Speculating on Anti-Caste Horizons: Kunal Lokhande with R. T. Samuel

Our Kickstarter campaign for THE BLAFT BOOK OF ANTI-CASTE SF is in its final week! We've raised over $12,500 from nearly 400 backers--enough to unlock a couple of stretch goals--and we're hoping to unlock a few more. If you haven't reserved a copy yet, please make a pledge, or help by spreading the word!

The book will be out in December. One of the contributors is Kunal Lokhande , the author of the short comic "Sanatan Gaming". He's interviewed here by Anti-Caste SF editor R.T. Samuel.

KL: I'm Kunal Lokhande, an artist and designer. I work with mixed media, projects with image making, comics, video games, and, to a degree, music. 

RT: Could you tell us a little about your anthology piece—without any spoilers?

KL: My comic resulted from seeing Indian futurism and video games through this particular studio I've worked with, and seeing how Brahminically charged and coded¹ they were regarding their narratives², and how they presented the idea of India.

The comic was conceptualised to show how Brahminism is merging into the internet space and internet subcultures, and then noticing how it can eat into and make other subcultures assimilate—historically and generationally, retroactively, going back centuries even. The idea of the comic is born from my speculation that Brahmanism will eat into anything that benefits it.

RT: How would you then define or explain the significance of anti-caste speculative fiction or futurism to people who were not so familiar with its context and politics? Because it's really obvious for those of us from the community, right? Like the need or the desire for anti-caste speculative fiction and anti-caste imagination, right? This kind of utopic thinking, or even dystopic sort of thinking as well, in that sense. 

KL: Speculative fiction is about imagining possibilities of how anti-caste construction or mobilisation can occur with the internet, and its new tools and creative ways of distributing knowledge... This is also a result of how I grew up with the internet while my parents did not. Their idea of community building would be more of a library or a physical space, not YouTube. It would have physical proximity.

I look at the possibilities of how tech and the Internet are disrupting these limitations. So, anti-caste speculative fiction works in two ways. And they’re not mutually exclusive. Firstly, there is a critique of 'Brahminical futurism'. Second, the current futurism can support the existing structures through tech or specific scenarios that are either very contemporary or slightly in the future. For me, those possibilities are very exciting. One of the reasons I go back to speculative fiction is because I have a background in social sciences rather than STEM. So hard science fiction, for me, in that way, is a little unreachable.

Meanwhile, speculative fiction is more like a possibility for building scenarios and places with a sense of assertion and a sense of holding power, claiming power in this oppressive world, and satirising the absurdity of existing structures. Because for me, what’s exciting is how the Internet has shaped us. But, it has also flattened so many contexts. The flattening of context does not necessarily mean the flattening of hierarchy and subverting of hierarchy into this middle ground of either appropriation or assimilation. But within that, how do we place ourselves to assert and claim our dignity, power, and positionality in this world? 

RT: I totally get what you mean, and that makes me wonder - what are some of the works of speculative fiction that inspire you?  

KL: I think of the comic journalism done by Joe Sacco. He’s one of the reasons I also got into comics as a socio-political inquiry rather than having this notion that comics are only about superheroes or for children. The moment I got access to underground comics and what they were trying to do, dealing with serious topics in a humorous way, it opened up many possibilities for me. Even though it's not speculative, it's still reflective, a medium to discuss difficult topics.  

Another favourite piece of media is a show called Atlanta by Donald Glover. It's a web series about hip hop and blackness in the post-Internet era. 

I think we are deciding what speculative fiction means in the Dalit context. 

Seeing a possibility and, you know, placing my socio-political context within that possibility and seeing what interesting thing can come out of it: that's speculative. Part of it is in either the present or near future. The speculation [that is often employed to envision the future] is not very fantastical or fictional, but it could happen in 10 days, maybe one month or a year, and I wouldn't be surprised.  

RT: Yeah, that’s true. Everything is moving super fast. Remember the first time we hung out at your house, and you showed me the game carved into the terrace, like, into the cement? I was just thinking that for so many Dalit and Adivasi families in one generation, people are time-travelling. 

KL: Yeah, absolutely.

RT: We are the people who, in one sense, have the most practice at speculation (about the future, about resistance and towards liberation). We’ve made a habit of it; we should be the ones dominating this genre. This anthology, and everyone’s stories, just seem inevitable. We (at Blaft) didn’t start it to commission new stories; we always operated with the understanding that we just needed to find them because our communities have always been thinking through these ideas and themes. Like even in the “Begumpura” poem by Ravidass. 

Now, especially, in this time of great flux, it's essential that the culture reflects the politics. That’s kind of what we’re getting at, I think.  

KL: This is an exciting point you mentioned–that it's not something we just started doing now. This is also a practice of resistance, working towards something you want to dream of. But what’s happening now is that some of us are in a position where material conditions are getting better enough to put these ideas down and find ways to disseminate them. I think that's the exciting part. What you just said about the game I showed you on my terrace. It’s Pachisi, basically the Indian version of Ludo. The people who construct the houses use lines in the cement to create the board. They use very simple geometric lines while working during construction time, which may be their way of experiencing leisure for, like, whatever time they could, whether it was half an hour a day or something. For people like us, having extended leisure and imagining a utopian future is a radical exercise. And being able to materialise that is very much a big deal. Because, now, things are coming together. Things like this [stories about utopias, anti-caste imaginaries, cultural objects that move towards liberatory possibilities and more] have always existed in our brains, individually or within pockets of community. Now, they are finding a means of dissemination, which is very exciting.