Border Fictions

 Last weekend I was lucky enough to attend (virtually) the London Science Fiction Research Community's annual conference; this year's theme was "Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, Science Fictions" (perhaps I should have just dragged my students there rather than teaching for a whole term). There's a conference schedule here , which gives you a sense of quite how wide (geographically and intellectually) this conference's span was--and I wonder to what extent this was because the pandemic had forced us all online and thus saved a lot of people from the choice between skipping the conference and an expensive and exhausting negotiation with the UK's border regime.  My own paper took off from Samit Basu's recent SF novel, Chosen Spirits , which imagines an upsetting "best case scenario" for India ten years into the future. Basu's novel is set in a Delhi whose borders are rigorously policed against "mobs from the Uttar Pradesh wildlands...

The climax of Manto's "Toba Tek Singh" is powerful because of Bishan Singh's moment of refusal--he will not travel to Hindustan, he will not accept that he is physically in Pakistan, he will not accept the broader idea of the partition of his country. He declares that Toba Tek Singh is "here"; and while that might simply be interpreted as "on this side of the border", that the narrative itself constantly elides the difference between the man and the land means that the intuitive reading is "here, where I am". Essentially, in that moment, Bishan Singh creates a speculative country of his own; a space that exists outside the border politics of India and Pakistan. Creating a private country of your own is, while difficult, at least theoretically possible: the major obstacle seems to be getting your existence recognised and making other countries (who are likely to be a lot more powerful than you) respect your borders. There is a surprising a...