Interview with R.T. Samuel: On The Fundamentally Anti-Caste Nature of Science Fiction

A lot of things about The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF make more sense when you realise it’s the culmination of a deep love for—and frustration with—all things speculative fiction. A genre that specialises in holding up a mirror to the ugly realities of humanity, many of the most impactful science fiction novels feature extreme social hierarchies. Just look at Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Caste and class have played a role in these kinds of stories for decades. So, the real surprise is that this is India’s first anti-caste speculative fiction collection. But then again, for obvious reasons, maybe not.

It all began with the curator and editor of the anthology, R.T. Samuel. After years of working as a journalist, Samuel was in an unenviable position: job hunting. After a few years of living and working in Vancouver and New Delhi, the Indian literary landscape looked bleak and uninviting. Finally, Samuel landed an interview with Blaft Publications, an independent publishing company based in Chennai, India, for an internship role. Founded by Rakesh Khanna and Rashmi Devadasan, Blaft Publications specialises in the non-mainstream, shining a spotlight on genre fiction in India, often translated from various regional languages. Some of their more famous anthologies include the Tamil Pulp Fiction series and Ghosts, Monsters, and Demons of India, an encyclopedia of folk horrors from all over the country. While Samuel was vastly overqualified for the internship that they interviewed for, Rakesh and Samuel stayed in touch after the call, exchanging emails about the books they liked to read, their mutual love for sci-fi, and their increasing frustration with the way the genre was developing in India. 

While Indian science fiction was growing in leaps and bounds as a genre, they both found the majority of the books being published apolitical and uninspiring. Additionally, the market had been flooded with books that pulled from Hindu mythology and culture without reckoning with the inequalities that it perpetuated. The end result? Both Samuel and Rakesh found themselves searching for something more.

As a genre, speculative fiction is the province of outliers, from Cyrano de Bergerac imagining voyages to the moon and sun to Mary Shelley reanimating corpses in Frankenstein. Asimov, widely considered one of the biggest names in the genre, defined it as “…that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology.” Though excessively dry, it’s an accurate description of a genre that took flight after the Industrial Revolution changed the world. But it doesn’t quite capture the true scope of science fiction. 

Science fiction, or speculative fiction, is simultaneously imaginative and destructive. It’s a space where writers can reshape the world, upend social and structural hierarchies, and explore entirely new universes while still being tethered to ours. For decades, it’s been considered subversive (and not always in a good way), and has often been dismissed as unrealistic. But in more recent years, as technology in the ‘real world’ has slowly begun to catch up to the pulp fiction of the past, sci-fi novels, which dealt in utopias and dystopias, have taken on a prescient edge that is hard to ignore. 

Today, artificial intelligence is making its first ripples through the workforce, changing the landscape of our social, economic and political spheres irrevocably—in ways that are both positive and catastrophic; technological innovation, though a strong power for good, often outstrips the bounds of ethics, and regulation remains two steps behind; governments all over the world are growing increasingly dictatorial; and despite increasing connectivity, social hierarchies are strengthening rather than disintegrating. It’s a playbook that most science fiction fans will recognise. Whether it’s Octavia E. Butler’s powerful Parable of the Sower or George Orwell’s 1984 or even Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451—the line between dystopian and ‘real’ has never been thinner. Or more jagged.

And while we share many frustrations and worries with our global counterparts, there remain some issues that are stubbornly and intrinsically linked to South Asian communities, even the diasporic ones. Caste is one of them. To some, caste is easily dismissed in this new world, flattened by technology, economics, and access. But to people who were raised within this insidious system, especially those oppressed by this rigid hierarchy, it’s an ever-present spectre. It influences everything from the food we eat to the jobs that we are allowed. It dictates both the personal and political in a way that is unfathomable to someone privileged enough to be outside it. 

Samuel says, “Ursula Le Guin and Seth Dickinson and Aliette de Bodard write amazing stories that are so deeply rooted in diverse contexts and different perspectives. They really are grappling with the length and breadth of humanity. Whereas the South Asian stuff, especially the Indian stuff, is so boring and one dimensional.”

