"In your country, men who are capable of doing no end of mischief are let loose and the innocent women shut up in the zenana! We have no hand or voice in the management of our social affairs. In India man is lord and master. He has taken to himself all powers and privileges and shut up the women in the zenana."
"Why do you allow yourselves to be shut up?"
"Because they are stronger than women."
"A lion is stronger than a man, but it does not enable him to dominate the human race. You have neglected the duty you owe to yourselves, and you have lost your natural rights by shutting your eyes to your own interests."
In 1905 colonial Calcutta, where purdah confined women and British rule circumscribed everyone, Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain imagined otherwise. Sultana's Dream transports its narrator to Ladyland, a society where men remain secluded in the mardana (a play on the word janana, which referred to the space women were “kept” in) while women govern through superior scientific knowledge, harnessing solar power, piloting air-cars, controlling weather, eliminating crime entirely. If physical strength doesn't entitle lions to dominate humans, why should it entitle men to dominate women? "Since the mardana system has been established, there has been no more crime or sin; therefore we do not require a policeman to find out a culprit, nor do we want a magistrate to try a criminal case," Sister Sara explains.
You see, imagining alternatives to oppression isn't escapism. Power structures, after all, are human constructions. What humans can build, they can also rebuild. When Sultana walks Ladyland's streets unveiled in daylight, she feels shy. Passersby mock her: "The women say you look very mannish." Confused, she asks what they mean. "They mean that you are shy and timid like men." Masculinity in this world means confinement and domesticity. Femininity simultaneously means freedom and courage.
Science fiction offers what scholar Roger Luckhurst calls a genre that "captures the fleeting fantasies thrown up in the swirl of modernity" by imagining futures premised on perpetual change. But as Suparno Banerjee argues in Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity (2020), India's colonial relationship to European modernity places Indian SF "at a unique and problematic position." Since "SF and European imperialism are intrinsically connected," and "modernity and progress are inherently linked to fantasies of colonialism," Indian SF from its genesis has been "resisting such fantasies of imperialism resulting from progress and modernity." Rokeya's achievement lies in threading this needle. Ladyland offers technology as benevolent and scientifically explained, while refusing the colonial logic that technological advancement justifies domination.
Indian feminist science fiction grapples with female foeticide, caste erasure, honor killings, sex-ratio crises—concerns that emerge from refusing to separate gender from caste, class, environment, geography. As Urvashi Kuhad identifies in Science Fiction and Indian Women Writers (2014), the genre responds to Indian realities: "Indian SF writers have picked out themes and also come up with new themes in accordance with the Indian environment, as not all may be applicable in an Indian context." What happens when women from the Global South imagine futures? They imagine different futures entirely.
"The social circumstances cannot be ignored," Kuhad insists. From Rokeya's singular 1905 vision through long decades of near-silence, to late-century works by Suniti Namjoshi and Padmanabhan, to the contemporary explosion of voices—Lavanya Lakshminarayan, SB Divya, Rimi B. Chatterjee, Mimi Mondal, Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Sukanya Datta, Sadhna Shanker, Kuzhali Manickavel, Vandana Singh—Indian feminist science fiction has evolved into a diverse field that can’t be neatly boxed into easy categories.
Banerjee observes that while "only a handful of authors, such as Leela Majumdar, Enakshi Chattyopadhyay and Bandita Phukan, established themselves in the field before the 1990s," in the past quarter-century, "many major voices in SF, especially in English, have been those of women." This shift has brought with it what Banerjee calls "a more critical and theoretical version of hybridity and introspection," with "dystopian futures" becoming "a dominant mode" alongside "questioning of postcolonial identity politics.
This history refuses linearity. It disappears underground for decades, resurfaces elsewhere in different languages, splits into tributaries: diaspora publications, regional magazines, dystopian warnings, solarpunk blueprints, technology critiques, community reimaginings. These writers insisted that imagination is a political struggle. The futures we imagine prepare us for the shifts we must bring.
