The Yesterday and Tomorrow
of Indian Steampunk

by Ishita Lahiri

Bibliography
Footnotes

The Punk in ‘Steampunk’

We are here to make the past look better. Simply kill a king here and invent a technology some years earlier and there you go, history fixed! The Victorian era, though all filled with smog and tuberculosis, suddenly seems like a time worth living in, for the brass is shining and the stars are within reach! — Nick Ottens

In the early months of 2009 a raging and quite pertinent interaction had taken over the science fiction fandom: the issue was of race and its recreation in literature. The debate on racism and how marginalized voices were unfairly exoticized by the West spanned a number of months over various blogs. Consolidated under a single name ‘RaceFail ’09’ the discussion included eminent authors and SF personas, some of whom expressed concerns over inherent prejudice surrounding the romanticization of ‘Victorientalism’. (1) This is especially relevant for steampunk which time and again has invited both criticism and its defence for engaging (and often idolizing) a period known for its imperialist attitudes and racist tendencies.

The aesthetic of steampunk isn’t hard to pin down for someone just being introduced to the genre. Ranging from shiny brass equipment to spiky goggles and rusty dirigibles, the subculture almost emblematizes the quintessential Victorian ‘dandy’. However it is not impossible for subversion to take place and it is perhaps here where the idea of ‘punk’ comes in. John Coulthart posits such an equation in The Steampunk Bible (2) to make the idea more lucid: “STEAM PUNK = Mad Scientist Inventor [invention (steam x airship or metal man I baroque stylings) x (pseudo) Victorian setting] + progressive or reactionary politics x adventure plot.”

The inclusion of certain ‘reactionary politics’ is crucial to the genre and has been emphasized by participants of the fandom to be central in recreating a version of the past. The questions that plagued the fandom during the RaceFail debate have since then perturbed steampunk neophytes as well. Does steampunk promote a more consumable and amicable version of Industrial steam-powered England? Do the active re-imaginings of the past do away with colonial violence perpetrated in third world countries? And finally, how differently does a post-colonial nation like India react to steampunk literature?

Most of these questions receive uneasy answers but in this context, it is important to cast a primary look at some of the multicultural steampunk platforms that have been proliferating since the RaceFail fiasco. Steampunk India by Suna Dasi for instance explores a post-mutiny, alternative Victorian urbanscape while Beyond Victoriana has been dedicated to underrepresented minorities and non-European ethnicities. In one of the blog entries from the latter entitled ‘The Semantics of Words & the Antics of Fashion: Addressing “Victorientalism”,’ (3) the following lines are cited (4):

First, let me say that steampunk, because it deals with the dynamics of history and its alternatives, can never, ever be considered apolitical. History is always subjective, choosing to expose or veil people, events, and perspectives based on the bias of the teller. In fact, it’s not surprising that the most widely-known histories are those written from the perspective of those in the dominant culture and that underrepresented histories are so because they have been ignored or oppressed by institutions in the dominant culture...

While steampunk creators sometimes eschew this ideologue, the fact remains that even an active reimagining of the past would require preferential biases of events to neglect or include. The politics of retro-futurism has been a site of engagement for long starting from forefathers of the movement in Wells and Verne to upcoming authors experimenting with a largely Western style by adding a distinctive Indian ethos to the same.

In fact, the backdrop of steampunk rarely situates itself beyond the onset of industrialisation which recalls the murky, sooty and poverty-stricken Britain filled with poorhouses and slums. Only in this context, the past does not look so grim and instead becomes an aesthetic in its own rights. The idea isn’t only to reclaim an important time period in the history of nation-building but also to redress some of the grievances concerning it. The sentiment is succinctly captured by VanderMeer who says:

At its best, Steampunk is unabashedly positive and inclusive in its outlook, encouraging applied imagination put to both fanciful and practical purposes. Although some Steampunks are escapists - using the accoutrements of the Victorian period without reference to imperialism or the social inequities of the era-many see their efforts as a way to repurpose the best of that time while correcting for the worst. (5)

The uneasy steampunk nostalgia of Victorian Britain is however completely incompatible with the Indian landscape. Industrialization in Britain closely followed colonial control over the rest of the world. In other words, the modernisation of Britain which hailed the influx of a corpus of Science Fiction is dependant largely on Britain’s relationship with the colonies. In his paper Literature and Politics (6) John D. Lindberg writes: “....any work of literature is in part a product of sociological and political factors, to the extent that the writer’s personality has been shaped by sociological and political environment of his time”.

