah was defined before the late nineteenth century…scrutiny of the qiṣṣah/history relation reveals that the two were implicitly regarded by many as twin genres” (6-7). Given the story’s interest in presenting itself as a traditional tarikh of the Mughal emperor Akbar, and then inserting within that genre the time travel convention of science fiction, we can discern in the story a modernist impulse of formal and generic experimentation.
As mentioned earlier, “Fasana-e-Akbar” begins as a conscious attempt at a commingling of autobiography and tarikh, and an assertion at realism and objective historical truth. The first chapters begins with the following lines:
“O God, first of all I implore that you come to my aid in the writing of this autobiography [aap biti]. Only your Greatness can make the pen of an ignorant like me flow smoothly. Imbue my prose with clarity, so that I may be able to correctly relate events that I have witnessed firsthand with courage and virtue, without malice or spite. Whether or not the reader believes that I am telling the truth does not matter to me. In fact, the truth is that I too am filled with shock and suspicion when I think back to the events. Only God knows the absolute reality of the events. My own reason fails at fully comprehending the things that happened. It is impossible that someone reading this story might get to the bottom of things. If so, glory be to God!” (252).
Here, a few interesting aspects immediately jump out. One is the interest the story shows in realism, verisimilitude and historical accuracy. At the same time, the narrator cautions the reader about the limits of reason and rationality in understanding the events of the narrative. Here, one might argue that since the story does not draw upon an Enlightenment-era scientific-rationalist epistemology for its cognitive estrangement, it is therefore not science fiction, as defined by Suvin. However, I would argue that the story can still be read as science fiction, for a number of reasons.
For one thing, the story’s immediate acknowledgement of the limits of rationalist epistemologies alerts the reader to the idea that other epistemologies are being drawn on. Such epistemologies were prevalent in precolonial South Asia and while they limited the use of reason, they were not anti-rationalist in nature. These epistemologies merely “circumscribed the role of the intellect (‘aql ) and privileged the heart as the organ best placed to encompass reality” (163) and instead centered the affect of wonderment (ta‘ajjub, ḥairat). Khan explains that within the framework of this kind of knowledge tradition,
“The cause may ultimately be discoverable; in this sense, the wonderful was not contrary to reason…wonder may be a challenge to the intellect, to inquire and probe into the cause of the wondrous thing. However, Divine Power, infinitely exalted in this statement, constituted a limit to the intellect’s power” (182).
The narrator of “Fasana-e-Akbar” can be seen in the passage above to be appealing to a similar kind of epistemology—one that points to the limits of the intellect (“My own reason fails at fully comprehending the things that happened”), evokes the feeling of wonder and awe (“I too am filled with shock and suspicion”) and yet still encourages the use of reason to understand events to the extent that it is possible for humans to do so (“It is impossible that someone reading this story might get to the bottom of things. If so, glory be to God!).
Secondly, even though Hussain’s story begins and continues in form as a tarikh, its narrative moves forward through the science fiction trope of time travel. Unlike the protagonist in Hyder’s story who travels back in time through the use of technology, here Rafiq ends up in Mughal India when he is washing his face in a stepwell (baoli) in an old Mughal-era fort and accidentally falls into the water, being saved from drowning by people and then emerging out of the same stepwell in the 16th century. Here, no scientific explanation is provided, but the protagonist spends considerable amounts of time trying to reconcile this extraordinary event with realism and reason. Magic and supernatural explanations are brought forth, but they exist alongside appeals to reason and deduction in understanding how the time travel occurred. For instance, when Rafiq is presented in the court of Akbar and he is asked to explain himself he says, “I am an unfortunate man who has gotten trapped in some kind of evil magic” (270) but another character contradicts this by calling his predicament one which is “worthy of reasoned thought” (ibid) and then lists down the characteristics of Rafiq’s out of time appearance methodically. As the story progresses, Emperor Akbar demands that Rafiq present proof of his claims of being from a different time, and Rafiq spends much time with the Abkar’s court poet, Faizi, where they try to use deductive reasoning to solve the mystery of Rafiq’s time travel. Both stories, therefore reveal a consciousness about the various genres they are participating in and engaging and subverting the conventions of.
IV.
According to Suparno Banerjee, a scholar of South Asian science fiction, South Asian science fictional works that engage the concept of time travel exist on “a sliding scale between subaltern and dominant anti-colonial discourses, employing rereading of canonical history, sanctioned cultural memory and invocation of communicative memory.” Both “Raushni Ki Raftar” and “Fasana-e-Akbar” use the science fiction trope of time travel to comment on history, the passage of time, and colonial modernity, although both figure at different points on Banerjee’s sliding slide. “Raushni Ki Raftar” introduces through Padma a romanticized nostalgia for the past but then immediately undercuts it with humor. There are descriptions of the ancient city of Heliopolis and its grand mansions and halls, but those are interjected with comments that point to the constructedness and falsity of the romanticisation with which ancient Egypt presents in the cultural imagination. For example, one such descriptive passage says,
“They entered the hall. At the center of its silvery, pearl-gray floor, was a pond laid in black stone. On the shelves, papyrus rolls, tied with gold ribbons, were placed neatly. The walls were decorated with colorful frescos, rows of profiles, golden couches and chairs. It looked like all the items were brought back from the ‘Egyptian Rooms’ of the British Museum and placed here!” (193; emphasis mine).
Another passage states:
“Padma walked a bit further in search of a restaurant and found a bearded old man squatting, doing rosary, in front of a closed shop (with a sign ‘available on rent’). He was dressed in a robe and a round cap—like a Jew in Cochin, or a priest of a Syrian church, or a Mapilla maulvi. Suddenly, a familiar-looking figure materialized in the midst of the teeming crowd, dressed like he was wearing a period costume in a Hollywood film” (191; emphasis mine).
Both the comments on the British Museum and Hollywood period films jar readers out of the scene and remind them of the ways in which the historical memory of ancient Egypt is constructed in the present. A few passages down, the challenge to any kind of romanticized view of the ancient Egyptian past is made more explicit when Padma is taken to Nobleman Thoth’s mansion and interacts with him:
“Mr. Thoth, the Senior, was the Pharaoh’s chief scribe and belonged to an elite family. Thoth, the Junior, was also into writing. As the script was pictorial—hieroglyphs—he knew art as well. He kept aloof from the conspiratorial environs of the court and instead frequented the circle of artists and writers of the city. He was irked with the conservative beliefs and ancient traditions of his country—but the oldies did not let the new generation have its ways. “So, this is the reality of ancient Egypt’s mystery and romance,” Padma thought with disappointment. One of the scribes in the library, busy copying the scrolls, had a runny nose, while the other scratched his head continuously. Two young scribes kept arguing with each other. The slave-girl called Anoti was neither beautiful nor attractive, but pock-marked and chubby. Even Thoth Junior was just an ordinary boy, except he wore a Hollywood parade costume instead of a coat and pants!” (194-195).
Here, Padma is a stand-in for the reader, coming into the scene of ancient Egypt with her pre-conceived notions of what the historical period would have been like and being disappointed with the everyday texture of it, which is not unlike that of the contemporary time to which she belongs, with the period being filled with ordinary humans with their everyday foibles and interpersonal conflicts.
At the same time, the story uses time travel to critique modernity, and to challenge the idea that time moves linearly from backwardness toward progress and advancement. When Padma reveals to the Israelites what is in store for them, she remarks,
“The Romans will expel you from their land and you will wander the earth as exiles. Then, after 32,500 years, and 1948 years after the birth of the Messiah Jesus Christ, you will establish a new state in the same Canaan. And just like you were exiled by other nations, you will dispossess the Arabs from their land” (210).
Here, by referring to the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 and Israel’s Zionist occupation of Palestine, Padma makes explicit the cycle of violence and persecution that continues over the course of history, recurring in various guises, complicating the idea that the period of modernity is one of justice and the flourishing of humankind, and instead emphasizing a more cyclical view of temporality.