“Rakesh and I asked ourselves why there isn’t better science fiction in India and why there isn’t more stuff like that. The equivalent of Indigenous Futurism and Afrofuturism because those go hand-in-hand. Octavia Butler was getting published in the heyday of those white guys. It doesn’t need to come ten years after. So we were asking, where’s that?”

“My theory about why there hasn’t been anti-caste science fiction and speculative fiction in this country is that the people who are writing in this genre are upper caste Hindus. Their lack of grappling with their own contexts and blind spots is what produces this kind of bland or hierarchical storytelling.” 

The duo decided that they needed to seek these stories out. Of the experience, Samuel says, “We were sure from the beginning that they were out there. It’s just that they’ve maybe not been understood in this way before. There had to have been people writing in the genre, and if it was not in English, it would be in other languages. We were going to put together this anthology because we knew that we needed that kind of creative and cultural perspective.” 

In the process, they found that in a very real way, regional anti-caste writers were tackling speculative fiction centuries ahead of their English-speaking and writing counterparts. Way back in the 14th century, Sant Ravidas, a radical anti-caste public thinker and poet, imagined a casteless utopia, Begumpura. As Samuel writes in the introduction of The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF, “…in just a few sentences, he champions borderlessness and the end of the nation-state; he decries capitalism, surveillance and control of the public. His world-building—succinct, humane, and moving—is so detailed that it even ventures into economic infrastructure. With no taxes and an abundance that is equally and collectively shared, Begumpura could easily slide into the ranks of the most famous speculative fiction worlds of literature and screen. I’m also fascinated by the vibrant present that his words evoke. As a tanner—his caste occupation—now set free, Ravidas names his future (that too, a future that hasn’t yet happened) as the present. What else is that, if not the essential nature of SF?”

Samuel and Rakesh found several Gujarati language works that fit the purpose, as well as stories in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. To round things off, they carefully commissioned pieces from established and new writers alike. It reads like a list of who’s-who and who-to-watch in the Indian speculative fiction world. Bama, Gogu Shyamala, V Chandrasekhar Rao are among the contributors, as are Mimi Mondal, Yukti Narang, Archita Mittra, Gouri, and Hameedha Khan. 

The anthology isn’t limited by form, and several popular comic and visual artists were also invited to contribute. Rahee Punyashloka, best known for his evocative art pieces, has written a short story; and Sumit Kumar’s comic Spacewali and Kunal Lokhande’s visual masterpiece Sanatan Gaming are no less powerful than their wordier counterparts. 

One of the more striking aspects of the collection is its fluidity. There’s a wealth of themes contained within these pages: from queerness and religious reckonings to futurism and climate justice. And at first glance, these stories have very little to bind them together. But it is the book’s expansiveness that makes it so special. The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF is reflective of the people who helped create it. Rakesh and Samuel haven’t so much curated the collection as cultivated it. 

Part of what makes this book such a standout is the freedom granted to the creators. All too often, writers from marginalised communities find themselves the flag bearers of generational trauma. They are not permitted to distance themselves from the weight of their histories even in fiction. Samuel recounts, “One of the reasons I left my journalism job was because I was reporting on institutional murders in higher education STEM institutes. I wanted to write about the structures in these institutions, and my editor kept asking me for human interest stories. Which basically meant I should go ask the students what their experiences of casteism were. After that, I found myself wondering, as a commissioning editor, why don’t you ask authors to write a different kind of story? I mean, why haven’t we gotten a speculative fiction story from Bama before? Why didn’t anyone encourage these people to write different kinds of stories?”

“The other thing that speculative fiction could potentially bring to the anti-caste space and literature is a sense of remove from the author’s side. For me, personally, I don’t want to make my career off having to constantly share personal stories. Whereas if you’re writing a story in this genre that’s just a little bit removed, people don’t necessarily think you’ve experienced those things. I think the sense of distance and being able to see it more as a storyteller rather than a recounting of personal tragedy helps.”

Samuel adds, “I think for a lot of them, this was the anthology where they could develop some of their ideas that had been on the back-burner. Because when they are working for other curation projects or publications, people don’t want these stories. They don’t want a science fiction story. So a lot of people were like, “This is my chance! I have this one in my box, let me dig it out.”

