Contextualizing Urban Narratives through the Socio-Spatial Dialectic 103640093X, 9781036400934

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Contextualizing Urban Narratives through the Socio-Spatial Dialectic

Contextualizing Urban Narratives through the Socio-Spatial Dialectic By

Ankur Konar

Contextualizing Urban Narratives through the Socio-Spatial Dialectic By Ankur Konar This book first published 2024 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2024 by Ankur Konar All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-0364-0093-X ISBN (13): 978-1-0364-0093-4

CONTENTS

Preface ...................................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Chapter I ..................................................................................................... 9 Narrativizing Urban Space(s): Theoretical Issues and Literary Representations Chapter II .................................................................................................. 17 Discourses on Delhi and Literary Representations Chapter III ................................................................................................ 25 Language of Global Cities: Inclusiveness of Non-exclusivity in Piyush Jha’s Mumbaistan Chapter IV ................................................................................................ 33 Banaras and the Representation of Widows in Mona Verma’s The White Shadow Chapter V ................................................................................................. 39 City as Muse: Portrayal of Edinburgh and Kolkata in Selected Poems of Bashabi Fraser Chapter VI ................................................................................................ 45 “City Plays”: Bombay and Banality of Social Existence in Shanta Gokhale’s Avinash Chapter VII ............................................................................................... 53 The Urban Frontier: Representation of Dhaka in Tanvir Malik’s Short Takes: Stories from Bangladesh Chapter VIII ............................................................................................. 61 Glasgow as “Text”: Mapping the Urban Space in Scottish Fiction

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Contents

Chapter IX ................................................................................................ 67 The “Cinematic City”: Kolkata in Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani Conclusion ................................................................................................ 73 Of “Postnational Constellation”: The City Space in Amit Chaudhuri Notes......................................................................................................... 79 Bibliography ............................................................................................. 89

PREFACE

Contextualizing Urban Narratives through the Socio-Spatial Dialectic probes into examining how the urban narratives explore the complexities of city life, including the diversity of its inhabitants, the challenges of urbanization, and the impact of social and economic disparities. They may delve into topics such as crime, poverty, gentrification, and the struggle for identity and belonging in different bustling metropolis like Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Benaras, Edinburgh and Glasgow. This monograph provides a lens through which authors and storytellers examine and reflect upon the complexities, challenges, and opportunities of urban life. I have extensively used the first two chapters of my Ph.D thesis titled “City as Text: Cultural Geography and Urban Encounters in the Novels of Amit Chaudhuri” (http://hdl.handle.net/10603/199855). I have also incorporated the modified version of my two published papers – “Banaras as Text: Representation of Widows in Mona Verma’s The White Shadow” (www.bcjms.bhattercollege.ac.in/v7/n1/en-v7-01-01.pdf) and “Glasgow as Text: Mapping the Urban Space in Scottish Fiction” in JAST 2.1 (2016): 15-19. The monograph seeks to reiterate how the discourse of urban narratives refers to the specific language, themes, and ideas that are commonly found in stories set in urban environments – both the Orient and the Occident. It encompasses the way urban spaces are portrayed, the issues and conflicts that arise within these settings, and the social, cultural, and political commentary that is often embedded in these narratives. Furthermore, the discourse of urban narratives can serve as a platform for social critique and commentary on issues such as racism, inequality, and environmental degradation. It may explore the power dynamics at play in urban settings, the impact of urban planning decisions, and the consequences of rapid urban development.

INTRODUCTION

In a recent article titled “Postcoloniality, Religion, Geography: Keeping Our Feet on the Ground and Our Heads Up” the critic Gareth Griffiths asserts: “Land, and its extensions into theories of the construction of space and place, has emerged, alongside studies of the colonial body, as one of the most important recent sites for articulating contemporary cultural concerns.” (2009, 445) Theories associated with landscape, place and space, a focal point of recent critical discourse as reflected in Griffith’s statement quoted above, was in fact initiated during the second half of the twentieth century. The so long exercised linear and one-sided implication of the teleological forms of history as a dominating parameter in the field of criticism was radically resisted in the mid-1960s. As a result of such a revolutionary change in the field of social sciences, the concept of geography has become very much prominent in the field of critical theory that posits a direct challenge to the time-related traditional explication of cultural discourse. The social critic Elizabeth Grosz in Space, Time, and Perversion points out: “Even today the equation of temporal relations with the continuum of numbers assumes that time is isomorphic with space, and that space and time exist as a continuum, a unified totality. Time is capable of representation only through its subordination to space and to spatial models.” (1995, 95) Vis-à-vis this perception of Time’s subordination to Space, the famous social critic Doreen Massey too in the celebrated book For Space talks about the necessary unification of Space and Time and retrospectively points out that their obvious continuum was not in the focal point of discussion and remained consequently, yet unexpectedly, somewhat “unthought.” (2005, 7) The French intellectual Michael Foucault is the first critic who discussed the notion of spatiality in the realm of the modern critical discourse. Vis-à-vis the contextual interdisciplinarity and the philosophical hermeneutics, Foucault in his famous essay “Of Other Spaces”, with a tone of anticipation, proposes a probable “epoch of space”: The Present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects

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Introduction points and intersects with its own skein. One should perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating present-day polemics oppose the pious descendants of time and the determined inhabitants of space. (1986, 22)

Using conceptual ideas like “space of emplacement” (1986, 22) and “desanctification of space” (1986, 23), “internal space” and “external space” (1986, 23), “heterotopias” and “utopias” (1986, 24) Foucault in the abovementioned essay clearly rejects the traditional positional superiority of history as a dominant, dynamic discourse over geography which has so long been considered to be stable, fixed and somewhat passive. In his other essay titled “Questions on Geography” (1980) Foucault laments for the long practiced passive approach to spatiality: “Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the contrary was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic.” (1980, 70) To prioritize the dynamicity of space, Foucault offers a conceptualization of a relevant discourse on the viability of space in his most celebrated essay “Of Other Spaces”: The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosions of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another. (1986, 23)

This intertwining and interweaving sense of space proposed by Foucault does not remain sacrosanct for a long time. Foucault’s typical ideological position and proposition as reflected in his oft-cited statement in “Of Other Spaces” – “heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (25) – has been contested by the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre in his famous book The Production of Space (1976), in which Lefebvre discusses three vital dimensions of space: “lived space”, “perceived space” and “conceived space” – these phrases sound ironical vis-à-vis Foucault’s standpoint mentioned above.1 That Foucault’s epistemic formation of the theoretical conception of space is one-sided and has not been able to keep up with the existing gap between the epistemological and the practical is the central issue of Lefebvre’s thesis that promotes or tries to promote a social notion of space which virtually converges the philosopher’s space and real space, theory and practice as well as geographical place and social space. For further clarification, it would be relevant to quote from Lefebvre’s