This essay and its sequel trace 120 years of that work, of how women have wielded science fiction to dismantle patriarchy, caste hierarchy, colonial legacies, and capitalist exploitation, often simultaneously, and how they've asked the questions that needed to be asked. What if bodies weren't commodities? What if memory couldn't be erased? What if caste didn't determine destiny? What if technology were used for justice instead of surveillance? What if power operated differently?
What If Women Had Power? (1905-1980s)
In contrast to our world, where women have "no hand or voice in the management of our social affairs," where "man is lord and master," what if women controlled science and governance? Sultana's Dream imagines such a world where technology is benevolent, violence has been eradicated. That very imagining was an act of resistance.
Yet nothing followed. The gap between 1905 and the next significant wave of Indian feminist science fiction stretched across the entire mid-twentieth century. This wasn't because science fiction itself was absent. The genre was flourishing. Bangla magazines like Sandesh (started 1913) and Hindi publications like Saraswati carried speculative stories regularly. By the 1960s, Ascharya emerged as the first magazine dedicated exclusively to science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Magazine culture exploded across languages: Dharmayug, Vigyan Pragati, Parag, Saptahik Hindustan in Hindi; Ramdhanu, Kishore Bharati, Anandamela, Desh in Bangla; Naval, Balmitra, and Rahasya Ranjan in Marathi; Anandha Vikatan in Tamil.
Women were nearly absent from these pages. Male writers and characters dominated—inventing technologies, exploring space—while women, when they appeared at all, served as plot devices, love interests. The imaginative leap SF required was coded masculine, as was science itself. Women in the real world were fighting for basic education, for the right to work outside the home. The luxury of imagining futures had to wait while the present remained unlivable.
When women did appear as scientists in these narratives, the pattern was rather predictable. You’d see supporting roles, male approval required for research, romantic functions within scientific plots. Assistants, not inventors. Science fiction, a genre which is theoretically unlimited by reality's constraints, replicated reality's gender hierarchies with absolute loyalty. Even the imagined futures couldn't escape the present's prejudices.
Eighty-four years later, in 1989, Suniti Namjoshi returned to that familiar question with The Mothers of Maya Diip. What if women ruled? Where Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915) had imagined a conflict-free matriarchal utopia, Namjoshi presented a conflict-ridden matriarchy that obsessively glorified motherhood to the point of creating its own oppressive hierarchies.
On Maya Diip, an island off India's west coast, adult status is synonymous with motherhood. "Unless she is a mother, she is not a woman." Women are classified into Grade A mothers (co-mothers who share child-rearing), Grade B mothers (biological mothers), and Grade C mothers (servants who do chores until they can afford to "have a daughter" and apply for Grade A status). Male babies are abandoned. Female sexuality exists only in the service of reproduction.
Namjoshi, an openly lesbian feminist who had spent years navigating both Indian and Canadian societies, understood that biological motherhood becomes oppression when made compulsory, when glorified as women's only valuable role, an argument second-wave feminism had been making through the 1970s and 1980s. Where Rokeya imagined women's rule as scientifically enlightened, Namjoshi imagined authoritarianism. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. So, regardless of who wields that power, corruption is imminent, and defining women solely through reproductive capacity, whether in patriarchy or matriarchy, simply trades one cage for another.
Nearly a century separates Rokeya's utopia from Namjoshi's dystopia, yet both writers understood that easy answers don't work. Rokeya knew that simply reversing purdah wasn't enough. Education mattered. Rational governance mattered. Namjoshi knew that simply removing men wasn't enough. Any system that defines women by biology alone would create oppression, regardless of who's in charge.
Even as Namjoshi published in 1989, the gender gap in Indian SF remained vast, especially in regional languages. Hindi science fiction had flourished since the early twentieth century, yet it wasn't until 2005, a full century after Rokeya, that Kalpana Kulshreshtha published Uss Sadi Ki Bat, the first science fiction collection by a Hindi woman writer. There were exceptions in other languages: Leela Majumdar in Bangla, publishing Akash Ghanti (1976) and Batash Bari (1974); Enakshi Chattyopadhyay, writing and translating across science and literature in Bengali; Bandita Phukan, the pioneering Assamese SF author and Northeast India's first woman mechanical engineer. But these were outliers. Even today, women in non-English Indian SF remain far and few: Mandakini Goagte and Nandini Thatte in Marathi, Sagarika Roy in Bangla, Ajanta Das in Assamese, Subhashini in Kannada, Ambai in Tamil. Vernacular traditions remained—and largely remain—heavily gendered, shaped by who had access and visibility.
