Introduction: Science, fiction and the non-aligned world

Abstract

The introduction surveys the central role accorded to certain ideas of techno-scientific development in Indian nationalist imagination. It then examines the recent trend of a ‘post-colonial turn’ in both science studies and science-fiction scholarship and argues that this misses the opportunity to examine both science and science fiction in relation to global capitalism, colonialism and international opposition to these. By looking at the case of Indian science fiction written during the first decades of Indian independence, when the country took a leading role in the non-aligned movement, it suggests that such inter-related literary and political forms tried to chart alternative routes to dominant practices of modernization in the 20th-century.