Worlds rewritten: Feminist resistance in South Asian speculativefiction

This thesis positions South Asian Speculative Fiction not as escapism but as a vital technology of feminist resistance against British colonialism, religious fundamentalism, and patriarchal nationalism. Mapping a literary lineage from early twentiethcentury reform movements to present-day authoritarian anxieties, the study argues that these narratives function as counter-hegemonic spaces where the female body refuses inscription by the laws of men or the state. The research examines Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's visionary works, Sultana's Dream (1905) and Padmarag (1924), within the context of Colonial Reform Movements in Bengal. It analyses how Hossain utilised utopian imagination to dismantle the logic of the zenana, constructing instead a 'realist utopia' founded on secular education and interfaith sisterhood that defied the conservative norms of her era. The investigation pivots to the 'intermedial afterlives' of these texts in the visual art of Chitra Ganesh (2018) and Shehzil Malik (2022), demonstrating the enduring vitality of Hossain's vision in modern feminist consciousness. Transitioning to the post-colonial nation-state, the thesis examines the critical dystopias of Bina Shah's Before She Sleeps (2018) and Manjula Padmanabhan's Escape (2008). It explores how contemporary regimes weaponise religion and technology to enact total reproductive governance, reducing women to state resources. Yet, the study concludes that even within these enclosed landscapes, the utopian impulse survives. Through the fugitive survivalism of Padmanabhan's wasteland or the subterranean networks of Shah's heroines, the genre insists that the future is not a closed circuit of oppression but a horizon of possibility, sustained by the persistence of memory.