This book studies the significance and representation of the ‘city’ in the writings of Indian poets, graphic novelists, and dramatists. It demonstrates how cities give birth to social images, perspectives, and complexities, and explores the ways in which cities and the characters in Indian literature coexist to form a larger literary framework of interpretations. Drawing on the theoretical concepts of Western urban thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre, Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Edward Soja, David Harvey, and Diane Levy, as well as South Asian thinkers such as Ashis Nandy, Arjun Appadurai, Vinay Lal, and Ravi Sundaram, the book projects against a seemingly monolithic and homogenous Western qualification of urban literatures and offers a truly unique and contentious presentation of Indian literature. Unfolding the urban-literary landscape of India, the volume lays the groundwork for an urban studies approach to Indian literature. It will be of great interest to scholars and students of literature, especially Indian writing in English, urban studies, and South Asian studies.
Author(s): Subashish Bhattacharjee; Goutam Karmakar
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 300
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of contributors
Foreword: from spatial experience to experienced space: representations, recollections, and reproductions of the urban spaces in Indian literature
Introduction: writing cities: appropriating the urban in Indian literatures
Part 1 Fictions of the ‘cities at the centre’
1 City’s deity: exploring the urban and sacred space in Anita Desai’s Voices in the City and Journey to Ithaca
2 Khushwant Singh’s Delhi: a multi-layered projection of an anthropomorphised city
3 Diasporic return to Calcutta in Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter and Days and Nights in Calcutta
4 Stories by the sea: memories and space in Amit Chaudhuri’s Friend of My Youth
5 ‘. . . Not exactly fear, but unease, an apprehension’: flânerie and the tactics of survival in Baumgartner’s Bombay
6 Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis: the networked city
7 At home in city (?): reading the destabilising New City in Raj Kamal Jha’s She Will Build Him a City
8 The radical, the bourgeois, and the alienated in the city in Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others
9 Discovering new cities and their underbellies within the old: seeing the periphery of Kolkata through the lens of Kunal Basu’s Kalkatta
10 Palimpsestic jungle/jumble: visceral urbanism in Rajat Chaudhuri’s Hotel Calcutta
11 Mumbai queered: perils and pleasures of the sexual metropolis in Murder in Mahim
12 ‘Botanising on the asphalt’: towards an alternate cityscape of Delhi and its urbane citizenry in Ravish Kumar’s Ishq Mein Shahar Hona
Part 2 Fictions from the fringes
13 Rohinton Mistry’s city by the sea: a place to call home?
14 Urban spaces and fading culture in Mamang Dai’s fictions: a postmodern reading of city life
15 Evolution of Heterotopic space: unearthing the toxic cityscape in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People
16 Cosmopolitanism and trade relations: analysing the port city of Muziris through Sethumadhavan’s novel The Saga of Muziris
Part 3 Staging the city
17 ‘Cities imprison and kill the blood’: exploring the politics of the representation of the country and the city in Rabindranath Tagore’s Red Oleanders
18 Girish Karnad’s consideration of ‘urban spaces’ for his plays
19 A tale of two cities: showcasing the façade of the Indian metropolis in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Lights Out and Harvest
20 City, space, and spectacle: Parsi Theatre’s Indar Sabha
Part 4 Poetics of the cities
21 Imagery of revolt and withdrawal: the city–country interface in the poetry of Keki N. Daruwalla and Adil Jussawalla
22 ‘How can she feel at home in so many places?’: city, home, and diasporic subjectivity in Sujata Bhatt’s poetry
23 When a city speaks: tracing the voices and visions of Mumbai in Gopal Lahiri and Sunil Sharma’s Cities: Two Perspectives
Part 5 The city in itself
24 Liberating the cursed city: looking through Jiddu Krishnamurti and Sisirkumar Ghose
25 Journey from alienation to integration: travel, urban space, and chronotope in Bharati Mukherjee’s Days and Nights in Calcutta
26 Psychogeographies: urban space and situationism in Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
Index