Thus the rise of steampunk literature in Britain — a by-product of rapid industrialisation and its resurgence through the mass appeal of DIY cannot be applied to the India. Consequently, a wholly different set of lens and cultural reading of steampunk has to be undertaken for the latter. In the next section, I will attempt to briefly enumerate the factors for which Indian steampunk takes an altogether different trajectory to its European counterparts.

The Case for India:

Of the two camps between Verne and Wells, India discernibly falls into the latter through its speculative fiction stories and science frequently blended with fantasy and mysticism. While Verne invariably sticks to the ‘hard sciences’ Wells’ imagination is more free-ranging in exploring alterities. The distinction between the two was commented on Verne himself in an interview published in Temple Bar in 1904:

I consider him [Wells], as a purely imaginative writer, to be deserving of very high praise, but our methods are entirely different. I have always made a point in my romances of basing my so-called inventions upon a groundwork of actual fact, and of using in their construction methods and materials which are not entirely without the pale of contemporary engineering skill and knowledge. The creations of Mr. Wells, on the other hand, belong unreservedly to an age and degree of scientific knowledge far removed from the present, though I will not say entirely beyond the limits of the possible. Not only does he evolve his constructions entirely from the realm of the imagination, but he also evolves the materials of which he builds them. (7)

The prevalence of fantasy world building and predilection for magic instead of the engineered retro-futurism of the West creates a chasm in Indian Science fiction. Even the stalwarts of Bengali SF such as of Satyajit Ray and Leela Majumder (who concretely re-defined the genre) take a more “ambiguous stance” (8) when it comes to the creation of fictive landscapes.

Steampunk aesthetics thus find little representation in Indian speculative fiction. The few that do exist mostly remain inaccessible to readers nationwide due to the heterogeneity in cultural milieu and the barrier of languages. While efforts to unearth buried treasures in Indian SF are an on-going project, there is almost no effort undertaken to explore steampunk or proto-steampunk elements in the same.

Coming back to Lindberg’s take on the inter-relatedness of socio-political factors and literature, the discrepancy of work produced by Europe and India is thus undeniable. Suparno Banerjee notes this chasm between the two cultures and the influences on mainstream literature they respectively heralded:

Hans Harder suggests that everything Indian was associated with spiritualism, mainly Hindu, and everything European connected to science. Even the famous Bengali spiritualist Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) juxtaposed the ‘spiritual East’ and the ‘materialistic West’ in his social and religious discussions, which impacted the popular imagination to a great extent... (9)

The noteworthy element here is the reference to the ‘materialistic West’. The West was, without a doubt largely concerned with material which they procured through various imperial connections with the East. The increased export of British goods in Indian markets sustained and maximized British industrialisation thus paving the way for its heyday as an economic power.

In comparison, Britain’s colonies and especially India were undergoing a steady decline in GDP with most of its revenue being drained in the hands of the colonial masters. (10) The export of British goods created a sizeable hole where Indian industrialisation should be. Aditya Mukherjee provides some data to corroborate the deep divide between Western and Eastern economy:

It has been calculated by Irfan Habib that in 1801, at a crucial stage of Britain’s industrial revolution, drain or unrequited transfers to Britain from India represented about 9% of the GNP of the British territories in India which was equal to about 30% of British domestic savings available for capital formation in Britain [....] it must be emphasised that the dependence of the British....on the colonial, non-industrialised (in the Indian case deindustrialised) part of the world increased in tandem with the development of modern industry in Europe... (11)

India as a case of de-industrialisation thus cannot readily engage in reminiscing and romanticizing Western industrialisation while its popular culture is still seeped in the murky, grimy, sooty topoi that Britain has since grown out of. While the arts and crafts movement in Britain (a precursor to later trends in DIY) (12) arose out of a necessity to debunk the heinousness of industrialisation, the Indian handicrafts industry underwent a more effective organisation owing to the absence of industrial processes and not in spite of it.

