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Even as Russia rained devastation down on Ukraine, a different kind of war was underway on social media forums. It was an information war, a battle for supremacy in propaganda—fought on multiple vectors.
The world looked on curiously as US President Joe Biden invited 20-something TikTok influencers to enlist them in the battle against Russian disinformation. Then, there was concern writ large among foreign diplomats when big tech and 'multi-national' firms based in the West adopted overtly political stances, censoring information freely in super-highways that were under their control. Uncomfortable questions lingered in the air—who was to say that, one day, the lens wouldn't turn their way?
On the other side, thousands of Twitter and Facebook bot accounts in support of Vladimir Putin cropped up almost overnight, fluently conversant in the praxis of decolonisation and Western empire overreach in languages as varied as Tamil, Hindi, Urdu and Zulu—spread across South Asia and Africa.
A wonderful breakdown of the propaganda network is available in this Twitter thread.
Boundaries broke down, unnatural alliances were formed (India, China and Pakistan were all in one corner in the global diplomatic forums), the concept of truth was completely kneecapped and overwhelmed, and a sense of liminality—global disorientation—hung thickly in the air.
It has also sparked a renewed interest in the concepts of totalitarianism—how it has changed over the years, and what new forms it can take. In a world that is, for the first time in millennia, truly multipolar—with different power structures now vying for supremacy at every level of human governance structure—what would totalitarianism look like? In line with the main theme of the 21st century, will it also be 'decentralised'?
And that is where legal scholar, and speculative fantasy and fiction editor Gautam Bhatia's new series of speculative fiction [SFF] novels 'The Chronicles of Sumer' comes in. Through The Wall and The Horizon, Bhatia introduces us to the world of Sumer, surrounded on all sides by a giant impregnable wall. The people of Sumer know nothing of the world outside it, though the smara (subconscious yearnings) lurks deeps inside their souls. The story revolves around a group of youngsters calling themselves Tarafians—after revolutionary poet Taraf—and their attempts to convince Sumer that the world outside the wall should be explored. On the other side of the political divide in Sumer are forces like the Shoortans—a quasi-religious group whose job is to keep the boundaries of the Wall intact and sacrosanct.
The series is an exploration of a lot of fascinating motifs. How can a civilisation like Sumer exist within a bounded space? Sumer, fed by river Rasa, is divided into 15 concentric circular mandalas (the mandalas are divided on labour differences—and class connotations are implied). Population control is another aspect, enforced by child caps and marriage licenses. In essence, it is a circular city, trapped in an imaginary circular time, divided into circular classes. As Bhatia describes it, Sumer is not a dystopia in the traditional sense of the term. Every natural resource is limited, but there are no times of real hard-hitting scarcities. Sumer has lived through wars and conflicts, with each side raising the banner of 'freedom'. Even though there is a division of mandalas, there is no segregation in the traditional sense—marriages between mandalas are not banned, but carries heavy economic disincentives. Homosexual relations are glorified as ‘pure love’. There is freedom of speech (in a flawed, yet familiar way). There is no all-encompassing power structure. Shoortans themselves are divided, with a faction aligning with revisionist Tefnakth and his Coterie. There is noisy democracy, with different factions including progressive leaders like Council Elder Sanchika. An elite group called The Select spreads science and scientific appreciation amongst Sumerians.
Bhatia eschews the pop portrayals of overdone Orwellian or Huxleyan dystopias, and instead gives us something far more familiar, rooted and hard-hitting. A world where the citizens are incentivised to keep the power structure intact—with the 15 mandalas, almost everybody is above somebody else, and has interest in maintaining the system.
The more institutional powers, meanwhile, are caught in something akin to a Mexican standoff; an unending jostle to impose their definition over the most premium commodity of all—truth and freedom.
The Wall explores Mithila and the Tarafians attempt to scale the wall and explore the world outside. In The Horizon, the stakes are much, much higher, with black clouds of unrest and disaster looming over Sumer.
Bhatia speaks to THE WEEK about some of the motifs in the book and the changing definitions of totalitarianism in the current political climate.
Edited excerpts:
Q/ Is Sumer inspired from the Mesopotamian civilisation?
Actually, it has nothing to do with Mesopotamia. It is inspired from Meru—the Meru mountains [believed to be] in the centre of the world. I realised only later the association that people would make with Mesopotamia. The inspiration came from Meru.
Q/ Is Sumer actually set in the past, or in the future? Maybe a [post-techno world after] something akin to the Butlerian jihad, as portrayed in Dune?
It is set in the far future—given the existence of builders who created the world, and the existence of structures that come from a different technological time. It is like a post-technological civilisation, and some incident has pushed everyone to an early modern way of living.
Q/ If it is indeed in the future, have we moved from a post-scarcity world to one of scarcity?
I don’t think we are post-scarcity now. We are still very much in scarcity. What the two novels try to do is show you a world where scarcity is contingent—it is artificially created. In our world, scarcity is a function of political decisions. In the world of Sumer, scarcity is a function of a literal Wall. And it doesn’t need to be that way.
Q/ In the book, you show circles as motifs (mandalas, the wall, the horizon), or cages that people have to break through to get to freedom. Was it a conscious decision?
There are a couple of reasons for it. So, the first is that the idea of circular time is a non-capitalist idea that has been there in all these old cultures. It would make sense for Sumer to have circular time. It is not necessary that every society, whatever its vertical economy, would think of time in the same way. It was broadly to do with that. It is also, as you say, that these concepts become cages, and to attain freedom, you have to break out of the contextual cage you are in—whether it is circular time, whether it is not being able to see the horizon. So, it is part of that broader idea.
Q/ For me, your two novels best defined dystopia from a real-world perspective, compared to everything I have read in the recent past. There is a functional political system, and not really an overwhelming want for anything. In this current milieu, how would you define dystopia?
I don’t think the duology [The Wall, the Horizon] is dystopia. In the science fiction tradition, dystopia is the opposite of utopia, right? It is where suffering is kind of the defining feature. It can be post-apocalyptic, where land is ravaged, there is no society, and you are struggling to survive. Or, you are in like 1984 [George Orwell] or Brave New World [Aldous Huxley], where societies are absoluted in political tyranny. That is kind of a near hopeless world. I was consciously avoiding creating a dystopia. I think my novel genre is best defined as an ambiguous utopia. You think things are fine, but you scratch beneath the surface and you find a lot of issues. Ambiguous utopia, for me, is more interesting.
Q/ At the point of time, with the atomisation of society, all of us experience dystopia in different and highly personalised ways. For some, dystopia could be primarily induced by the social media. For some, it could be the government. For some workers, it could be corporations. Is there a need, specifically for science fiction writers, to redefine dystopia?
I don’t think we need new definitions per se. Personally, I don’t find dystopic writing all that interesting. I find works which induce ambiguity into classical dystopia far more fascinating. I think a good example is S.B. Divya’s recent book Machinehood, set in the near future where the economy is completely gig-ified. Everybody has to do gigs in order to survive. It is not this gruesome kind of dystopia, where you are under surveillance all the time, and every moment is one of terror. People still get on with their lives. People still negotiate their way through it. Books that acknowledge the dystopic element of our world, without completely succumbing or dissolving into the dystopia, that is the kind of work I like to read more. That is not to say that dystopic writing is not important. It has always been very important. It is just a matter of personal taste.
Q/ One motif your book explores is the nature and cost of freedom. If you think of society as an equation of who gets hegemony over freedom (we had single agents in the past, like states, which had monopoly over money, territory and so on—which is not the case now), which of these terms need redefinition?
In the two books, there is a real physical impediment to freedom in the form of the wall. Of course, the wall can stand in for many things. There is a point at which the scientists tell the people that they can vote on any decision in the city, but they can’t vote against the Wall because it is a part of nature. A lot of debates on freedom stem from what society has decided as natural, and it is a debate on what can’t be changed versus what can be changed. Aristotle, for instance, once wrote that slavery was a condition that some people were born with. For centuries, there were struggles to redefine it and outlaw it. I think [the story of freedom is] the history of trying to shift the needle on what we accept as natural, and what we think of as humanly created and hence need not accept.
Q/ In the book, you write about the system [of mandalas and restrictions] as being propped up by the people themselves, because someone would always be above the other. What of this nature of distributed oppression do we not understand?
I think every system of oppression is propped up by the people, and by a range of interests. Oppressive systems work because, at any point, there are enough interests propping it up, and they are able to exercise hegemony. Caste system is a classic example of that. Of course, Sumer has nothing to do with caste system, and there is no relation to it. But, there is this [growing] idea that oppression is always distributed. In a lot of fantasy novels, you see one tyrant, one dark lord, that has to be overthrown. I think oppression is a lot more granular and a lot more distributed. I think one of my attempts with the two books was to show how both oppression and struggle for freedom are ultimately distributed struggles—not featuring one hero and one dark lord. It is much more complex, and people have their motivations which you can’t always classify as good or bad.
Q/ Where do you stand on tech utopianism vs tech dystopianism?
I think they are equally flawed, in that technology is not a recipe for either utopia or dystopia. It depends on how you use it. At any given time, you will have elements of both utopia and dystopia. Think face recognition or deep learning. On one hand, it has great uses. On the other, it can be used for deep fakes, fake news, and so on. A lot of it depends on how tech is designed to be used. I think it is a political question. I think tech utopia and tech dystopia are simplifications of how tech is embedded in our politics.
