Pandemic, Dystopian Fiction, and Increasing Inequalities: A Reading of Samit Basu's Chosen Spirits

Abstract

This paper examines Samit Basu’s Chosen Spirits (2020), a speculative narrative, which depicts a world of extreme surveillance and dystopia, technology-controlled, and the deep differences between the privileged and the underprivileged. The Indian version of the novel is considered for this paper. Through this work of dystopian fiction, this paper understands how this pandemic could accelerate the world into a living dystopia, and how dystopian fiction speculates the futures awaiting us. This paper is an effort to understand the privileged spaces and power structures that ensure the marginalised populations are bound to the margins, and how, a pandemic could lead to the further erasure of the unprivileged, until and unless, the ones on the comfortable side of the power structures, take a stronger stance.

Keywords

• covid-19, literature, dystopian fiction, india