Bengali science fiction

Bengali science fiction (বাংলা বিজ্ঞান কল্পকাহিনী Bangla Bigyan Kalpakahini) is a part of Bengali literature containing science fiction elements. It is called Kalpabigyan (কল্পবিজ্ঞান Fictional science) or stories of imaginative science, in Bengali literature. The term was first coined by Adrish Bardhan during his editorship years. Bengali writers wrote various science fiction works in the 19th and early 20th centuries during the British Raj, before the partition of India. Isaac Asimov's assertion that "true science fiction could not really exist until people understood the rationalism of science and began to use it with respect in their stories" is true for the earliest science fiction written in the Bengali language. Though not particularly science fiction, as tales of speculative fiction and alternate history, and vision of the future, the first notable work was by Kailash Chandra Dutta (1817-1857), in his "A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours in the Year 1945". Written as a submitted piece for a competition at Hindu College, this was later published in Calcutta Literary Gazette (06.06.1835). Dutta was only eighteen years when he wrote the story describing a revolution of the students of Hindu College against the Raj. Shashi Chandra Dutta (1824-1886), another notable name from the same family, wrote "The Republic of Odisha, A Page from The Annals of the 20th Century". Published in The Evening Harkaru's on 25 May 1845, Dutta's work depicts the birth of an independent Odisha state as a republic, from the hands of the British Raj, in the year 1916. These two pieces of alternate history are also Bengali's first notable works in English. Another alumnus of Hindu College, Sri Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, also called the father of Bengali historical fiction, in 1857, published a collection of two novels as a book called "Anguriyo Binimoy". Inspired by the English book Romance of History, "Anguriyo Binimoy" (The Exchange of Rings) is also a classic example in the alternate history genre.