This is the fourth talk in the Prof. Avadhesh Kumar Singh Memorial Lecture Series delivered by Prof. Atanu Bhattacharya, Dean, School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar. His talk titled as "The Storm and the Garden: Speculative Fiction in India". The following is a brief description of his talk: 

Speculative fiction in India can be traced back to 1835 in India though the sheer variety of narratives that can be subsumed under this category is quite astonishing. In Bengal, especially due to its early encounter with colonial modernity, speculative fiction has an unbroken tradition from 1835 to the present times. This talk explores two early texts in this genre – Jagadish Chandra Bose’s ‘Palatak Tufan’ (The Runaway Cyclone) written in 1896 and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s ‘Sultana’s Dream’ (1905) – and attempts to place them within the context of early negotiations that the Bengali intelligentsia carried out with colonial Enlightenment science through such speculative narratives. The talk also explores the ethical and ecological concerns that these texts evoke siting them firmly against a monolithic ‘grand narrative’ of colonial modernity.

The following is the link for the YouTube lecture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_SMHFZs3K8