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observation fromThe Production of Space: “Social space is not a thing among other things, nor a product among other products: rather, it subsumes things produced and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity – their (relative) order and/or (relative) disorder.” (1991, 73) According to Lefebvre, with the disappearance of natural space from the critical domain what has become much more prominent and well accepted is the concept of social space: “To recognize space, to recognize what ‘takes place’ there and what it is used for, is to resume the dialectic; analysis will reveal the contradictions of space.” (1991, 17, my emphasis) Throughout The Production of Space Lefebvre uses two concepts: “representation of space” (1991, 33) which virtually stands for maps, knowledge, and power, and “representational space” (1991, 39) which consists of the essential elements of social space passions, memories, rituals and many more. Vis-à-vis the gradual development of the theory of space in the contemporary critical discourse, the French theorist Michel De Certeau in his The Practice of Everyday Life very pithily defines space as “a practiced place.” (1984, 117) Furthermore, the social critic Yi Fu Tuan’s concept of ‘topophilia’ adds to this conceptual development of space; by his coinage ‘topophilia’ Tuan refers to the effective bond that exists between place and the dwellers of the place. In his book Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values (1974) what he tries to point out is that the topophilic attachment of past days may only be realized through artifacts, like literature and painting which serve much more than mere visualization. By proposing that ‘space’ is more abstract than ‘place’, he coins the term “topophilia” to connote a sense of “fondness for place” which “incarnates the past” and “provokes pride of ownership and creation” (1974, 247). Thus the topophilic realization through literature and painting extends and generally goes beyond the particular place. By projecting a symbolic unification of sensibilities like people and environment, location and locution, these representations are not mere objects to be looked at but rather to be lived in because they randomly celebrate the networking power.2 Taking a cue from both Foucault’s proposition of “heterotopias” and Lefebvre’s endorsement of socio-political implications of space, the American urban geographer Edward W. Soja in his Postmodern Geographies: the Re-assertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1986), Third Space: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places (1989) and Postmetropolis: Critical Studies in Cities and Regions (2000) builds up the formulations of spatial complexities and imaginaries.3 In his discussion on the urban culture of Los Angeles in Postmodern Geographies, Soja uses the term “spatialization” to indicate “the increasing reassertion of a spatial

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Introduction

emphasis in ontological, epistemological, and theoretical discourse and in our practical understanding of the material world.” (1989, 158, my emphasis)4 This reassertion of spatial practice is the fundamental point of Soja and in his analysis he makes it very clear that the sense of space derives from sociality; in Postmodern Geographies he very emphatically negates any slight possibility of the existence of unsocialized space; the production of space has the obviousness of virtual socialization: A distinctively postmodern and critical human geography is taking shape, brashly reasserting the interpretive significance of space in the historically privileged confines of contemporary critical thought. Geography may not yet have displaced history at the heart of contemporary theory and criticism, but there is a new animating polemic on the theoretical and political agenda, one which rings with significantly different ways of seeing time and space together, the interplay of history and geography, the ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ dimensions of being in the world freed from the imposition of inherent categorical privilege … New possibilities are being generated from this creative commingling, possibilities for a simultaneously historical and geographical materialism; a triple dialectic of space, time, and social being; a transformative re-theorization of the relations between history, geography, and modernity. (1989, 11-2)

In his observation Soja acknowledges C. Wright Mills’ 1959 textual project, The Sociological Imagination for the reassertion of space whose roots lie in the “habitus of social practices.” (1989, 17-8) Vis-à-vis this backdrop of the philosophical emancipation of space, the next part will focus on the critical studies related to the spatial dimensions of the city and its connection with cultural geography. In connection with the theory of space and spatiality discussed at length in the previous unit, this unit will focus on the emergence of the concept of “cultural geography” which is also the focal issue of this thesis. Joseph E. Spencer and William L. Thomas in their Introduction to Cultural Geography (1969) very precisely analyse the phrase ‘cultural geography’ that has drawn much popular attention in contemporary critical studies: The concern of the cultural geographer remains the broad study of spatially oriented and spatially differentiated cultures operating through time on the surface of the earth as a means to the further and deeper understanding of human performance by other geographic specialists. More particular inquiry into the processes and functions of human systems in specific regional environments becomes the concern of some of the more specialized subdisciplines within the broad realm of human geography. (1969, 4)

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After Foucault, Lefebvre, Tuan and Soja the concept of space is mainly taken up by David Harvey who very precisely maps a rupture between the modern and the postmodern conception of space in his oft-cited book, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Social Change (1989). This book offers Harvey’s standpoint vis-à-vis the reformation as well as reformulation of space that has a latent tendency to denote the sense of cultural geography: Whereas the modernists see space as something to be shaped for social purposes and therefore always subservient to the construction of a social project, the postmodernists see space as something independent and autonomous, to be shaped according to aesthetic aims and principles which have nothing necessarily to do with any overarching social objective, save, perhaps, the achievement of timeless and “disinterested” beauty as an objective in itself. (1989, 92)

Cultural geographers tend to amplify the meaning of physical surroundings by reading the environment through the perspective of humanity. The collective social involvement of people and place as pointed out by the social critic Manuel Castells in The City and the Grass Roots (1983), produce a human centric interpretation of spatial environment: “Space is not a ‘reflection of society’, it is society … spatial forms … will be produced, as our objects are, by human action.” (1983, 4, original emphasis) The strong connection between physical space and humanity dominates Castells’ conceptualization of space. After Castells, Doreen Massey in For Space (2005) defines space from three different angles: first, space as “the product of interrelations; as constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny;” second, space as “the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality;” and finally, space as “always under construction.” (2005, 9) Space or the perception of space exists through the mode of association with the cultural geography of a particular place. In For Space Massey further clarifies the intersection as well as interpenetration of spatial dimensions: Space can never be that completed simultaneity in which all interconnections have been established, and in which everywhere is already linked with everywhere else. A space, then, which is neither a container for alwaysalready constituted identities nor a completed closure of holism. This is a space of loose ends and missing links. For the future to be open, space must be open too. (2005, 11-2)

Thus, a cultural geographer focuses on the shifting stance of recent critical attention: “Instead of narrative, structure; instead of diachrony, synchrony;

