Postcolonial Urban Outcasts

294 Pages·02.042 MB·English

by  Madhurima Chakraborty

Postcolonial Urban Outcasts
Extending current scholarship on South Asian Urban and Literary Studies,
this volume examines the role of the discontents of the South Asian city. The
collection investigates how South Asian literature and literature about South
Asia attends to urban margins, regardless of whether the definition of mar-
gin is spatial, psychological, gendered, or sociopolitical. That cities are a site
of profound paradoxes is nowhere clearer than in South Asia, where urban
areas simultaneously represent both the frontiers of globalization as well
as the deeply troubling social and political inequalities of the global south.
Additionally, because South Asian cities are defined by the palimpsestic con-
fluence of, among other things, colonial oppression, anticolonial nationalism,
postcolonial governance, and twenty-first-century transnational capital, they
are sites where the many faces of empowerment and disempowerment are
elaborated. The volume brings together chapters that emphasize myriad criti-
cal approaches—geospatial, urban-theoretical, diasporic, subaltern, and oth-
ers. United in their critical empathy for urban outcasts, the chapters respond
to central questions such as: What is the relationship between the politico-
economic narratives of globally emerging South Asian cities and the dispos-
sessed? How do South Asian cities stand in relationship to the nation and,
conversely, how might South Asians in diaspora construct these cities within
larger narratives of development, globalization, or as sources of authentic
ethnic identities? How is the very skeleton—the space, the territory—of
South Asian cities marked with and by exclusionary politics? How do the
aesthetic and formal choices undertaken by writers determine the potential
for and limits to emancipation of urban outcasts from their oppressive cir-
cumstances? Considering fiction, nonfiction, comics, and genre fiction from
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka; literature from the twentieth and
the twenty-first century; and works that are Anglophone and those that are
in translation, this book will be valuable to a range of disciplines.
Madhurima Chakraborty is Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Literature in
the Department of English, Columbia College Chicago, USA.
Umme Al-wazedi is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature in the
Department of English and Co-Program Director of Women’s and Gender
Studies at Augustana College, USA.
Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.
Edited in collaboration with the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Stud-
ies, University of Kent at Canterbury, this series presents a wide range of
research into postcolonial literatures by specialists in the field. Volumes will
concentrate on writers and writing originating in previously (or presently)
colonized areas, and will include material from non-anglophone as well
as anglophone colonies and literatures. Series editors: Donna Landry and
Caroline Rooney.
49 Language and Translation in Postcolonial Literatures
Multilingual Contexts, Translational Texts
Edited by Simona Bertacco
50 Postcolonial Custodianship
Cultural and Literary Inheritance
Filippo Menozzi
51 Sex Trafficking in Post Colonial Literature
Transnational Narratives from Joyce to Bolaño
Laura Barberán Reinares
52 The Future of Postcolonial Studies
Edited by Chantal Zabus
53 Postcolonial Comics
Texts, Events, Identities
Edited by Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji
54 What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say
Edited by Anna Bernard, Ziad Elmarsafy, and Stuart Murray
55 Postcolonial Urban Outcasts
City Margins in South Asian Literature
Edited by Madhurima Chakraborty and Umme Al-wazedi
Related Titles
Postcolonial Life-Writing
Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation
Bart Moore-Gilbert
Postcolonial Urban
Outcasts
City Margins in South Asian
Literature
Edited by Madhurima Chakraborty
and Umme Al-wazedi
First published 2017
by Routledge
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© 2017 Taylor & Francis
The right of Madhurima Chakraborty and Umme Al-wazedi to be identified
as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Chakraborty, Madhurima, editor. | Al-wazedi, Umme, editor.
Title: Postcolonial urban outcasts: city margins in South Asian literature /
edited by Madhurima Chakraborty and Umme Al-wazedi.
Other titles: City margins in South Asian literature
Description: New York: Routledge, 2017. | Series: Routledge research in
postcolonial literatures; 55 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016024649
Subjects: LCSH: South Asian literature (English)—History and criticism. |
South Asian literature—History and criticism. | Cities and towns in
literature. | Marginality, Social, in literature. | Outcasts in literature. |
Postcolonialism in literature.
Classification: LCC PR9570.S64 P67 2017 | DDC 820.9/954—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016024649
ISBN: 978-1-138-67723-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-55964-3 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
In memory of Professor A. F. M. Rezaul Karim Siddique,
Who was brutally murdered on April 23, 2016.
You believed in the redeeming qualities of civilizations and all
human beings.
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Contents
List of Figures ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Whose City? 1
MADhURIMA ChAKRAbORTY
PART I
Urban Outcasts, Urban Subalterns
1 Recasting the Outcast: hyderabad and hyderabadi
Subjectivities in Two Literary Texts 21
NAzIA AKhTAR
2 The Margins of Postcolonial Urbanity: Reading Critical
Irrealism in Nabarun bhattacharya’s Fiction 39
SOURIT bhATTAChARYA
3 “Someone called India”: Urban Space and the Tribal Subject
in Mahasweta Devi’s “Douloti the bountiful” 56
JAY RAJIvA
4 “Stuck at Pause”: Representations of the Comatose City
in Delhi Calm 72
AMIT R. bAIShYA
PART II
The National, The Global, and the Diaspora
5 Unmoored: Passing, Slumming, and Return-Writing
in New India 95
RAGINI ThAROOR SRINIvASAN
6 Lahore Lahore Hai: bapsi Sidhwa and Mohsin
hamid’s City Fictions 113
CLAIRE ChAMbERS
viii Contents
7 between Aspiration and Imagination: Exploring Native
Cosmopolitanism in Adib Khan’s Spiral Road and
Mohammed hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti 131
PAYEL ChATTOPADhYAY MUKhERJEE, ARNAPURNA RATh,
AND KOShY ThARAKAN
8 Portrayal of a Dystopic Dhaka: On Diasporic Reproductions
of bangladeshi Urbanity 149
MASWOOD AKhTER
PART III
The Space of the Margins
9 Imag(in)ing the City: A Study of Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi 169
NIShAT hAIDER
10 Gendering Place and Possibility in Shashi Deshpande’s
That Long Silence and Kavery Nambisan’s A Town Like Ours 187
LAUREN J. LACEY AND JOY E. OChS
11 Delhi at the Margins: heterotopic Imagination, Bricolage,
and Alternative Urbanity in Trickster City 204
SANJUKTA PODDAR
PART Iv
Forms of Urban Outcasting
12 Carl Muller’s Palimpsestic Urban Elegy in Colombo: A Novel 223
MARYSE JAYASURIYA
13 The Fiction of Anosh Irani: The Magic of a Traumatized
Community 239
KELLY A. MINERvA
14 New Capital? Representing bangalore in Recent Crime Fiction 257
ANNA GUTTMAN
List of Contributors 273
Index 277
List of Figures
4.1 Conversation between Vibhuti Prasad and Parvez. 74
4.2 The masked character. 77
4.3 Moon addressing the audience. 79