By Sinéad Murphy, PhD student in Comparative Literature
The King’s Fantastic Talks series came to life with its first instalment on 23rd October, with Prof Pablo Mukherjee delivering a riveting and trenchant study of third world non-aligned science policy and science fiction in India in the mid-twentieth century, focusing on the fiction of Satyajit Ray. Though Ray is better-known outside of India for his films, Mukherjee argues that Ray’s fiction and films are bound by similar aims, particularly the drive to achieve a modernist style which can adequately reflect the process of uneven modernisation in a newly postcolonial third world nation.