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Introduction

instead of time, space.” (Massey 2005, 37, my emphasis) As far as the critical approach to space is concerned, there has occurred a remarkable change in perspective from the modern to the postmodern times: modern critics conceive space from the point of view of physical geography, whereas postmodern critics consider space through the lens of cultural/human geography.5The postmodern notion of space celebrates heterogeneity, diversity and difference. Reading space through the postmodern lens, Julian Murphet in the essay “Postmodernism and Space” very precisely observes the figurative implication of space in postmodern times: “Space is swarming as it has never swarmed before, with movement, difference, colour, polyphony.” (Connor 2006, 130) According to the sociologist Mike Crang in the book Cultural Geography (1998), the place-specific performance of cultural rituals, human beliefs and superstitions, life practices, contribute to the making of the sense of a space/landscape. If seen from this perspective, cultural geography may well be considered to be a “text” that may be read from different perspectives and different points of view because it celebrates the typical human drama in a spacespecific context with the virtual obviousness of cultural engagement.6The cultural geography is essentially a site of multiplicity – the multiplicity of engagement and association. Through the exposition and specification of the urban mode of living, it is understandable that the idea of cultural geography connotes the cultural engagement of the inhabitants of a particular place with the immediate social environment. As the space-specific standpoint determines the identity of the character concerned, the urban critic Jonathan Raban, by focusing particularly on city space and its representation in celluloid, comments in his much celebrated book, Soft City: “In cities, people are given to acting, putting on a show of themselves.” (1974, 35) The idea of cultural geography is very prominent in the context of postmodern existence because culture, being not in conformity with lexical simplicity, is a virtual product of contesting ideologies.7Essentially and literally, the cultural geography of a place becomes the “space to which meaning has been ascribed.” (Carter et al 1993, xii) The word “place” refers to the physical geographical entity, while the word “space” suggests the network of relations that defines social interaction in a particular place; in fact, “space” is much more than “place;” “space” is something in addition to “place.”8The famous anthropologist James Clifford in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Centuryvery precisely explains the space-place dictum: “An urban neighborhood, for example, may be laid out physically according to a street plan. But it is not a space until it is practiced by people’s active occupation, their movements through and

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around it.” (1997, 54) This shift of focus from the traditional “place” to the contemporary notion of “space”, and from physical geography to cultural geography is being celebrated in the every field of recent critical theory. Though the two words “urban” and “city” are considered to be synonyms, Lefebvre in Writings on Cities (1996) makes an important distinction between the two - “the city, a present and immediate reality, a practicomaterial and architectural fact, and the urban, a social reality made up of relations which are to be conceived of, constructed or reconstructed by thought.” (1996, 103) In spite of Lefebvre’s rigid distinction of the two terms mentioned above, social critics have realized that the urban social experience or the city’s cultural geography is impossible without the material fact of the city. Allied with the interplay of tenderness and estrangement, competitiveness and closeness the claim of the city offers a strong sense of cultural geography. All the encounters are not innocent but rather they are complex and ambiguous, and this ambiguity renders, according to Lewis Mumford in The City in History (1961), the “ambivalent gifts.” of city life (1961, 54) Consequently, the urban space is both “discursive and constructive.” (Barker 2000, 292-3) Cultural geographers in their studies try to focus specifically on the structural binaries apparent within an urban space. Center/margin, outer/inner, public/private – these binaries very often reveal two different aspects of city life, one which is extrinsic and relates to external reality, and the other is intrinsic and related to experiential reality: “The city … brought with it the expectation not only of outward assault but likewise of intensified struggle within: a thousand little wars were fought in the marketplace …” (Mumford 1961, 52) Significantly, in this perspective of the city, the human factor plays a very vital role. Vis-à-vis the abovementioned geo-critical studies related to the urban space, it would not be an overstatement to state that the city is more than a place, more than a mere geographical setting as Robert E. Park in the article “The City: Suggestions for the Investigations of Human Behaviour” points out: The city is something more than congeries of individual men and social conveniences … something more, also, than a mere constellation of institutions and administrative devices … The city is, rather, a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions, and of organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in these customs and are transmitted with the tradition. (Gelder and Thorton1997, 16)

So, without the city-dwellers, the conception of the city is incomplete. From the above analytical remarks made by cultural geographers, it is clearly understandable that the various human experiences associated with

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Introduction

inhabiting in a city space produce a meaningful image of the city. One of the earlier critics of urban space, Kevin Lynch in The Image of the City (1960) explains the necessary connection between city space and human inhabitants within a city space: “Like a piece of architecture, the city is a construction in space, but one of vast scale, a thing perceived only in the course of long spans of time … we must consider not just the city as a thing in itself, but the city being perceived by its inhabitants.” (1960, 3) By equating the potential growth of a city to “a marvelous palimpsest” (1968, 3), the urban sociologist R.E. Pahl in the Introduction to Readings in Urban Sociology (1968) observes that a city is not simply a mere “physical artefact;” rather a city nurtures some obvious ‘social entities’; in short, cities are what “society lets them be.” (1968, 4)9 From the perspective of the twentieth century critical parameter, the conceptualization of city as space and the subsequent consideration of the city’s cultural geography as a matter of discourse have enriched not only the theoretical field, but also the field of literature, because such discourses have provided a lens through which one can interrogate the city life from a broader point of view. Therefore the city, according to Louis Wirth’s view in the essay “Urbanism as a Way of Life”, is “the product of growth rather than of instantaneous creation”, (Reiss 1964, 62) which becomes the “most immoderate of human texts” (De Certeau 1984, 2). Consequently, the textualization of city as space is bound to convey the human perspective of city, which becomes interesting as a subject of study from the point of view of cultural geography. This monograph will extensively discussthe theories of space and it will also attempt to show the connection between city space and cultural geography. The perspectives of different social theorists related to space, city and cultural geography discussed in this chapter will evidently help us in properly understanding the representation of the urban spaces in literature. The next chapters will focus on the literary representations of city space and, by doing so, an attempt will be made to properly amplify the interface of city space and cultural geography.

CHAPTER I NARRATIVIZING THE URBAN SPACE(S): THEORETICAL ISSUES AND LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS

“It is an old association; over and over we tame the spatial into the textual and the conceptual; into representation.” (Massey 2005, 20)

Before the appearance of French philosopher Henry Lefebvre in the theoretical field, Raymond Williams, the cultural critic, using the socio-political perspective, analyses the nature of the existing gap between two different places: the Country and the City. In his book The Country and the City (1973) Williams, by examining different literary texts and the parameters of social and economic growth, vehemently rejects the traditional conception that endorses the fact that rural life is simple, innocent and somewhat utopian, while city life is full of unpredictable complexities.1As far as the history of English Literature is concerned, many poets have textualized urbanity in their literary works. For instance, Abraham Cowley represents the ‘crowd, and buzz, and murmurings’ of the city space (“The Wish”), William Wordsworth laments the ‘din of towns and cities’ (“Tintern Abbey”), P.B. Shelley feels that “the City’s voice itself is soft like Solitude’s” (“Dejection near Naples”) and Rudyard Kipling focuses on the revival of city in “Cities and Thrones and Powers”. In the modern era, T.S. Eliot presents the image of an urban ‘wasteland’, full of discordant penetration: What is the city over the mountains Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violent air Falling towers Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London Unreal (The Waste Land, 371-6)

One can further add the postmodern poet Philip Larkin’s suave urbanity as reflected in his book of poems The Less Deceived (1955) and The Whitsun

