The City Speaks

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