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Accepted Paper:

The Fictions of Science and Cinema in India  
Raminder Kaur (University of Sussex)

Paper short abstract:

I consider the content and contours of speculative fiction that engages with the imaginative potential of science (as opposed to actual scientific developments), and that nowadays manifests itself as a distinctive form in terms of the speculative fiction masala in India.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I consider the historical precedents for and contemporary phenomena of speculative fiction film in India. My main attention is towards speculative fiction that engages with the imaginative potential of science (as opposed to actual scientific developments), and that nowadays manifests itself as a distinctive type in terms of the speculative fiction masala (SFM). Speculative fiction is the preferred term in view of the Eurocentric and modernist framework implicit in the concept of science fiction. The SFM is characterised by imaginaries of science, modernist and/or arcane, that propel the narrative whilst availing itself of the masala aesthetic that came to fruition in the decades following the advent of sound in the 1930s. It could be argued that film enabled the possibilities of recreating an otherworldly 'wonderscape': cinematic scenes that encapsulated and encouraged a sense of wonder in an accentuated suspension of disbelief. Sometimes wonderscapes defined the spirit of the film in terms of the 'devotional', the mythological', the Arabianesque fantasy, or speculative fiction; other times it entered in measured doses by way of delicious action and delirious dance sequences, devices which themselves attached to the aforementioned genres.

Panel P37
The aesthetics and fictions of science
  Session 1