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Chapter I

Weddings (1967). Apart from the canon of English poetry in which one encounters various literary representations of city spaces, there are instances of such similar representations in other genres of English literature –Jacobean city comedies like Philip Massinger’s The City Madam (1632) and Richard Brome’s The City Wit (1653) and Victorian fictions, particularly of Charles Dickens and of William Thackerey. Though Dickens himself was famously “obsessed with pacing the London streets” (Parrinder2006, 227), he projects a different image of London that goes against the traditional representation of the city.2 The urban critic Phil Hubbard in the book City points out that cities “foster creativity” (2006, 3) through the trajectory of eventful encounters. Vis-à-vis the city’s social centrality, postmodern geographer Edward Soja in Postmodern Geographies (1989) proposes that the urban landscape may be treated as “text” because it nurtures the elements of reading: “The landscape has a textuality that we are just beginning to understand, for we have only recently been able to see it whole and to “read” it with respect to its broader movements and inscribed events and meanings.” (1989, 157) It is this significant view of Soja that has been contextualized in the argument of this thesis. That the landscape has its own textuality which can be read, is central to the understanding of the notion of “city as text”. Through the interplay of urban and verbal decay and through the juxtaposition of utterly retrograde and provincial, in postmodern fictions like C. MacInnes’s City of Spades (1957), Doris Lessing’s Four Gated City (1969), Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1974), Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1985), Martin Amis’ London Fields (1989), Rutherford’s London: The Novel (1998), Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City (2005) and the novels of Iain Sinclair and Ian McEwan, the representation of the city becomes a dramatic “text” to be read and reread; the representation of the city invites close attention to its significant encounters of power politics as Lewis Mumford in The City in History (1961) points out in an analytic observation: “The city … ceased to be a stage for a significant drama in which everyone had a role, with lines to speak: it became, rather, a pompous show place for power; and its streets properly presented only two-dimensional facades that served as a mask for a pervasive system of regimentation and exploitation.” (1961, 196)In their textualization of the urban space in the fictional world, postmodern British novelists, particularly Amis and Sinclair, it is interesting to note, have used the concept of the “flaneur”.3 Phil Hubbard in his book City credits texts written about city life because these texts “are valuable not only because they offer detailed descriptions of individual buildings, neighbourhoods and locales, but also because they

Narrativizing Urban Space(s)

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locate particular social groups and individuals in these spaces, mapping out the fractures of social class, race, gender, age and sexuality which characterize city life.” (2006, 69) The different textual representations of urban spaces connote the idea of heterogeneity that defines city life. In fact, it is impossible to capture all the aspects of city life within a particular textual representation, because the city space is ineffable: The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below’, below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk – an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmanner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of the spaces that cannot be seen … The networks of these moving, intersecting writing compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other. (De Certeau qtd in Gupta 2008, 219, my emphasis)

In the Preface to The Image of the City in Modern Literature (1981) literary critic Burton Pike, as he examines the presence of the “city” in the Western literary canon, observes that the city in Western culture has always been a “problematic” one (1981, 1). Thus, the different literary authors’ attempt to portray city space, as mentioned above, is, in fact, an act of transforming the physical city into the textual pages. The urban critics or analysts like Watson and Gibson began to focus on, in the Introduction to Postmodern Cities and Space (1995), how the city dwellers “think, represent, live and create space” (1995, 2) in different cities through their urban experiences in this era of globalization, when city means many things – “a spatial location, a political entity, an administrative unit, a place of work and play, a collection of dreams and nightmares, a mesh of social relations, an agglomeration of economic activity, and so forth.” (Hubbard 2006, 1) Allied with the germs of psycho-geography, R.E. Park’s Introduction in The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment (1925) maps the sense of selfsufficiency of the city space that ultimately results in some kind of autonomous identity of the city, nurturing a sense of great expectations: The city ... is something more than a congeries of individual men and of social conveniences – streets, buildings, electric lights, tramways, and telephones, etc.; something more, also, than a mere constellation of institutions and administrative devices –courts, hospitals, schools, police and civil functionaries of various sorts. The city is, rather, a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions, and of the organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in these customs and are transmitted with this

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Chapter I tradition. The city is not, in other words, merely a physical mechanism and an artificial construction. It is involved in the vital processes of the people who compose it; it is a product of nature, and particularly of human nature. (1925, 1, my emphasis)

The city, being much more than a mere physical setting, offers a kind of psychological osmosis (“a state of mind”), whereas the writings on the city may be considered to be textual responses to the continuous shifting sense of urban dynamics. As cultural spacing is essential for determining the location of the character concerned, Doreen Massey in For Space (2005), by quoting Derrida, points out that spacing has an obvious implication of “textualization.” (2005, 50) As far as the textualization of the sociocultural aspect of a city is concerned, Julian Murphet in the article “Postmodernism and Space” points out the difference between the modern and the postmodern outlook on the city: “Quite unlike the ‘unreal city’ of modernism, which seduced even as it repelled, the postmodern city deploys its simulated, self-duplicating surfaces with the goal of repelling desire itself.” (Connor 2006, 118) Thus, the textual representation of the city has undergone a significant transformation from modern to postmodern times. Vis-à-vis the textual representation of the urban space, Kingsley Davis in his Foreword to Jack P. Gibbs’ Urban Research Methods (1961) very rightly points out: “The abundance of the moralistic and reformist urban literature attests both the newness and the significance of cities.” (Gibbs 1961, xii) Thus the newness involved in the textualization of the city/cities is replete with the urban caricature that offers the readers a significant trope of cultural transmission. The physical geography of a city virtually becomes a readable text through literary representations. Different critics from many perspectives have focused on different salient features of city life.4The urban sociologist Kevin Lynch in his book, The Image of the City (1960) emphasizes the regular exchanging pattern of social engagement in a city where “on different occasions and different people, the sequences are reversed, interrupted, abandoned, cut across.” (1960, 1) Another urban critic Jonathan Raban in the celebrated book Soft City (1974) has focused on the “plastic” nature of the city that adds sensation to urban living.5 The textualization of urban life and environment leads to the creation of narratives that celebrate the cultural geography of the city space. In her seminal work The Cultures of Cities (1995) Sharon Zukin, by examining the cultural constructions of cities through social interaction and psychological exchange, focuses on the construction of power relations in the urban space: “The look and feel of cities reflect decision about what – and who – should be visible and what should not.”

