The City Speaks: Urban Spaces in Indian Literature

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.

Table of Contents:
Foreword: From Spatial Experience to Experienced Space: Representations, Recollections and Reproductions of the Urban Spaces in Indian Literature Mustafa Zeki Çirakli Introduction: Writing Cities: Appropriating the Urban in Indian Literatures Subashish Bhattacharjee and Goutam Karmakar Part 1: Fictions of the ‘Cities at the Centre’ 1. City’s Deity: Exploring the Urban and Sacred Space in Anita Desai’s Voices and the City and Journey to Ithaca Deeptangshu Das 2. Khushwant Singh’s Delhi: A Multi-Layered Projection of an Anthropomorphised City Sarani Ghosal Mondal 3. Diasporic Return to Calcutta in Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter and Days and Nights in Calcutta Rima Bhattacharya 4. Stories by the Sea: Memories and Space in Amit Chaudhuri’s Friend of My Youth Sayan Aich Bhowmik 5. ‘…not exactly fear, but unease, an apprehension’: flânerie and the tactics of survival in Baumgartner’s Bombay Rupayan Mukherjee 6. Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis: The Networked City Amrutha Kunapalli 7. At Home in City (?): Reading the Destabilising New City in Raj Kamal Jha’s She Will Build Him a City Kuheli Singha 8. The Radical, the Bourgeois and the Alienated in the City in Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others Nilanjan Chakraborty 9. Discovering New Cities and Their Underbellies within the Old: Seeing the Periphery of Kolkata through the Lens of Kunal Basu’s Kalkatta Avijit Das and Shri Krishan Rai 10. Palimpsestic Jungle/Jumble: Visceral Urbanism in Rajat Chaudhuri’s Hotel Calcutta Subhadeep Paul 11. Mumbai Queered: Perils and Pleasures of the Sexual Metropolis in Murder in Mahim Somdatta Bhattacharya 12. ‘Botanising on the Asphalt’: Towards an alternate cityscape of Delhi and its urbane citizenry in Ravish Kumar’s Ishq Mein Shahar Hona Rajarshi Roy Part 2: Fictions from the Fringes 13. Rohinton Mistry’s city by the sea: a place to call home? Natacha Lasorak 14. Urban Spaces and Fading Culture in Mamang Dai’s Fictions: A Postmodern Reading of City Life Debajyoti Biswas 15. Evolution of Heterotopic Space: Unearthing the Toxic Cityscape in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People Somasree Sarkar and Neha Kumari 16. Cosmopolitanism and Trade Relations: Analysing the port city of Muziris through Sethumadhavan’s The Saga of Muziris Maya Vinai and Revathy Hemachandran 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 Arnab Chatterjee 18. Girish Karnad’s Consideration of ‘Urban Spaces’ for His Plays Jolly Das 19. A Tale of Two Cities: Showcasing the Façade of the Indian Metropolis in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Lights Out and Harvest Praggnaparamita Biswas 20. City, Space & Spectacle: Parsi Theatre’s Indar Sabha Sib Sankar Majumdar 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 Baisali Hui 22. ‘How can she feel at home in so many places?’: City, home, and diasporic subjectivity in Sujata Bhatt’s poetry Joyjit Ghosh 23. When a City Speaks: Tracing the voices and visions of Mumbai in Gopal Lahiri and Sunil Sharma’s Cities: Two Perspectives Goutam Karmakar Part 5: The City in Itself 24. Liberating the Cursed City: Looking through Jiddu Krishnamurti and Sisirkumar Ghose Goutam Ghosal 25. Journey from Alienation to Integration: Travel, Urban Space, and Chronotope in Bharati Mukherjee’s Days and Nights in Calcutta Basundhara Chakraborty 26. Psychogeographies: Urban Space and Situationism in Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found Ujjwal Kr. Panda

About the Author :
Subashish Bhattacharjee is Assistant Professor of English at Munshi Premchand Mahavidyalaya, University of North Bengal, India. His doctoral research, at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, is on the interstices of continental philosophy and architecture. He has authored/edited several volumes including Queering Visual Cultures (2018), New Women’s Writing (2018), Japanese Horror Culture (2021), and Hororo Cogitaire (forthcoming). Goutam Karmakar, Ph.D. (English), is Assistant Professor of English at Barabazar Bikram Tudu Memorial College, Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, Purulia, West Bengal, India. His forthcoming and recently published edited books are Nation and Narration: Hindi Cinema and the Making and Remaking of National Consciousness (forthcoming), Narratives of Trauma in South Asian Literature (forthcoming) and Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature: Traversing Resistance, Margins and Extremism (2021). He has been published in journals including MELUS, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, South Asian Review, Journal of Gender Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, National Identities, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, and Asiatic among others.