Draft:Runaway Cyclone

"Runaway Cyclone"
Short story by Jagadish Chandra Bose
Translator	Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay
Country	India
Language	Bengali
Genre	Science Fiction
Publication
Published in	Abyakto
Award	Kuntaline Purashkar

Runaway Cyclone (পলাতক তুফান )

Runaway Cyclone (Bengali :পলাতক তুফান), previously named as Niruddesher Kahini (The Story of the Missing One) by Jagadish Chandra Bose, was first published in 1896. This short story is considered to be one of the first works of Bengali Science Fiction (Kalpabigyan). It was the first winning entry of the Kuntaline Story Competition. Later, Bose modified and included the story in his collection “Abyakto” under a different name Palatak Toofan. Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay translated the story into English in 2013.

Synopsis

The story is set in two parts. Part I deals with the scientific mystery of a supernatural cyclone disappearing in the Bay of Bengal and Part II provides with the answer of the same.

Part I

As published in the Englishman on 28^th and 29^th September, The Shimla and Alipore Meteorological Office warned about a deadly cyclone that was going to strike Bengal within two days. Consequently, the Barometer fell a few inches, the sky was dark and cloudy with mild raining throughout the day. However, by the evening of October 1, the sky became clear and the news confirmed that the cyclone had left Bengal and gone to a different direction. The Newspaper voiced people’s concerns about the unreliability of the Meteorological department.

The “runaway cyclone” phenomenon caused debates in scientific communities. A German professor at the British Association convention at Oxford presented a paper explaining how the atmosphere never dissolves into space because of the gravitational pull. When oil and water are mixed, the lighter oil floats on the surface. Lighter objects are less influenced by Earth’s gravity. Similarly, the lighter hydrogen tries to escape Earth’s atmosphere but is not absolutely free from the gravitational pull. However nuanced, this scientific explanation could not answer the mystery with which the story began. This is eventually done by the narrator in Part II.

Part II

The severely ill narrator was advised a sea journey by his doctor. It began on September 28. After spending first two uneventful days, on October 1 the sea took a dangerous form. Breezes were still, surface water was taut. The Captain of the ship hinted at the impending doom with a sad face. Shortly after, huge waves started hitting the boat from all sides, the sounds of the cyclone mixed with the angry sea produced a music of obliteration. In his apparent final moments, the narrator remembered his eight year old daughter, her joke about his balding hair and the bottle of the magical hair oil ‘kuntal keshari’ being left in his bag. He managed to pour the bottle of the hair oil into the sea and like magic it calmed the running, violent water and the entire atmosphere; with the sun coming up almost instantly. That’s how thousands were saved from their untimely death and the ‘scientific mystery’ was resolved.

Background

The 1896 version “Niruddesher Kahini” is a bilingual science fiction story with the main narrative described in Bengali and the scientific material in English. The 1921 version “Palatak Toofan” is rewritten solely in Bengali. This second version comes up with a few changes, with fuller descriptions and more relaxed pace. The hair oil ‘Kuntaline’ becomes ‘Kuntal Keshari’ and it is given a backstory describing the troubles of an English circus manager due to his balding lion who is helped by a sanyasi to whom the formula of the oil occurs in a dream. The 1896 version ends with an explanatory passage drawn from a scientific journal "Scientific American" that has later been omitted in the 1921 version.

The content, context and closure of the story involving meteorology, cyclone, sea voyage, scientific debates, effects of oil on water are very well known to a contemporary Bengali-Indian reader. Built upon this shared scientific and cultural context, Bose’s story appears strange yet scientifically plausible to his readers.

Themes and analysis

Hair Oil : from ordinary to scientific

The narrator’s weapon to stop a deadly cyclone actually originates from an entrepreneur’s need to promote his product. Hemendramohan Basu, the manufacturer of the Kuntaline hair oil came up with the marketing idea of the Kuntaline Purashkar, a short story competition where anyone could participate with one condition that the stories handed in for the award must feature Kuntaline hair oil. The 1896 winner of the competition was Bose’s story about weather control. A mundane Bengali everyday commodity like a hair oil being transformed into a scientific instrument marks the collapse of the binary between ordinary (domestic) and scientific (modern). Premendra Mitra’s Ghanada Stories (“The Walking Stick”) too deal with similar motifs where ordinary objects are reimagined with hidden scientific potential.

Butterfly effect

Bose’s story and the hair oil anticipate the ‘butterfly effect’ phenomenon from chaos theory, the concept that tiny actions in a deterministic nonlinear system can lead to huge changes and have global effects. Bose used this method fifty-six years earlier Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” whom science fiction history credits the first literary use of the effect.

Proto Bengali Science Fiction

Chronologically, Kylas Chunder Dutt's A Journal of 48 Hours In The Year 1945 (1835) and Shoshee Chunder Dutt's Republic of Orissa: Annals From The Pages Of The Twentieth Century (1845) mark the beginning of proto Bengali Science Fiction. But according to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction's entry on Bengal, Bose’s “Niruddesher Kahini” is the most significant and one of the best works of Bengali Science Fiction in its embryonic stage. During his speeches between 1910s to 1930s, Bose criticized the proposition that vivid imagination is injurious for scientific quest. This story reflects the same sentiment. The failure of a German professor to explain the scientific mystery is set in contrast with the achievement of a common Bengali man to provide a native vocabulary and show that scientific endeavour could be a part of Bengali imaginative literature. Bose anticipates the tradition that will later be used by Begum Rokeya in Sultana’s Dream.

Anti-colonial Politics

The 1921 extended version of the story combines features of both science fiction and magical realism. By tracing the origin of the Kuntaline hair oil and therefore the solution to the ‘scientific mystery’ to the Indian sanyasi, Bose diminishes the undisputed influence of western science and exposes how its narrative trope acts as a tool to maintain the empire’s control. Bose’s ‘science made in India’ hints towards the modernity of the sub-continent and critiques the colonial monopoly over what counts as legitimate scientific knowledge.