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(1995, 7) The reference to these various types of criticisms related to the city space is important, because these will help the readers to interpret the textualization of the city in a new dimension. In a recent study, Peter J.M. Nas et al in their erudite introduction to their book Cities Full of Symbols (2011) project an interdisciplinary approach to unearth the city’s different layers of cultural matrix – the “morphologic, demographic, economic, social-cultural, administrative and planning dimension.” (7) Vis-à-vis such positions and expositions regarding different discourses on the city, cultural critics like Joe Moran emphasize on the necessity of the “textualization of social space” through different modes of representation because it is only through the representation that a city’s myriad impressions are palpable: Cities are clearly material entities, products of some of the traditional concerns of geography such as labour, land and capital, but they are also textualized. In a sense, the city can only ever be understood textually, because it is far too complicated and labyrinthine to be encapsulated in its material totality: we only ever have access to a selective interpretation of it … Interdisciplinary approaches to the city … tend to focus on the textualization of social space within the material reality of the city itself, while relating this to its representation in other kinds of text: novels, poetry, films and other media. (2007, 167)

Without this prescribed textualization, the proper sense of city can never be fully perceived. Referring to J. Duncan’s book, The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom (1990), Hubbard, by specifying a particular time period, points out that the notion of “city as a text” became a “widespread approach to urban geography since the late 1980s.” (2006, 60) If one examines English literary texts, it would not be a Herculean task to note that the city, in most of the cases, becomes more than a setting; in fact it becomes a significant character in the text – a character that impacts on the nature of the other human characters leading their daily life. The next unit of this chapter will briefly discuss the textual representations of the city in the field of Indian English literature. This discussion will eventually guide us to understand the very approach of the writers to city life and space, and it will also help us to locate their uniqueness as Indian authors who have textualized the city in quite a different fashion. The India-based urban critic Kusum Lata Taneja in Morphology of Indian Cities states that the landscape of India bears the “heterogeneous geographical elements for urbanization” (1971, 42) and this urbanization has been effectively textualized, instances of which are replete in Indian English literary texts.6Cities have been represented in various ways by

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different Indian authors belonging to different periods of Indian English literature. In Raja Rao we find that the notion of a city is burdened with the responsibility of civilizing and protecting the rural backward class. As the villagers in Rao’s novel Kanthapura (1938) believe or at least try to believe: “We shall go. Oh, we shall go to the end of the pilgrimage like the two hundred and fifty thousand women of Bombay. We will go like them, we will go …! Men will come from the city, after all, to protect us! We will go …!” (1970, 166, my emphasis) In the Sahitya Akademi Awardwinning-novel The Shadow Lines (1988), Amitav Ghosh focuses on the transnational encounters of two particular cities during the Partition – dramatic Calcutta and traumatic Dhaka – the one resembling the other; as the anonymous narrator narrates his inner feelings: … the simple fact that there had never been a moment in the fourthousand-year-old-history of that map, when the places we know as Dhaka and Calcutta were more closely bound to each other than after they had drawn their lines – so closely that I, in Calcutta, had only to look into the mirror to be in Dhaka; a moment when each city was the inverted image of the other, locked into an irreversible symmetry by the line that was to set us free – our looking-glass broader. (1996, 233)

By making a comparison between the Calcutta of the past and the Calcutta of the present Joyonto in Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter states: “The real Calcutta, the thick laughter of brutal men, open dustbins, warm and dark, where carcasses were sometimes discarded, did not exist. He knew Calcutta would not be as kind to them as it had been to him.” (Mukherjee 1990, 41) In Oleander Girl (2013), Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni focuses on two families of North and South Calcutta and the precious moments spent by the family members at the very heart of the city. Bombay (now Mumbai) becomes a meeting place in Salman Rushdie’s fictions that generally offer a multicultural space of incidental encounters. In a sense, Bombay becomes the commercial capital of India where the negotiations of different spatial dialectics continuously occur and recur. In his poetic passages the city-based poet Nissim Ezekiel focuses on the psychological topography of space-specific affinities in Bombay. By projecting a sense of urban geography and cultural dimensions of a particular city, Vikram Chandra’s Love and Longing in Bombay (1997) and Ardashir Vakil’s Beach Boy (1997) explore the busy life style of Bombay and the characters’ psycho-geographical sensibilities vis-à-vis the city’s urbanity. Khushwant Singh’s Delhi (1990), like Anita Desai’s Clear Light of the Day (1980), is an artistic exploration of city poetics that we find in the Indian capital. In Manju Kapur’s Custody (2011) the urban angst of Delhi arrests the growth of the characters’

Narrativizing Urban Space(s)

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expressive spontaneity and results in relational breakdown and economic turbulence. Apart from the aforementioned texts, there are many Indian English literary texts that narrativize the urban space from different perspectives: Arun Joshi’s The City and the River (1994), Kamala Markandya’s Pleasure City (1982), Pankaj Mishra’s The Romantics (1999), and Kenize Mourad’s In the City of Gold and Silver (2013).7 Even Mahesh Dattani, the only Sahitya Akademi Award-winning Indian English dramatist, has textualized urban culture and environment in his plays like Bravely Fought the Queen (1991) and On a Muggy Night in Mumbai (1998). The representation of the city in Indian English literature has changed since the time of Raja Rao. Due to the impact of globalization in India, Indian writers now are more interested in textualizing the city from the perspective of technological advancements that have become very apparent in contemporary city culture. Manjula Padmanava’s Harvest (1997), Piyush Jha’s Mumbaistan (2012) and Mahesh Dattani’s The Big Fat City (2014) are glaring examples of such literary representations where we find the technology-based networking solidarity among the city’s characters. In addition to these, Arunodaya Chaudhuri in his collection of plays titled Eleven New Plays (2013) shows the strong technological connection between the four metropolitan cities of India. As far as the literary representations of urban spaces are concerned, it is very much prominent that technological innovations in the field of science, commerce and telecommunication have impacted upon the shape, structure and content of literary narratives that define the contemporary nature of Indian English literature. Vis-à-vis the interface of literature and urban space, it is usually the setting of a fictional narrative that provides a broad canvas for showing urban life and culture.8 Philip Trew’s view regarding this issue is very noteworthy: Contemporary fiction has been concerned too with the abstract quality of provincial urban dynamics … As a site of narrative and culture the city is mobile, existential and yet perversely monumental, combining in contemporary fiction the globalized economy with both the localized dynamics of intersubjectivity and a sense that culture always creates a sense of loss through its very ongoing adaptation, or evolutionary survival. (2004, 89-90, my emphasis)

With regard to the representation of the city in literature, the writers’ approaches to Western cities and to Indian cities are different because the existential perspectives of the people living in Oriental and Occidental cities vary due to their positional roots. In this context, R. Champakalashmi in her book Trade, Ideology and Urbanization (1996) states: “The impact of the western city has also led to a sharp distinction being made in the studies of

