The City Speaks

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.

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