Contesting Colonial Ethnography through an Imagined Global Geography for the 22nd Century: Rāhul Sāṃkṛtyāyan’s Hindi Science Fiction Bāisvīṃ Sadī

This paper analyses Rāhul Sāṃkrityāyan’s only work of ‘science fiction’, Bāisvīṃ sadī (Twenty-second century, 1923), reading it as a local element of the global phenomenon of modernity, where complex interactions of a whole set of competing –even contradictory– tendencies were at work. The utopian twenty-second century globalized society envisions an alternative modernity to the one imagined by the socialist Russia, the capitalistic Europe, and also to the visions offered by Indian nationalists. He proposes a nomadic model for a positive globalization, thus anticipating theories of becoming and philosophical nomadism that will be labelled as postmodernist.