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Western and Asian cities, the western cities as symbols of economic vitality and political autonomy, and the Asian cities or urban forms as predominantly political and cultural rather than economic phenomenon.” (1996, 1) The city, as a product of culture becomes a veritable contact zone that celebrates the territorialized culture (having a bond between culture and location). When an author attempts to textualize a city, the relationship that develops between a city and a text is reciprocal in nature and this aspect has been addressed by the literary critic Jesse Matz in The Modern Novel (2004):9 Modern city life deeply changed the very nature of the novel … It meant new modes of contact: people were thrown together in new ways, without the kind of knowledge of each other they might have had in other, older places … Fiction, to be true to this new life, had to develop new registers of intensity, speed, and flux … So one way the novel responded to the new spaces of modern life was to trace the swift and continuous shift of urban stimuli; another was to compensate for urban excess by providing readers with emotional restoration. (2004, 67-8, original emphasis)

As the cities have been the powerful incubators of Indian English literature for a long time, it is significant to mark how the city-based texts mentioned above become potential sites for offering the dialectical display of the nuances of the urban spaces concerned with the characters’ psychological topography that regularly encounters the cultural geography of social existence.10 The theoretical issues related to city space and the notion of cultural geography that has been elaborated in this chapter will be used in the next chapters to study the intricate relationship between city and context.11

CHAPTER II DISCOURSES ON DELHI AND LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS

You men of these eastern regions Knowing me beggarly state you mock me; You snigger amongst yourselves and ask me Where on earth can you have come from? Let me tell you! There once was a fair city, Among cities of the world the first in fame; It hath been ruined and laid desolate, To that city I belong, Delhi is its name. (cited in Singh 2010, 53)

The above quoted lines of Meer Taqi Meer from his poem “There Once Was a Fair City”, translated into English by Khushwant Singh has the germs to straightjacket the urban spaces of Delhi in the modes of discourses. Through the textualizations of urban agglomeration, the cultural geography of Delhi may be read vis-à-vis the parameters proposed by urban critics as “complex structures, hierarchies of power, racialized and classed cartographies and exclusive zoning.” (Tickell and Ranasingha2018, 301) The urban galaxy of Delhi through the act of spatializing as reflected through different writers’ visitations of the city’s narrative geography, will be examined to search what went into the making of the city’s spatial coverage in the fictional representations like Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi (1940), Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day (1980), Khushwant Singh’s Delhi: A Novel (1990), William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi (1993), Arvind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) and Manju Kapur’s Custody (2011). This chapter, by taking recourse to Khushwant Singh’s edited anthology City Improbable: Writings on Delhi (2001) and Vinay Lal’s edited book The Oxford Anthology of the Modern Indian City: The City in Its Plentitude (2013), will focus on the abovementioned novelists’ ideological responses to the symbolic experiences of Delhi and its spatial ambit. Allied with contestations and negotiations through the disjuncture of the representational politics of location and the referential

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fixity of location, Delhi is obviously “rich in literary-urban narrative traditions.” (Tickell and Ranasingha 2018, 301) By projecting the existential dilemmas vis-à-vis the constant changing pattern of the city, the representations, as will be discussed, become potential reflectors of the city poetics against the backdrop of power politics. The cultural and political geography of Delhi becomes highly textual as it provokes to be engaged with various types of discourses related to different social contexts. Through the negotiations of altered space and altered time, Delhi offers its amenities and proclivities to the readers through the bifurcation of a conceal/reveal mode. Nonetheless it is also important to note that the city has drawn the attention of the national as well as of the international readers. William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi (1993) did exactly for Delhi what Dominique Lapierre did for Calcutta in City of Joy (1985) -the international exposition of the spatial codes of the city’s local cultural matrix. Urban critics like Patrick Geddes in Cities in Evolution (1949), Kusum Lata Taneja in Morphology of Indian Cities (1971) and Annapurna Shaw in Indian Cities in Transition (2007) have all focused on the changing patterns of urban spaces and all the three titles of the abovementioned books bear witness to this fact of metamorphoses as a constant element in the formation and emergence of the Indian urban spaces. Even Arthur Gallion and Simon Eisuer in their book The Urban Pattern: City Planning and Design claim: “Cities are being continuously rebuilt, after a fashion, and decentralization is not only coming, it is here.” (1963, 232) Though metamorphoses are obvious vis-à-vis the conceptualization of urban spaces, the cultural geography of Delhi/New Delhi is unique in the sense that, as Malvika Singh observes in her book Perpetual City: A Short Biography of Delhi, “no other city, despite repeated attempts to destroy it, or neglect it, continues to grow and reinvent itself from age to age.” (2013, 3) In fact, Malvika Singh’s use of the epithet “perpetual” very pertinently claims the spirit of the city which is deeply rooted in historical backdrop: “As I grow older, I too, have moved into another phase of exploring life, past and present, in this city, and find that I have just about scratched the surface of an incredibly complex historical reality … The decoding never ends in this perpetual city …” (2013, 5-6) These sentences/sentiments claimed by the author sound too personal to encounter Delhi’s urban frontier which has a long story-telling history. Shahjahanabad that we now call Old Delhi was the last Mughal capital of India and in 1911 and later more prominently in 1931 the British Government laid the foundation stone of the imperial capital of India – the “jewel in their crown”– New Delhi. The renowned critic of the city Narayani Gupta’s Delhi between Two Empires 1803-

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1931: Society, Government and Urban Growth (1997) is a significant case study of the city’s historical establishment. This historicity of Delhi is further reiterated by Malavika Singh: In the fifties, there was a quiet, insular and ‘protected’ New Delhi that lived alongside a vibrant, decaying Shahjahanabad or Old Delhi as we know it today. One ‘city’ slept at ten, Old Delhi rocked through the night. In many ways, these twin cities stand for an India of then and now, confident yet confused, culturally proud but looking to intimate that which was, at the time, unattainable. (2013, 22)

This observation may well be supplied to support the observation of urban critic Sophie Watson who in the oft-cited book on urban discourses titled City Publics: The (Dis)Enchantments of Urban Encounters tries to conceptualize the urban public space as “a site of potentiality, difference and delightful encounters.” (2006, 19) Even this duality of Old Delhi/New Delhi forms a crux in Anita Desai’s most celebrated novel on this city Clear Light of Day (1980). Let me quote a passage from Desai that radically promotes an evolutionary shift vis-à-vis the city’s poetics and politics of existence: Old Delhi does not change. It only decays. My students tell me it is a great cemetery, every house a tomb. Nothing but sleeping graves. Now New Delhi, they say is different. That is where things happen. The way they describe it, it sounds like a nest of fleas. So much happens there, it must be a jumping place I never go. Baba never goes. And here, here nothing happens at all. Whatever happened, happened long ago–in the time of the Tughlaqs, the Khiljis, the Sultanate, the Moghuls – that lot … And then the British built New Delhi and moved everything out. Here we are left rocking on the backwaters, getting duller and greyer, I suppose. Anyone who isn’t dull and grey goes away – to New Delhi, to England, to Canada, the Middle East. They don’t come back. (2005, 8)

