Specters of Sultana:
A Sci-Fi Opera
In the year 2018, after my grandmother Sandhya Mitra passed away, I was sent a large digital folder, containing personal photos, articles and other documents from her days as a doctoral student at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai in the 1950s. Among the many magical things that these articles contained, was the most obvious truth that my grandmother had been a scientific pioneer in the field of particle physics in independent India, something that I needed to understand and in turn share with the rest of the world.
Specters of Sultana is a speculative sci-fi Opera, containing a fictional history of Subcontinental Science. Weaving together historical research about the anticolonial Science movement in British India in the early 1900s and nuclear power fantasies of the postcolonial nations of the Subcontinent, the Opera engineers speculative encounters between iconic women and queer people involved in scientific research in the region, following in the footsteps of Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, feminist educationist and Spider Mother of South Asian science fiction.