An even more explicit critique of modernity occurs in the later part of the story, after Thoth ends up traveling forward in time with Padma to 1980s India. Thoth refashions himself to fit the contemporary period as Al-Syed Dr. Thoth al-Hermez, a successful artist of ancient Egyptian paintings, living in a lavish mansion in Bombay’s fashionable Cambala Hill district and traveling the world (213). However, he becomes increasingly depressed and dissatisfied by the trappings of modern life, until the story’s climax when he announces to Padma, “I have seen enough of the future!” (216). When Padma asks why he is dissatisfied with the modern times, he says, “What exactly is so great about this age?” (215). Pointing to the television which is running news of numerous wars around the globe and various racial, ethnic and religious conflict, he continues:
“Tell me, exactly how civilized have you become in the intervening 32,500 years? We persecuted the Israelites and fought against the Assyrians. You all live in perfect peace and harmony, filled with love for one another. Our pharaohs were cruel despots, while your rulers are angelic. We were fearful of death, while you have liberated yourselves from the fear of extinction. You do not build magnificent tombs. You do not venerate the deceased. You do not write elegies and books of the dead. In fact, you have given up on writing poetry altogether. Your religion, philosophy, morality, psychology, mythology, your ideas of romance and spirituality, all of these are entirely rational. Your wars are based on humanism. Your nuclear bomb is a symbol for your love of mankind. Clearly, the speed of your light is very fast indeed” (215).
Here, by pointing out the violences that undergird the project of modernity, and by exposing the contradictions between the espoused values of the modern age—humanism, love of mankind, reason and rationality—Hyder’s story brings together the interests of both modernism and science fiction.
By contrast, Hussain’s story is less immediately critical of a romanticized nostalgia for the past. One thing to note here is that the story was conceived of a part of a full-length novel that remained unfinished due to the author’s death, and so it is possible the first few chapters that we do have, and which seem to indicate a more uncritical view of the Mughal past, were merely meant as a setup for more critical perspectives to emerge later on in the narrative. However, in the existing chapters of the story, it is possible to discern a specific kind of colonial Indian Muslim yearning for a golden age in history, which is a prevalent theme in Urdu literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For instance, when talking about his childhood, Rafiq relates his older sister talking to him of the past glories of the family and of ashraf (upper-caste) Muslims more broadly:
“She would tell me of glorious things and tell me different kinds grand tales…the effect was that it instilled in me a deep sense of the glory of my religious, my caste (“qaum”), and my family. Under her tutelage, I felt as if the world was filled with lowbred, vulgar people with small oasis of civilized, sharif people scattered about, and of those sharif people, our family was the most cultured and civilized” (255).
He goes on to say, “I don’t know why or on the basis of what knowledge did Accho Baji told me that we were actually Arabs; our forefathers came from a line of kings. Now kinship has fallen out of our family line and we are now impoverished, and yet what does that matter? We are still the children of a grand sharif family” (ibid). Here, there is the familiar nostalgia of upper-caste Muslims in colonial India, although the author does introduce a fissure of doubt as to the veracity of such a narrative when Rafiq says he isn’t sure where his sister came up with this line of family lore.
Later, when he is strolling the streets of Arga, Rafiq muses to himself about the lost glory of the Muslim rulers:
“This is the same Agra that was once the seat of power for Mughal emperors. These same streets must have been walked by who knows what kind of glorious people. Now look, there goes the modern Lala Ji, wearing trousers over his dhoti, a hat and coat on, walking with such stiffness. His ancestors would never have imagined that one day their progeny would embrace such a garb. In the age of the Mughals, his ancestors would have proudly worn the Muslim dress. I wonder what kind of clothes the Muslims of those times wore. Look, that man is driving a horse carriage (tanga). It is strange to imagine that perhaps his ancestors might have a vizier or a king amongst them…Oh how the tables have turned! Look, a bicycle. For god’s sake, if Shah Jahan had been told by a fortune teller that one day in your city a nawab’s son–or at least a munshi’s son—will be flying through the air on such a contraption, he would surely send the fortuneteller to the madhouse. I’m sure there must have been madhouses in those times too…” (262).
Here, on the surface it seems that the narrator is echoing the familiar kind of nostalgic rhetoric Muslims suffering under colonial rule would use. However, the tone is exaggerated to the extent that Rafiq’s musings take on an almost comical affect, implying perhaps that these naive and simplistic views of the character will eventually be challenged and contradicted later on in the story. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern in Hussain’s story this musing on history as a story of the rise and fall of glorious empires, and in that way one can argue that the story critiques the author’s colonial present as one which has not brought about a linear progression from backwardness to enlightenment and advancement (the markers of colonial modernity, such as the Western dress of coat, trousers and hat, or the bicycle are particularly made subjects of exaggerated disdain). In so doing, the story, like Hussain’s, critiques modernity’s narrative of linear temporality. Using the science fiction trope of time travel allows both Hyder and Hussain to articulate both localized, vernacular and specific concerns on the one hand, and address and critique the temporality established by colonial modernity on the other.