Existing social boundaries and continuous configuration of boundaries through the city-dwellers’ act of living, as reflected in the abovementioned quotation, have the typical tendency to denote the trajectories of convergence and divergence. The renowned author Rana Dasgupta in his much acclaimed book Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi (2014) makes a comparative study of Delhi, Mumbai, and Calcutta; and the comparative studies even cover the social web of life through the confrontation of Old Delhi and New Delhi: “The old was dying, the new was in preparation, and we were living in the in-between …” (2014, 39) Though history shows us that the city celebrates the colonial/postcolonial encounter, the city has also gone through a terrible communal fury which

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has resulted in the enigma of urban ruins. In spite of many assurances in Desai’s novel [“Anyway, you will be quite safe here, outside the city walls. There won’t be riots here …” (Desai 2005, 108)], the readers find random “arson, looting and murder in the city.” (Desai 2005, 125) The interplay of traumatic violence and dramatic tension in the city forces to promote the novel through observations like - the city was “in flames that summer” (Desai 2005, 67) and the city was “burning down;” (Desai 2005, 91) such observations bear obvious reflections of a valley of violence. The noted Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie who writes a precise Introduction to Desai’s novel very pertinently observes: “This is not a novel of people who are forced to leave their homes by Partition, or face violence because of it; it is an altogether subtler tale of how Partition changed the world of Old Delhi.” (Desai 2005, ix) It would be relevant to mention that the social critic Talja Blockland in the book Urban Bonds (2003) notes how social groups are constructed in the city space for the common interest of the group members. In her seminal work The Cultures of Cities (1995), Sharon Zukin rightly hints at the construction of unequal power relations in cities: “The look and feel of cities reflect decisions about what – and who – should be visible and what should not.” (1995, 7) As far as the history of Indian cities is concerned, urban spaces are habituated to go through riots – Jamshedpur in 1979, Delhi in 1984, Bombay in 1992, Ahmadabad in 2002 and most recently Delhi in 2020. In fact Vibhuti Narain Rai’s Curfew in the City: A Novella (2016) is a brilliant exposition of the regular eruption of violence in Indian cities. It is important to point out that Desai’s Clear Light of Day was published in 1980 and in 2020 we again find the disturbing elements of a riot in Delhi. Even after forty years things have not changed that much! This article is an attempt to refer to the crucial spatial codes of the city’s cultural matrix on the characters’ psychology that is always full of what the city critics map as “empirical nuances of city life.” (Hubbard 2006, 7) In Twilight in Delhi (1940), renowned novelist Ahmed Ali projects the socio-cultural study of colonial Delhi that led to the call for freedom. The tell-tale title iterates the fact that the beginning of the British rule in Delhi posits with the identity crisis of the Muslims in the city and, to a broader extent, the identity crisis of the whole nation. The clash of cultures and the ongoing formulation of “Othering” is quite clear in the following quotation from Ali’s passages to Delhi: It was the city of Kings and monarchs, of poets and story tellers, courtiers and nobles. But no King lives there today, and the poets are feeling the lack of patronage, and the old inhabitants though still alive, have lost their pride and grandeur under a foreign, yoke … where are

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Babur and Humayan and Jahangir? Where is Shahjahan who built the city? …gone they are, gone and dead beneath the all-embracing earth. (1984, 2)

The changing faces of the city have constantly been recurred in various discourses offered by the urban critics. The following observations of Malvika Singh in Perpetual City: A Short Biography of Delhi are indeed the precise cultural imaginations of the changing topography of Delhi: “Metropolitan Delhi, the city of today, sits upon that last bloody layer of the last century. Building on the remains of the past, dreaming of a possible future is what makes Delhi, Delhi.” (2013, 11, emphasis added) And again: “Dilli had changed forever. A dreadful polarization between communities that were, till recently, considered to be the same, had been planted in the soil of this ancient city.” (2013, 107, emphasis added) Undoubtedly, all the above quoted observations are volcanic eruptions of the discourses on Delhi’s cultural geography. Even Vinay Lal in the Introduction to his edited book The Oxford Anthology of the Modern Indian City: The City in Its Plenitude (2013) has placed the violence of Delhi on emphatic mode and he believes that these deeply ingrained psychological wounds are hard to be erased from the root/route of the city: Delhi, as much as Lucknow, still bears palpable reminders of the brutal suppression of the 1857 rebellion: tough many have written of the city of memories, evidently one can also invoke the city as a space of memorialization – not merely a space filled by monuments and memorials, testaments to the captains of industry, nationalist heroes, and men and women of science and arts, or to episodes in the city’s history, but also more elementally as a space that, in the first instance, generates passions and thus permits the very exercise of memorialization. (2013, xxxiii)

Thus the conception of space is highly textual because it heavily engages with the discourses of power vis-à-vis social contexts. Travelling through time, space and history to understand the urban sprawl of Delhi, Khushwant Singh’s Delhi: A Novel (1990), William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi (1993) and Mala Dayal’s Celebrating Delhi (2010) offer geo-critical explorations of the spirit of the city. Through the images and issues like eunuchs and brutality on the Sikhs, the exploited and oppressed image of Delhi has been sketched by renowned novelist Khushwant Singh in Delhi: A Novel: “What freedom? Freedom for what? Loot, kill. Everyone talk freedom – don’t know what freedom means.” (376) This statement offered by a character named Budh Singh who works as a night watchman may be served as the disjuncture between distance

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and desire among the city dwellers in the midst of cultural imposition and social proposition. Apart from the abovementioned novels, Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich like Us (1986) presents, portrays and projects the political image of New Delhi as Amit Chaudhuri did in the representation of Calcutta in Freedom Song (1998). Undoubtedly, Delhi forms a pivot in Sahgal’s awareness as is evident from his two other novels - The Day in Shadow (1971) and A Situation in New Delhi (1977). By narrativizing the topology and the genealogy of Delhi, Manju Kapur’s novel Custody (2011) forms a major strand vis-à-vis the literary representations of the city; this street novel captures the corporate life style of the city dwellers and how they have been customized in this “custody” like existence. What is important to point out is that Desai in her exploration of the city poetics of Delhi in Clear Light of Day, much like Amitav Ghosh in The Shadow Lines (1988) relies on the image of a veranda: “The veranda ran all around the house and every room opened out onto it.” (Desai 17) It is expected that the miniature version of the city can be captured by standing/sitting on the veranda. Vis-à-vis the reading of a city’s spaces through “selection and omission” and “the balance of intuition and intention” (Turchi2004, 25), the readers find incorporated stories and retrospective reasoning as offered by Bimla in Clear Light of Day: “Here things were left unsaid and undone. It was what they called ‘Old Delhi decadence’.” (Desai 2005, 20) The urban spaces of Delhi offer and promote multi-textured trajectories that bear testimony to the proverbial sayings of Sheikh Nizamuddin Auliya – “Dilli is still far away.” Rukmini Bhaya Nair in the essay titled “City of Walls, City of Gates” included in City Improbable: Writings on Delhi points out the aspect of Delhi being a gated city: “Delhi is ‘Dehali’, i.e. ‘threshold’, ‘gateway’, glorious etymological truth of the capital of India, deeply embedded in its samsaric imperial heart and trivial bureaucratic self-images and centrist complacency, likely to be quite drowned in the flood of five-star freebooting now overtaking it.” (Singh 2010, 283) Traversed by multiple effects and affects the city, Rukmini Bhaya Nairremains impervious to the factors of claiming and disowning the city through the mythological metaphors: “Delhi is possibly the fastest growing city in India, which strains its resources beyond belief, and it has probably been heading this way from the time Delhi was Yudhistir’s mythic Indrapastha! Hence, the endless fantasies of ‘the walled city’ in Delhi, the desire for a place of escape in a city of no escape.” (Singh 2010, 284) Various literary representations of Delhi go into the very root of the city by reconfiguring the socio-cultural ethnic elements within as well as beyond the walls of Delhi.1The cultural critic E.D. Varughese in the oft-cited book Reading