Artisanal skills which survived colonisation are thus not a reaction against the complexities of modernisation but a bare necessity for Indian textile industries to continue. In spite of this, both handicrafts and modern industry suffered irreparable losses during colonial rule which hardly made India at par with the West in terms of industrial development. This again establishes the fact that steampunk in India follows quite a different route to that in the West.

In fact, commenting on the ‘punk’ in steampunk, VanderMeer declares that steampunk is more about its suffix than its prefix. The appeal for DIY is not simply to understand the deeply embedded, esoteric entanglements in the processing of a product but to also capture the mode of its production and thereby reduce a sense of alienation from the same.

In fact, championing the figure of the inventor/tinkerer is a classic trope in steampunk literature that attempts to celebrate the spirit of DIY. Additionally, like its precursor in the Art and Crafts Movement, DIY tries to regain control from capitalist companies and their practices of commodification like Bruce Stirling notes:

...the heaviest guys in the steampunk scene are not really all that into “steam.” Instead, they are into punk. Specifically, punk’s do-it-yourself aspects and its determination to take the means of production away from big, mind-deadening companies who want to package and sell shrink-wrapped cultural product (13)

So central is DIY to steampunk that an entire sub-genre of stitchpunk (14) has been fashioned out of it. (15) In short, DIY potential is pivotal to the ‘punk’ in steampunk- the idea which inspires one to devise sustainable methods of technology by donning the traditional role of tinkerer/inventor. (16) VanderMeer citing Bruce Stirling writes: “Just as many Steampunks claim that the subculture arose in part from dissatisfaction with modern, seamless, antiseptic technology, so too the Arts and Crafts movement occurred as a reaction against the inroads of industrialization.” (17)

As with industrialisation, DIY in India is statistically different from the rest of the world. The recent American Housing Survey and the Scottish House Condition Survey have analysed the dependence of DIY on individual income (18) with results that show no conclusive correlation between the two. This means that most developed countries engage with DIY more as a choice than as necessity.

For instance, in a study of DIY in urban England “over 80% of instances [where] DIY was used, both economic necessity and choice were co-present in the motives of DIYers”. (19) In comparison, Indian households which maintain strict social hierarchies and often display classist prejudices rarely consider DIY as respectable labour. A survey conducted shows the difference of attitudes towards DIY in developing countries like India:

Future non-DIYers believed house work should be left to skilled people. There was a willingness to put up with labour problems for fear of being labelled as penny pinchers and fear of being ‘looked down upon’ by conducting low-skill jobs. Indians are different from their Western counterparts in the meaning they attach to time and work.... DIY in an Indian culture does not come naturally, as professions are chosen through social and historical family backgrounds and are divided on strict social lines. (20)

India thus exhibits what anthropologists call a ‘high context’ culture, one which depends on traditional sociological roles for functioning instead of exploring alternative roles in society. The following graph explains some of the various reasons Indians show reluctance towards the DIY movement. The DIY ethos manifest in steampunk thereby loses a significant appeal to mainstream Indian audience thus remaining localised to the urban fringe who due to upcoming trends in globalisation show some predilection towards embracing the movement.

Figure 1: Reasons for Indians’ reluctance for DIY (Anjula Gurtoo 2010)

So far we have seen how India remains a curious case of exemption both in terms of seeking influence from Victorian modernisation to produce a quasi-historical industry-beset world and basking in a certain aesthetic of the inventor/tinkerer to immerse in steampunk DIY. Thus, prying out Indian steampunk from forgotten works in regional languages becomes subject to the fact that certain historical and social conditions explain the sparse nature of works in the genre.

