Though science and religion, and as an extension science fiction and religious thought have often been represented to exist in oppositional axes in socio-cultural practices of thinking, the entanglement between these two apparently contradictory domains run deep and intimate. Unsurprisingly, these points of encounter between the two have been manifested in varied ways with science fictional narratives often attempting to engage with, champion or provide a critique of certain religious discourses. While in some instances these narratives have represented and propagated certain religious worldviews and traditions, at other times they have indulged in critical investigation over specific religious practices and rituals that seem exploitative and exclusionary in nature. Speculating about religion, creative artists have often attempted to reinterpret sacred texts by reimagining their mythic components, while at other times they have envisioned newer religions all together, inventing concomitant world orders, religious customs and belief systems, even cults. Science fiction has also frequently attempted to understand the nature of divinity, superhuman, and supernatural entities and wondered about the place of humans in this vast infinite cosmos, questions, which are essential preoccupations of religion as well. Moreover, complex ideas like evil and sin, ethics and justice, which are staples of science fictional narratives, overlap with the theorization of the discipline of religion. Similarly, apocalyptic and dystopian science fiction narratives imagining the end(s) of the world are heavily drawn from the frameworks of eschatology, again a core concern in religious discourses. Religion’s quest for understanding the world in a collective but simultaneously hierarchical pattern, the afterlife, the body and soul have found shadows in science fiction’s leitmotif of digitalization of self and disembodied consciousness. Again, the rise of the superheroes in sci-fi narratives nods to the idea of revelation and prophetic figure as seen in religious texts. Indeed, science fiction and religion have been entangled in more ways than one.
In a country like India with a strong penchant for imaginative storytelling and where religion pays a pivotal role in socio-cultural formations of identity on a daily basis, speculative imaginings revolving around the core idea of religion are bound to appear of which Kalki 2898 (2024) is a significant contemporary example. Kalki 2898, India’s most expensive film to date and an ‘ethereal science fiction’ (Shawl 2016), reinterprets the Hindu epic The Mahabharata, framing the story in a futuristic dystopian wasteland version of the nation plagued by severe ecological precarity and extreme crises in the system of faith, waiting for a messiah to arrive and deliver them from their sufferings. Along with attempting to reframe the ancient classic in the generic structure of science fiction, the movie also sets out to explore complex questions like that of belief and faith, of the messiah and the messianic, of authority and godhood, of climate driven apocalypse and eschatology, of sin, guilt and redemption, of good and evil, among others, questions which are preoccupations of both science fiction as well as religious studies. While the film has been selectively accused of distorting the sacrality of The Mahabharata for taking excessive creative liberty in reimaging the godly figures, it has mostly been welcomed as championing the ideology of Hinduism with its overt religious symbolism and lingual register. What is even more interesting however is that beyond the apparent points of entanglements and interactions, Kalki 2898 comes out as a material manifestation of religion, by formulating modified and mutated categories of religion more suited for these times and thereby helping in the circulation of the religious discourse.
The proposed paper aims to unpack and decrypt the unique nodal points through which the politically vibrant science fictional narrative of Kalki 2898 grapple with and is modified by increasingly complex and mutating nature of religion and its discourses. Rather than attempting to see religion as an abstract set of belief system posited in opposing binary or casual interaction with the ‘science’ of science fiction and represented through stock archetypes and symbols in this narrative, the study would interrogate how popular culture, provides an apparatus of materiality for religion to proliferate. The paper will follow an interdisciplinary method combining literary studies and the disciplines of religion. In addition to archival work, which has remained a core method for the study of literature and films, the project will substantially borrow theoretical frameworks and concepts from the discipline of religion. James Thrall’s(2024) analytical framework for interpreting science fiction through the lens of religion will serve as a guideline. Expanding on this structure of interpretation, the project will utilize categories used in the study of religion, such as sacred/profane, space-time and incongruity, as analysed by the historical materialist David Chidester in his seminal book Religion: Material Dynamics (2018). Chidester’s methodology allows for a dynamic interpretation of religion that is not fixed in specific texts or in ahistorical time, Rather, it “flows through the circulation of people, objects, technology, money, images of human possibility, and ideals of human solidarity”(p.8). Although the categories of sacred/profane and space-time have always been crucial to the discipline of religion in the Euro-Western academia, the concept of “incongruity” in Chidester’s work offers an understanding of these categories in which disparate factors converge without synthesis (p.5). This flexibility allows the project to explore the imagined gap between science and religion as incongruity. The paper will thus use the framework of religion as both a category of analysis and an object of knowledge. This methodology will enable the paper to focus on the contemporary economy of religion in India, which has become a driving force in the material production of science fiction and in turn become a material apparatus for the storage and dissemination of religious discourses.
Drawing from the ancient Hindu epic The Mahabharata, Kalki 2898 AD (2024), reimagines elements of the grand narrative in a futuristic wasteland while setting out to explore questions of belief and faith, of the messiah and the messianic, of authority and godhood, of climate driven apocalypse and eschatology, of sin, guilt and redemption. What is more interesting,is how the movie,a significant pop-cultural product,serves as a material manifestation of specific religion while excluding specific ones, helping in formation of modified categories of the religion and ultimately aiding in its contemporary circulation.This paper will attempt to unravel the entanglement between religion and science fiction in Kalki 2898, by drawing from the framework of the possible avenues of interaction (Thrall 2024) and the methodology of religious materiality (Chidester 2018). While Thrall provides a succinct guideline to interpret the interactions, Chidester arguments about materiality help locate the findings in real world religious manifestation.