Caught between the Goddess and the Cyborg: Third-World Women and the Politics of Science in Three Works of Indian Science Fiction

In 1905 Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, a young Bengali reformist, wrote a short story entitled “Sultana’s Dream”. Dubbed “a terrible revenge!” (against men) by her husband, who proudly arranged for its publication in The Indian Ladies’ Magazine,1 this short utopian tale of gender role inversion forcefully articulated Hossain’s views regarding the power of modern education to transform the position of women in contemporary Muslim society. Nearly a century later, Manjula Padmanabhan wrote Harvest (1996) for “the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation International Competition for a new, original, unproduced, unpublished play which ‘deals with the problems facing Man on the threshold of the 21st century’”.2 This dystopian play, which won first prize in the competition, forcefully articulates the author’s concerns regarding the neocolonial implications, especially for third-world women, of economic globalization. 1996 also saw the publication of Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome, a novel that explores in fictional form the omissions and commissions of the discourse of modern science that has been subjected to extensive critique by both feminist and postcolonial theory in the past couple of decades. Not surprisingly, its overt engagement with the history of science, combined with a temporal span that includes the future, has led The Calcutta Chromosome to be characterized as a work of science fiction. The label of science fiction, however, could be applied with equal justification to “Sultana’s Dream” as well as Harvest, not only because of Caught between the Goddess and the Cyborg