Alternate Worlds

Abstract

Nearly seven decades after C.P. Snow’s famous Rede Lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” (1959), the idea of an intellectual split between literature and science may appear naïve to an Indian audience. Most of the non-Western knowledge systems acknowledge that the universe, with all its mysteries, is much larger than the scope of scientific invention, and local knowledge systems in traditional cultures have significant roles to play in understanding the reality. This chapter attempts to explore the interrelationship between science, traditional cultural discourse, local knowledge, and literary imagination with references to select contemporary Indian Anglophone novels, excluding science fiction. The first section of this chapter, with references to two of Amitav Ghosh’s novels—The Hungry Tide (2004) and Gun Island (2019)—emphasizes that local knowledge systems, however “unscientific” or uncanny these may appear, often make sense of reality where unilateral scientific explanation falls short. The second section explores how traditional cultural discourses, community knowledge, and certain systems of spirituality attempt to explain uncontrollable phenomena such as ailment or death, focusing on two literary debuts: the tribal writer Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey (2014) and the US-based Indian writer Priyanka Champaneri’s The City of Good Death (2021). With reference to these four novels, the chapter brings home the point that behind everyday reality explainable by scientific causation, there is a spectral dimension mediating between the worldly and the other-worldly, between the intuitive and the counter-intuitive.