Even so, a preliminary research on the same would reveal a palpable gap in the history of steampunk literature in India extending roughly for a century (19th century to 20th century to be exact): a period which falls under colonial rule and India’s struggle for independence. Race relations thus form an important part in the construction of Indian science fiction stories during British rule.

As a result, popular sentiments were subject to sway from ideologies prevalent during the period. Indians longed for a consolidated idea of nationhood which was possible through certain shared beliefs and affinities. (21) This was possible through the participation of a national hatred for European technology and machinery. Consider this single critique by Gandhi — one of the most influential people in India’s struggle for independence — which was published in Hind Swaraj:

I cannot recall a single good point in connection with machinery ... If, instead of welcoming machinery as a boon, we shall look upon it as an evil, it would ultimately go... It is machinery that has impoverished India. It is difficult to measure the harm that Manchester has done to us. It is due to Manchester that Indian handicraft has all but disappeared... If the machinery craze grows in our country, it will become an unhappy land. (22)

Such opinions shaped not only public behaviour but also had a major impact on the kind of literature produced by authors. This does not in any way imply that most Indian authors engaging with science fiction would automatically show a general disdain for the machine but it does to a certain extent explain the larger body of softer speculative fiction than hard sciences, the latter of which accordingly negotiates and tries to represent sociological, anthropological and psychological relationships in society.

Of late, authors and science fiction enthusiasts are re-engaging with lost and forgotten works, translating them from regional languages and tracing patterns in their respective development. In Other Tomorrows Suparno Banerjee tries to identify certain schematic influences on post-colonial Indian science fiction. The Blaft Anthology recently published three volumes of Tamil Pulp Fiction which have elements of SF and futurism.

The Bengali science fiction webzine Kalpabiswa published in 2020 Arthatrishna by Sumit Bardhan- a self-proclaimed Bengali steampunk thriller. In addition to this, writers such as Vandana Singh and Indrapramit Das have been toying with steampunk depictions in Indian landscapes with their respective take on the colonial question.

Bhushondi Kager Noksha (2019) another Bengali steampunk thriller (also written by Sumit Bardhan and published in the Kalpabiswa website) explores steampunk imageries in a nation plagued both by Martians and the British. The language of the narrative imitates a formative, colloquial Bengali, the kind found in Hutom Pyanchar Naksha (1862) and thus throws a rather authentic light in the assumed historicity of the text. In fact, the language — although dense in a few places — isn’t too far off from that found in Rahasya, an important proto-steampunk work by Hemlal Dutt published in 1882.

Proto-steampunk elements are also portrayed in Ascharya Vrittant, a dream story published in a mainstream Hindi science fiction magazine called Piyush Pravah (1884-88). While the story itself operates beyond the confines of machine aesthetics, Ascharya Vrittant explores the concept of imaginary adventures and dreams which is admittedly an important characteristic in steampunk stories.

These works thus become important prototypes for the better understanding of multicultural steampunk in place of the racially oblivious literature inspired by ‘Victorientalism’. While some of these Victorientalist works attempt to produce an ethnically diverse portrayal, they often fall short and instead replicate harmful media stereotypes that propagate a misconception of the ‘Orient’.

Such fictions often forget the heterogeneity comprising Indian ethos and culture and instead opt for an exotification that is both misleading and dangerous. At one level, these renditions seek to globally commodify cultural differences and at the same time consolidate such differences to produce a unitary idea of the nation, an exercise which is both problematic and ambivalent.

One in fact does a great disservice to the varied forms of exploration that steampunk allows in alternate landscapes like India by merely reducing its aestheticization to meaningless allotropes and re-imaginations. Fortunately, some of these wrongs are gradually being addressed through multicultural sites such as Tor, Beyond Victoriana and Silver Goggles. The writer of the latter, Jaymee Goh, has been undertaking extensive research on Malaysian steampunk and post-colonial theory. Works like hers go a long way in providing a representation long overdue and while there is still a palpable gap in Asian discourse concerning the subculture, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to harbour some optimism about the same.

Copyright © 2021 by Ishita Lahiri