Rashmi Devadasan, Rakesh Khanna & R.T. Samuel
The Subverse
In episode three, we chat with Rashmi Devadasan, Rakesh Khanna, and R.T. Samuel, the brilliant minds behind The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF, which has been making waves in the Indian speculative fiction scene. Rashmi Devadasan is a writer with over twenty-five years of experience in indie publishing, Tamil feature films, and Indian English theatre. At Blaft, she has been part of the selection, editing, design and production of the company's fiction in translation, comic book anthologies, original fiction, and zines. She is the author of Kumari Loves a Monster, a picture book created with...
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Gautam Bhatia
The Subverse
In episode two of season four, lawyer, author, and editor Gautam Bhatia returns! When we last spoke to Gautam, he had just published The Horizon, the much-anticipated sequel to The Wall. Since then, he’s published a variety of non-fiction books, helped curate and edit a new anthology, Between Worlds, for Westland Books, and published a new sci-fi novel: The Sentence. The Sentence is genre crossing, with elements of political thrillers, murder mysteries, and old school science fiction. In it, the protagonist, Nila, is faced with an ethical, legal and political conundrum which will...
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Arcx - Gigi Ganguly
The Subverse
In the first episode of season four, host Anjali Alappat sits down with Gigi Ganguly, to discuss her debut collection of short stories, Biopeculiar: Stories of an Uncertain World (Westland Books, 2024). Gigi began her career as a journalist and, after some years of writing for newspapers, she decided to study creative writing at the University of Limerick. Her first novella, One Arm Shorter than the Other, published in 2022, got her nominated for the Subjective Chaos Kind of Award in 2023. Biopeculiar: Stories of an Uncertain World focuses on the relationship between the human and...
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Crooked Cats: The Truth Behind Beastly Encounters
The Subverse
In this episode of Stories from the Subverse, Nayanika Mathur, Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford, delves into the conflict between big cats and humans. Nayanika’s book, Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene (2021), was a key source of inspiration for , which examines the intersections of capitalism through a feline lens. In this piece, Nayanika focuses on the governance of nonhuman animals, their entanglements with humans, and what the consequences are. Mathur talks about the two types of big cats—the seeda saada...
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Fragmented Forests: Raza Kazmi Talks Capitalism, Conservation, and Charismatic Wildlife
The Subverse
In this episode of Stories from the Subverse, we present our first Cataplisms audio story. The Cataplisms project examines our multispecies entanglements, critiques capitalism, and acknowledges the cataclysms at our doorstep, all through a feline lens. In this episode, we hear from someone personally and professionally invested in the fate of big cats and the forests they live in. Raza Kazmi is a conservationist, writer and wildlife historian, who focuses on East Central India. His childhood in Jharkhand’s Palamu region, surrounded by the forest’s flora and fauna, including tigers and...
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Botanical Reckonings: Reclaiming the Embrangled Vegetal from Colonial Bonds
The Subverse
In this episode, we're discussing plants, their exuberant multispecies sexualities and what we can learn from them, how botany is always interlinked with its cultural and historic context including colonialism, and an interdisciplinary approach can make one a better scientist. Host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Professor , the Luella LaMer Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, Banu engages the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology and is most recently the author...
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History, Naturally: Earth, Climate and Human Cycles
The Subverse
In the eighth episode of the season, host Susan Mathews talks to Pranay Lal, a natural history writer and climate change advocate about the dearth of interest in publishing books on natural history, the climate crises, the need for natural history museums, how the story of climate is intertwined with all other histories, and more. Pranay Lal is a natural history writer, public health expert, and climate change advocate. He is the author of two books on natural history. Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent (2016), his debut book, won the Tata Lit...
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Plastic Worlds: From Synthetic Universality to Queer Kin
The Subverse
In this episode host Susan Mathews talks to Heather Davis, the author of Plastic Matter (2022) about plastic and how it has completely permeated our world. They cover a wide range of topics from synthetic universality, technocapitalism, chemical legacies, queer kin, reproductive questions raised by plastic, and hauntings created by the aftermath of slavery and settler colonialism. Davis is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great...
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A Creature Called Earth: Movers, Shakers, and Rainmakers
The Subverse
In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Ferris Jabr, author of Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life (2024), and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and Scientific American. The interview focused on the central question in the book: in what ways and to what extent has life changed the planet? From microbes to mammoths, life has transformed the continents, oceans, and atmosphere, turning a lump of orbiting rock into the world as we’ve known it. In the conversation, Jabr spoke of how Western science in particular has segregated geology from biology,...
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Earthly Matters: An Ecosophical Approach
The Subverse
We're back with The Subverse. In this episode of the season, host Susan Mathews talks to writer and ecological thinker about the current crises in modern cosmology. Ecosophy, which acknowledges the living earth, is a way to address this arrythmia and our current alienation from the earth to which we belong. Aseem Shrivastava is a writer, teacher, and ecological thinker with a doctorate in Economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has lectured across the world on ecological issues emanating from globalisation. Shrivastava speaks of the present moment...
info_outlineIn episode three, we chat with Rashmi Devadasan, Rakesh Khanna, and R.T. Samuel, the brilliant minds behind The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF, which has been making waves in the Indian speculative fiction scene.
Rashmi Devadasan is a writer with over twenty-five years of experience in indie publishing, Tamil feature films, and Indian English theatre. At Blaft, she has been part of the selection, editing, design and production of the company's fiction in translation, comic book anthologies, original fiction, and zines. She is the author of Kumari Loves a Monster, a picture book created with the artist Shyam. Her short stories were part of an anthology titled Strange Worlds! Strange Times! Amazing Sci-Fi Stories, published by Speaking Tiger. She is a fan of fungi, moss, lichen, cephalopods, and jellyfish. Rashmi also draws gentle, mostly cuboidal-shaped sample collector robots that do research on a cacti-covered asteroid. You can find Rashmi Devadasan on Instagram @kaimaurundai.
Rakesh Khanna grew up in Berkeley, California, of mixed Punjabi and Anglo-American heritage. He co-founded Blaft Publications in Chennai with Rashmi Ruth Devadasan, who is also his wife, in 2008. The company publishes translations of Indian fiction, folklore, weird fiction, and graphic novels. Rakesh is the co-author of Ghosts, Monsters, and Demons of India, the editor of Blaft's Tamil Pulp Fiction and Gujarati Pulp Fiction anthologies, and co-editor of The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF. Sometimes he edits mathematics textbooks. He is interested in marine invertebrates, demonology, topological graph theory, and banging on things to see what they sound like. You can find Rakesh Khanna on Instagram @blaftpublications.
R.T. Samuel is an editor and independent cultural producer working between London and New Delhi. R is the co-editor of the collection, The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF, helmed by a viral fundraiser that made it the second-most successful Indian publishing campaign in Kickstarter history. The book involved working with nearly 30 authors, translators and artists for close to two years, and features stories from more than six different languages and diverse mediums. From 2021-23, R was also the writer and broadcaster behind the hugely popular (20k plays and counting) underground political and cultural education podcast Clear Blue Skies S1. A lapsed investigative and culture journalist, R is currently pursuing an MSc in Anthropology and Professional Practice at University College London and is always happy to talk about 80s SFF, public radio, futures literacy and Indian hip-hop. You can find R.T. Samuel on Instagram @mithran.rt.
In this episode, we discuss the lack of understanding around caste, what’s missing from the Indian SFF scene, the challenges and thrills of putting together an expansive anthology, the importance of translated fiction, Enid Blyton's undeniable influence, and more.
Links to Rashmi Devadasan’s work:
Links to Rakesh Khanna’s work:
Links to R.T. Samuel’s work: