Author(s): Kavinder Bhatt, Dr. L.D. Mishra

Abstract: The Western transhumanist narrative often focuses on how technology can overcome biological limitations. However, much of South Asian speculative fiction situates the posthuman subject within a framework of historical trauma, caste-based social hierarchies, and persistent memory. This article analyses the discourses of genetic engineering and biopolitical governance through Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s novel Clone (Zubaan, 2018). The novel takes place in a sterile “Global Community” in the year 2400, where all individuals belong to a clone class system, with Clones produced for labour and organs, yet denied emotions or ancestral pasts. The protagonist of this fictional community is Clone 14/54/G, who uniquely experiences involuntary “visitations” from India’s past that resist the tabula rasa assumption enforced by the state. The analysis draws on theories including N. Katherine Hayles’s conception of embodiment and posthumanity, Giorgio Agamben’s bios/zoë distinction, Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, and Donna Haraway’s cyborg feminism. The central argument is that Chabria figures the posthuman body as a palimpsest: a surface partially erased, yet retaining its historical residue. Ideas advanced by Suparno Banerjee and Sami Ahmad Khan regarding Indian speculative fiction are also employed to locate Clone within the context of decolonial posthumanist critique. Ultimately, Clone suggests that an ethical posthumanism cannot be grounded solely in technological purification, but must account for the entangled bodies of consciousness, memory, and cultural legacy.

Keywords: Critical Posthumanism; South Asian Speculative Fiction; Biopolitics; Necropolitics; Genetic Memory; Palimpsest; Priya Sarukkai Chabria.

Article Info: Received: 07 Mar 2026; Received in revised form: 05 Apr 2026; Accepted: 09 Apr 2026; Available online: 12 Apr 2026

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.112.65