The City Speaks: Urban Spaces in Indian Literature

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