Speaking Crows and Alien Fish: Nonhuman Cosmopolitanisms in Satyajit Ray's Speculative Fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACT: I approach Satyajit Ray's sf stories as postcolonial interventions into Western Enlightenment discourses of scientific rationality. I trace the trajectory of these concerns as they are reflected in narratives centered around nonhuman animals, published in various Bengali juvenile magazines between 1961 and 1992. Ray's stories offer a critical site for interrogating, revising, and expanding the possibilities of a Kantian moral philosophy of cosmopolitanism for post-independence contexts of democratic governance, industrialization, and urbanization. Ray's sf enables readers to imagine a posthuman cosmopolitics (to use Isabelle Stengers's concept) as an alternative to colonial cartographies of personhood and the centrifugal impulse of postcolonial nation formation. My article addresses the significant but underexplored role played by Ray's ecological thinking and care for the nonhuman animal in his postcolonial politics. Ray's sf harnesses the possibilities of Bengali speculative fiction, including Kalpavigyan's model of a fluid science to posit a speculative vision of a future-oriented cosmopolitics where the possibility for non-reciprocal and untranslatable proximities becomes a conceptual foundation for thinking about alterity.