‘Not as a historian, but as a scientific observer': Notes on science in Jaspreet Singh's Helium

My remarks on Jaspreet Singh’s Helium will focus mainly on the aspect of science in the novel. This may appear as a surprising choice at first sight, given the urgency and intensity of the novel’s core concerns – the orchestrated anti-Sikh pogroms following the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984, as well as the subsequent denial of responsibility, commemoration and mourning both by the state and in the public record. But my reasons for choosing this focus are not only in the limitations of my own academic qualifications for addressing those core concerns directly, although, very clearly, other contributors to this colloquium will speak on those concerns in Helium with an insight and authority which this author, a literary scholar whose main source of insight and information is Jaspreet Singh’s novel itself, could never aspire to. My own expertise lies more in the examination of the representation and functions of natural sciences in contemporary fiction. But the novel generously repays an interest in science as one of its pervading themes and concerns, and it does so, as I will suggest, in ways that are intricately linked to the representation of the novel’s core concerns. The indications for the relevance of ‘science’ are widespread and go deep. But they start with the title of the novel which is, quite laconically, that of a chemical element, Helium, to which we are introduced comprehensively very early in the novel: