Originalversjon
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. 2017, 28 (1)
Sammendrag
The critical study of kalpavigyan (a word commonly identified as the Bangla term for science fiction but in its original context much larger in scope) typically involves two kinds of analysis. The first of these sees kalpavigyan as a diminutive subset of a global phenomenon called science fiction or sf, of which the representative works are Anglo-American or European-French in origin. The second, lacking a systematic framework for analyzing the specific phenomenon in Bengal, posits that kalpavigyan cannot be understood without reference to the larger body of Bangla popular science writing that has been the primary vehicle for the emergence of kalpavigyan. A consequence of these analyses is a fixation on the emergence of kalpavigyan, which necessarily begins the story with nineteenth-century colonial origins, and traces some form of linear history of kalpavigyan: a history that seems to run parallel to its counterparts in other languages. [...]