Why the exclusion? Reasons include unequal access to science education, conservative expectations about women's ‘proper’ literary subjects, and insular fandoms that imitate mainstream society's gender biases. As Kuhad argues, "The language has to suit the people of the nation because the ideas or scientific knowledge will not reach them unless it is communicated in a language understood by them." Yet women writers were denied that accessibility for most of the twentieth century. Bengali, Marathi, Tamil SF traditions flourished—fed by magazines—while women's voices remained absent, countless futures unimagined.
Stories may exist in forgotten magazines or unpublished manuscripts, women imagining otherwise who never reached print or have since disappeared from the archive. Translation might have made regional women's SF visible, but the gap between languages often remains impossible to bridge. As Rakesh K observes in an interview about The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF (2024), "Dalit/Bahujan/Adivasi Hindi speakers – there's nobody writing cool speculative fiction. They must be out there; we just haven't found them." The same applies to women across languages and regions—out there, but lost to language barriers and archival silence.
By the late 1980s and 1990s, however, the terrain was shifting. Global feminist SF, from Ursula K. Le Guin to Octavia Butler, was influencing Indian Anglophone writers. India's feminist movements had gained institutional ground. And most importantly, publishers were beginning to recognize that women readers and writers existed (and mattered) in SF spaces.
Bodies as Battlegrounds (1990s-2020s)
If the foundational question of Indian feminist SF was about power—who has it, who wields it—the question that has obsessed the genre since the 1990s is about bodies. Whose body is it? Who controls what happens to it? In a country where female bodies have been sites of violence for millennia through dowry deaths, honor killings, sex-selective abortion, and sexual assault, Indian feminist science fiction has wielded the speculative mode to make visible what patriarchy, neocolonialism, capitalism, and caste hierarchy do to flesh.
Across decades and authors, the same trajectory can be seen over and over. Bodies become commodities, resources to be harvested, modified, surveilled, stratified. Technology, rather than liberating, amplifies existing power structures, makes exploitation more efficient, more total. The women at the center of these narratives then ask: if this is what the future holds, how do we resist?
In Manjula Padmanabhan's 1997 play Harvest, Jaya watches her husband become a commodity. Om, a poor clerk in near-future Bombay, has signed his body over to InterPlanta Services, selling his organs to wealthy foreigners because survival demands it. His wife must watch his flesh become property, unable even to mourn properly:
How can I hold your hand, touch your face, knowing that at any moment it might be snatched away from me and flung across the globe! If you were dead I could shave my head and break my bangles – but this? To be a widow by slow degrees? To mourn you piece by piece? Should I shave half my head? Break my bangles one at a time?
What neocolonialism does metaphorically, Harvest makes literal. Bodies become raw material for distant consumption, the Global North extracting what it needs from the Global South. InterPlanta's surveillance cameras invade Om's home, controlling what the family eats, how they live. Om's brother Jeetu, mistakenly taken for the first transplant, returns enhanced and altered.
Yet Jaya refuses. She rejects the structure entirely; to her, dignity matters more than survival. The resistance may be diminutive, futile within the world of the play, but it insists that bodily autonomy, even when threatened by systems, can be a site of rebellion.
If Harvest shows bodies as extractable resources, Padmanabhan's 2008 novel Escape imagines total elimination. The novel imagines a world where technology can replace women's reproductive function. In future India, the Generals, misogynist rulers with access to cloning, have systematically exterminated all women. Genetic engineering enables asexual reproduction and female bodies have been rendered obsolete. Drones, a subhuman species, handle domestic labor. The nation becomes isolated, rife with massacres and rape.
