Page "Science fiction" Paragraph 75

Indian science fiction, defined loosely as science fiction by writers of Indian descent, began with the English-language publication of Kylas Chundar Dutt's A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours in the Year 1945 in the Calcutta Literary Gazette ( June 6, 1835 ).

Since this story was intended as a political polemic, credit for the first science fiction story is often given to later Bengali authors such as Jagadananda Roy, Hemlal Dutta and the polymath Jagadish Chandra Bose ( see Bengali science fiction ).

Similar traditions exist in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and English.

In English, the modern era of Indian speculative fiction began with the works of authors such as Samit Basu, Payal Dhar, Vandana Singh and Anil Menon.

Works such as Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome and Salman Rushdie's Grimus and Boman Desai's The Memory of Elephants are generally classified as magic realist works but make essential use of SF tropes and techniques.