What sets these stories apart from the more Western-focused speculative fiction we’re used to reading? Samuel says, “I think in any kind of Indian context, there’s so often a little bit of supernatural attached to every folktale and other kinds of stories. It does take on a very different narrative to the Western ones. It’s just the way we tell stories in general. I really liked the idea of reframing what speculative is as well.”

Caste plays a different role in each story. In some, like Gouri’s powerful A Demon That Sits On Your Chest, Gogu Shyamala’s The Phantom Ladder, and Neerav Patel’s Robot S/C, caste is a key factor, and in others, like Hameedha Khan’s File No. 786 and Archita Mittra’s Happily Ever After, it takes a backseat to other issues like climate change and homophobia, but bubbles below the surface, tendrils still powerful even in an imagined future. 

Religion, inextricably linked to caste, is also explored. Samuel says, “I feel like a lot of authors tackle it in ambiguous terms. What they use is not necessarily a religion we recognise or the story is set in a futuristic civilisation. But a lot of the people that we reached out to were Dalit people or people who are also religious minorities. And if you talk about casteism, you are grappling with religion. That comes with the territory. It’s not Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Sikhism, or indigenous practices that are the origin of casteism.”

“There’s all kinds of ways that people grapple with different traumas. There are different ways, psychologically, that people deal with their lived realities or their parents’ lived realities. For a lot of us, religion is how we liberated ourselves. For me, I’m from a very well established Dalit Christian family. We are very well established in our Christianity and also in our Dalit identity. So, I was never really taught shame.”

“Whatever issues you have with your community—whether it’s internal issues as a minority community, living in this Hindu system that dogs your footsteps, and really consumes you and limits your potential, your career, your relationships—your community isn’t oppressing you.”

But, as Samuel rightfully points out, India is the epicentre of Hindu culture. Youth culture, the culture of our parents’ generation, and beyond. And marginalised people have never had the luxury of seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses. That shows up strongly in their writing. Samuel says, “This came out a lot in the horror stories. We have multiple stories—we couldn’t put in all of them—writing about Hinduism as a force of terror, the horror of Hindu festivals and the terror of these customs. One person wrote this story that was very The Haunting of Hill House about someone who gets a job as a cleaner for an upper-caste couple in this old house, and then constantly having to clean. It’s a very claustrophobic story. We had others that followed similar themes. It’s definitely stemming from people’s experiences of living in this place, living in this context.”

And while horror is a frequently explored sub-genre in the anthology, magical realism made repeated appearances as well. “There’s a lot of stuff that happens in dreams, there’s a lot of riddles and spiritualism. Our writers were also interested in what casteism looks like in different forms. I would say overarchingly, they think it will follow us into the future through the algorithms. From a purely editorial perspective, I was surprised at how many of these stories had sad endings. Some of them are just really tragic, and not necessarily leading up to tragedy in a way that you expect.”

Samuel and Rakesh are aware that many people might not pick up the anthology because of its name and focus. Caste remains, for many, an incredibly touchy and controversial topic. One that most would like to avoid rather than excavate. Translations, similarly, are often ignored by mainstream media and readers. But Samuel is unfazed, saying, “The thing that I find the most remarkable about this anthology, and I think Rakesh has shown it in all these Pulp Fiction anthologies, is how much we’re missing out just because we’re divided by so many language barriers in this country. I really don’t know much about speculative fiction in languages other than English and I’m hoping to change that. And what’s interesting about these authors, and Dalit authors in general, is that they are riffing with the literary traditions of their language. They’re talking about a bunch of things that you might not be familiar with. And I think it’s a good experience as a reader, especially an English language reader, to not be centred all the time. The whole world is writing to you, and every time you read a translated work it not only expands your mind, and you learn more about other cultures, but it’s good practice for you—not everything is about you all the time.” 

Samuel and Rakesh are well aware that one anthology isn’t going to entirely shift the discourse around science fiction. But they’re encouraged to hear that more SF anthologies are in the works at other publishing houses, and other editors are seeking out newer and more nuanced perspectives. 

As Samuel writes, “I hope this anthology encourages you to dig deeper into marginal genres and little-known writers. Better yet, I hope it pushes you to write the stories you want to read. In a larger sense, I hope it opens doors for the wider publishing world, particularly in India, to take note of the eager market for imaginative stories that dance through time and space.”