Lavanya Lakshminarayan's The Ten Percent Thief (first published as Analog/Virtual; 2020) shows a vision even more metastasized. In future Bangalore, renamed Apex City and divided by Bell Corporation's algorithm into privileged Virtuals and oppressed Analogs, bodies are sorted by "productivity" metrics. The bottom ten per cent (the Analogs) are expelled from the city into wastelands, where their bodies become harvestable resources for the elite. "Herein we outline the principles of a smart new world. We seek to fulfil our human potential. We do not tolerate failure," declares the Meritocratic Manifesto. Failure, i.e, algorithmic underperformance, makes your body exploitable.
In Monsters Under the Bed, Lakshminarayan describes brain-altering procedures that erase memories of lower-class origins. Bodies can climb the hierarchy, but the cost is forgetting: where you came from, who you were, what happened to your family. The procedure is presented as benevolent, an opportunity. The Persona Police extends control to reproduction. Bell Corp monitors pregnancy decisions, punishing women whose choices threaten productivity. Bodies must labor, produce, optimize. Reproduction is reduced to another metric, another calculation in corporate efficiency.
Yet The Ten Percent Thief proposes collective resistance. The titular character Nāyaka, the Analog Champion, steals resources from the Virtuals to sustain her people. When she infiltrates the city to steal jacaranda buds, flowers that are "the exclusive right of the top one percent," and cultivates them within Analog territory, more than beauty, she creates refusal. "Tyranny's foe is community. We will not break." Besieged bodies can still organize, still resist, still build alternatives.
A quarter-century of Indian feminist SF lies between Harvest and The Ten Percent Thief, each work complicating how bodily commodification works.
Between these two works spans a range of Indian feminist SF exploring bodily commodification with an increasingly sophisticated critique. Sukanya Datta's Worlds Apart (2012) imagines chloroplast transplants making humans photosynthetic, dependent on sunlight. Dr Pinctada's "limited solution" to environmental catastrophe turns recipients green, fundamentally altering human biology. But inequality persists still. Genetic modifications can’t escape hierarchy. Some bodies are more equal than others. In “The Tide Turns Again,” Sukanya writes:
The kids knew that cloudy days often meant that their chloroplasts did not get enough sunlight and they sometimes felt a little weak. Of course, some children fared better than others because their chloroplasts were slightly more efficient which gave them an edge over the others.
Her “So Many Options” follows the centuries of female foeticide to its genocidal conclusion.
The skewed gender divide had just crossed the Ultra Red Mark. It now stood at roughly five hundred and thirty-seven females for every thousand males... Earth was a war zone for women. It had always been. Earthlings had preyed on women for millennia and slaughtered them collectively and individually, starting at conception—even before birth. Women had been marginalized, penalized, brutalized and terrorized throughout Earth's history. Now they were going extinct. It was almost as if after decimating all other animals on Earth, the dominant population had turned against the more vulnerable members of their own species.
SB Divya's work approaches bodily commodification from a different angle. In Loka (2024), hybrid protagonist Akshaya suffers from severe sickle-cell crises during her circumnavigation challenge. Her genetically modified body struggles with Earth. Her maker (parent) tells her:
People are curious whether your body will behave differently than those of the womb-born children on Meru. It's likely that you have congenital factors that they don't... Take as much time as you need to understand the path you want to walk, because that, more than any destination, will define you.
The body here is an experimental site, a data source, which doesn't belong to her alone, but represents an entire class of genetically modified humans fighting for recognition.
In Machinehood (2021), Divya escalates to full-scale bodily transformation under capitalism's demands. Set partly in Chennai with protagonist Nithya, the novel shows gig workers enhancing themselves through pills and neural modifications to stay competitive. Welga, a shield agent, undergoes the radical "dakini" transformation on a space station, fundamentally altering her consciousness and capabilities. But as Nithya's investigation reveals, the corporations producing these enhancements have been:
short-cutting the testing process, flouting the spirit of bioethical regulations, and knowingly putting people in harm's way for no reason other than profit motive. They rushed out custom pill designs to those most vulnerable because they had the lowest cost margins.
