The City Speaks: Urban Spaces in Indian Literature

328 Pages·2022·7.112 MB·English

by  Subashish Bhattacharjee, Goutam Karmakar

THE CITY SPEAKS
This book studies the signifcance 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 qualifcation 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.
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, PhD (English), is Assistant Professor of English at Barabazar
Bikram Tudu Memorial College, Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, Purulia, West
Bengal, India. He is also an NRF Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of the
Western Cape, South Africa. His forthcoming and recently published edited books
are Nation and Narration: Hindi Cinema and the Making and Remaking of National
Consciousness (forthcoming), The Poetry of Jibanananda Das: Aesthetics, Poetics,
and Narratives (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 Environmental
Planning and Management, Comparative Literature: East & West, South Asia
Research, 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.

THE CITY SPEAKS
Urban Spaces in Indian Literature
Edited by Subashish Bhattacharjee
and Goutam Karmakar
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
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© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Subashish Bhattacharjee and
Goutam Karmakar; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Subashish Bhattacharjee and Goutam Karmakar to be
identifed as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bhattacharjee, Subashish, editor. | Karmakar, Goutam, editor.
Title: The city speaks : urban spaces in Indian literature / edited by
Subashish Bhattacharjee and Goutam Karmakar.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary: “This book studies the signifcance 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 qualifcation 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”— Provided by publisher.
Identifers: LCCN 2022021440 | ISBN 9781032110820 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781032347721 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003323761 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Cities and towns in literature. | Indic literature—
History and criticism. | India—In literature.
Classifcation: LCC PK2907.C48 C58 2023 | DDC
820.9/35854009732—dc23/eng/20220531
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022021440
ISBN: 978-1-032-11082-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-34772-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-32376-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003323761
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
List of contributors ix
Foreword: from spatial experience to experienced space:
representations, recollections, and reproductions of the
urban spaces in Indian literature xii
MUSTAFA ZEKI ÇIRAKLI
Introduction: writing cities: appropriating the urban in
Indian literatures 1
SUBASHISH BHATTACHARJEE AND GOUTAM KARMAKAR
PART 1
Fictions of the ‘cities at the centre’ 15
1 City’s deity: exploring the urban and sacred space in
Anita Desai’s Voices in the City and Journey to Ithaca 17
DEEPTANGSHU DAS
2 Khushwant Singh’s Delhi: a multi-layered projection of
an anthropomorphised city 28
SARANI GHOSAL MONDAL
3 Diasporic return to Calcutta in Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s
Daughter and Days and Nights in Calcutta 38
RIMA BHATTACHARYA
4 Stories by the sea: memories and space in
Amit Chaudhuri’s Friend of My Youth 48
SAYAN AICH BHOWMIK
v
CONTENTS
5 ‘. . . Not exactly fear, but unease, an apprehension’:
fânerie and the tactics of survival in Baumgartner’s
Bombay 56
RUPAYAN MUKHERJEE
6 Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis: the networked city 69
AMRUTHA KUNAPULLI
7 At home in city (?): reading the destabilising New City in
Raj Kamal Jha’s She Will Build Him a City 80
KUHELI SINGHA
8 The radical, the bourgeois, and the alienated in the city in
Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others 90
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 102
AVIJIT DAS AND SHRI KRISHAN RAI
10 Palimpsestic jungle/jumble: visceral urbanism in
Rajat Chaudhuri’s Hotel Calcutta 112
SUBHADEEP PAUL
11 Mumbai queered: perils and pleasures of the sexual
metropolis in Murder in Mahim 124
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 134
RAJARSHI ROY
PART 2
Fictions from the fringes 145
13 Rohinton Mistry’s city by the sea: a place to call home? 147
NATACHA LASORAK
vi
CONTENTS
14 Urban spaces and fading culture in Mamang Dai’s fctions:
a postmodern reading of city life 157
DEBAJYOTI BISWAS
15 Evolution of Heterotopic space: unearthing the toxic
cityscape in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People 166
SOMASREE SARKAR AND NEHA KUMARI
16 Cosmopolitanism and trade relations: analysing the port
city of Muziris through Sethumadhavan’s novel The Saga
of Muziris 175
MAYA VINAI AND REVATHY HEMACHANDRAN
PART 3
Staging the city 189
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 191
ARNAB CHATTERJEE
18 Girish Karnad’s consideration of ‘urban spaces’ for his plays 202
JOLLY DAS
19 A tale of two cities: showcasing the façade of the Indian
metropolis in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Lights Out
and Harvest 217
PRAGGNAPARAMITA BISWAS
20 City, space, and spectacle: Parsi Theatre’s Indar Sabha 229
SIB SANKAR MAJUMDER
PART 4
Poetics of the cities 241
21 Imagery of revolt and withdrawal: the city–country interface
in the poetry of Keki N. Daruwalla and Adil Jussawalla 243
BAISALI HUI
vii
CONTENTS
22 ‘How can she feel at home in so many places?’: city, home,
and diasporic subjectivity in Sujata Bhatt’s poetry 254
JOYJIT GHOSH
23 When a city speaks: tracing the voices and visions of
Mumbai in Gopal Lahiri and Sunil Sharma’s Cities:
Two Perspectives 269
GOUTAM KARMAKAR
PART 5
The city in itself 283
24 Liberating the cursed city: looking through Jiddu
Krishnamurti and Sisirkumar Ghose 285
GOUTAM GHOSAL
25 Journey from alienation to integration: travel, urban space,
and chronotope in Bharati Mukherjee’s Days and Nights
in Calcutta 295
BASUNDHARA CHAKRABORTY
26 Psychogeographies: urban space and situationism in
Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found 305
UJJWAL KR. PANDA
Index 313
viii
CONTRIBUTORS
Rima Bhattacharya, PhD (English), is Assistant Professor in the Department
of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology
Kharagpur, West Bengal, India.
Somdatta Bhattacharya, PhD (English), is Assistant Professor of English at
the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of
Technology Kharagpur, West Bengal, India.
Sayan Aich Bhowmik is Assistant Professor in the Department of English,
Shirakole College, West Bengal, India.
Debajyoti Biswas, PhD (English), is Associate Professor and Head of English
at Bodoland University, Assam, India.
Praggnaparamita Biswas, PhD (English), is the Research Fellow of Indology,
The Asiatic Society, Kolkata, West Bengal, India.
Basundhara Chakraborty is pursuing her doctoral research at the Depart-
ment of English, Jadavpur University, West Bengal, India. She received
her MPhil degree in Women’s Studies from the same institution.
Nilanjan Chakraborty, PhD (English), is working as Assistant Professor of
English in Panchla Mahavidyalaya, West Bengal, India. He is also a Visit-
ing faculty, PG Department of English, Women’s College, Kolkata, West
Bengal, India.
Arnab Chatterjee, PhD (English), is Assistant Professor of English at Harish-
chandrapur College, University of Gour Banga, West Bengal, India.
Avijit Das is a UGC Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Humani-
ties and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Durgapur, West
Bengal, India.
Deeptangshu Das is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Reli-
gious Studies at the University of Denver, Colorado, USA.
Jolly Das, PhD (English), is Associate Professor, Department of English,
Vidyasagar University, Midnapore, West Bengal, India.
ix