ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the twin colonial sciences of geography and cartography with references to Leela Majumdar and Sukumar Ray, contributors to the Bangla children’s magazine Sandesh and writers of science fantasty tales, who were both products of Anglicized colonial educations and epitomized some of the ways in which the colonial subjects, assimilated, absorbed and reorganized the ideology of the techno-sciences of the empire. Both Majumdar and Ray, through their fiction written for children and young adults, grappled with the expanse of British territorial and scientific explorations to critique Western techno-sciences. In Majumdar’s kalpavigyan stories (like Shortcut, 1983) we see a questioning of the paradigms of Neo-Enlightenment scientific principles. Similarly, Ray’s narrative, Heshoram Hushiyarer Diary (1922), grapples with colonial science’s emphasis on the comprehensive archive and the experiential physical world. Both writers employ figures of surveyor/explorers who undertake tasks that underline the boundaries of scientific epistemology. The explorer figure is both a partaker and a critic of imperial sciences.