Bodies become testing grounds for untested technology. The poor, the desperate, those with "the lowest cost margins" get the experimental versions, which cause neurological damage, addiction, even death. As the Neo-Buddhist Machinehood monk Ao Tara argues in the novel,
WAIs, bots, humans, and animals—all thinking creatures embody life... We must find peace with the machines, not exploit them. When humans owned each other as slaves, they found ways to justify their actions, to dehumanize other people. We're falling into that trap with WAIs.
Bodily exploitation mirrors slavery’s rationale. Whether the body is human or machine, ownership enables exploitation.
In Microbiota and the Masses: A Love Story (2017), Divya presents the scientist Moena, Moena, a scientist living in extreme microbial isolation, controlling her internal biome after trauma. When she ventures outside, the sensory assault is visceral:
Bodies moved past her along the uneven slabs of the sidewalk. They stank of hot oil, sweat, sandalwood, fish, jasmine, sex. A stray dog trotted from a cluster of trash to a half-eaten banana. A fly fizzed into Moena's ear, tickling it before moving on. How did anyone live like this?
Her controlled, purified body experiences ordinary existence as contamination. To pursue love, she creates "Meena Sivaraman: middle class, moderately educated, modestly dressed. A proper, earnest, sane young woman," because Moena herself, brilliant and isolated, has been taught that "men desire women who can stand up to them and still remain short. They don't want women who are smarter or wealthier or more famous." The body is a liability. The body must be disguised, controlled to be lovable.
Across these works runs the consistent thread of bodies under capitalism, under patriarchy, under technological surveillance, which become sites of extraction and control. The future imagined is one where technology makes that oppression more efficient, harder to escape.
Yet these narratives also resist. The body remains a site of agency even when overwhelmed by systems designed to control it.
The Story Continues
Over more than a century, Indian women writers have wielded the spade of science fiction to dig through power and bodies. By the century's end, this focus had shifted from who holds power to what power does. How it commodifies bodies, how technology facilitates extraction. These stories present futures where bodily autonomy is impossible, where algorithms determine who deserves a chance at life.
But even in these grim visions, resistance materialises, whether through tiny acts of refusal or collective organizing. The body, though besieged, remains a site of agency, a site where power can be challenged.
But this is only half the story. Indian feminist science fiction fights simultaneous battles, whether over memory and who controls it or over futures built on completely different premises. Part 2 of this essay looks at these parallel struggles. We see how the genre treats remembering as resistance and how it imagines exodus and reconstruction. We also explore what makes its concerns distinctively rooted in Indian contexts of caste and colonialism. Stay tuned.
Amritesh Mukherjee is a reader, writer, and journalist—mostly in that order. He covers literature, cinema, and art through his writings and is fascinated by the stories that shape our world. Instagram/X: @aroomofwords
Primary Bibliography
1. Datta, Sukanya. Worlds Apart: Science Fiction Stories. National Book Trust, 2014 (reprint of 2012 edition).
2. Divya, S. B. Machinehood. Saga Press, 2021.
3. Divya, S. B. Loka. 47North, 2024.
4. Divya, S. B. Microbiota and the Masses: A Love Story. Tor.com, 2017.
5. Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat. Sultana’s Dream: A Feminist Utopia and Selections from The Secluded Ones. Edited and translated by Roushan Jahan. The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1988.
6. Kulshreshtha, Kalpana. Us Sadi Ki Baat. Amarsatya Prakashan, 2005.
7. Lakshminarayan, Lavanya. Analog/Virtual: And Other Simulations of Your Future. Hachette India, 2020.
8. Lakshminarayan, Lavanya. The Ten Percent Thief. Rebellion Publishing / Solaris, 2023.
9. Namjoshi, Suniti. The Mothers of Maya Diip. The Women’s Press, 1989.
10. Padmanabhan, Manjula. Escape. Picador India, 2008.
11. Padmanabhan, Manjula. Harvest: Revised and Expanded Edition. Hachette India, 2017.
Secondary & Critical Works
1. Banerjee, Suparno. Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity. University of Wales Press, 2020.
2. Kuhad, Urvashi. Science Fiction and Indian Women Writers: Exploring Radical Potentials. Routledge, 2022.