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New India: Post-Millennial Indian Fiction in English (2013) reads the Indian urban spaces as sites of transience that nurture quest for identities. A precise observation from Arvind Adiga’s award-winning novel The White Tiger (2008) may come relevant here: “Delhi is the capital of not one but two countries – two Indias. The Light and the Darkness both flow in to Delhi.” (2008, 251) Through such poetics and politics of narrative Delhi, a city of architectural gems beside the Jamuna River penetrates into a parallax of urban catastrophe – the reciprocation of the evolution of literature and the evolution in literature. Luis Fernandes’ The Historic City of Delhi (1983), C.S.H. Jhavala’s Stones and Streets (1991), H.K. Kaul’s Historic Delhi (1998), Hirsh Sawhney’s Delhi Noir (2009), Sam Miller’s Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity (2010), Premola Ghoshe’s Tales of Historic Delhi (2011), Sanjay Srivastava’s Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Guagaon (2015), Avtar Singh’s Necropolis: A New Delhi Crime Novel (2016) and Ravi Shankar Etteth’s Killing Time in Delhi (2019) may well be cited as the intensive and extensive studies on Delhi’s spaces of flows and flexible accumulation; Delhi becomes a city that juxtaposes the opposites – opulence and destitution; Delhi becomes a city that goes beyond any singular sensation: “Stories cannot describe this place. Chapters from history also fall short. Delhi has never had an individual character, being, instead, a conglomeration of history, culture art and architecture.”2 All these referred writings have the obvious tendency to juxtapose past and present, proximity and distance of the city and the city-dwellers – Delhi and Dilliwallahs. Critical explorations on Delhi like Veronique Dupont’s Delhi: Urban Space and Human Destinies (2001), Ema Tarlo’s Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi (2003), Ranjana Sengupta’s Delhi Metropolitan: The Making of an Unlikely City (2008), Sanjay Srivastava’s Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Guagaon (2015), Ayona Dutt’s The Illegal City (2016) and Surajit Chakravarty’s Space, Planning and Everyday Contestations in Delhi (2016) textualize the ambiguities of metropolitan lives in Delhi – the reciprocation of the city in the map and the city of the mind.3The engagement of the city-dwellers in the space-specific cultural practices is necessary for the proper understanding of the social balance in a particular geographical place. Though it sounds oxymoronic, Delhi and New Delhi are disadjusted/disjointed twin cities as far as the historical background of Delhi’s cultural geography is concerned. The renowned author of the city Aman Sethi in his book A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi maps the metamorphoses of the city from “a

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sleepy north Indian city” to “a glistening metropolis of a rising Asian superpower.” (2012, 38) The broader spectrum of cultural imposition and social proposition generates what Malvika Singh in Perpetual City: A Short Biography of Delhi terms a “New New Delhi” (2013, 111): “At its most resplendent, parts of the city merge into a single, diverse and historic cityscape that encompasses time immemorial, through a subtle, delicate, nuanced tapestry of cultures.” (Singh 2013, 4) In spite of many referential religious suffocation and urban nightmares “the dil of Dilli” (Singh 2013, 102) posits the newness of New Delhi as India’s quintessential capital territory.

CHAPTER III LANGUAGE OF GLOBAL CITIES: INCLUSIVENESS OF NON-EXCLUSIVITY IN PIYUSH JHA’S MUMBAISTAN

“The English language has surpassed the threshold of inevitability in many domains of communication – from aviation to scientific research and international business – and looks on course to become the world’s first truly global language.” (Grewal 2009, 78)

In his debut piece Mumbaistan: 3 Explosive Crime Thrillers (2012) Jha exploits the English language with an immense flexibility that vividly includes mutually exclusive parameters like the symbolic and the universal, the local and the global, the colonial and the postcolonial, the First World and the Third World.1 Allied with the city dialect and different registers of different professions Jha’s English becomes the language of ‘global cities,’ having specific code elements of globalization.2 Through the rejection of any involvement into a binary formation of English, being the most acceptable transnational language in recent critical discourses, it is reconfigured for its inclusiveness of non-exclusivity. Vis-à-vis the articulation of textual selfhood through language, it would be relevant to quote a critical passage, having in-depth explanatory power: Different styles of language can reveal different facets of personality, and the various speaking styles of narrators, in particular, can reveal much about their attitudes and their ways of seeing. A distinctive speech style can also mark off a narrator or character from the position of the author, allowing a viewpoint to emerge which can be critical of the character, satirizing the life-style which the character represents or allowing more ironic perceptions to emerge. (Carter and McRae 2001, 473)

As a medium of communication Jha uses that English which, because of its reflexive elastic nature of scripting, creates no barrier to global readers/communication. Through the transcendental embeddedness of language, English in Jha becomes the linguistic bridge to avoid any

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cultural breech of misunderstanding. Taking cue from the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method one can say that Jha’s language in the novel does express the readers’ finitude.3 Through the reshaping of hierarchies the language of Mumbaistan offers a transnational space of communication which stands as a stark contrast to the Postcolonial treatment of English. To establish my argument, I will quote from Jha as well as from two other writers of different countries; through the comparative study it would be quite clear that English as a medium of literary communication is almost the same in all the cosmopolitan novels.4 The first citation is from Mumbaistan where a character named Samir internalizes the urban delirium: Samir looked towards at the people milling around on the promenade. A jumble of thoughts invaded his mind … Samir’s eyes fitted from face-toface, trying hard to match the mental image of twenty-something Bahaar when he last saw her. The crowded promenade full of hawkers, tourists and burqa-clad ladies was not the best place for a clear view of everyone who was passing by. The failing light was not of much help, either. (Jha 2012, 234)

The next citation is from Martin Amis’ oft-cited novel Money, a novel that revolves round London and New York; the situation is when John Self, the protagonist of the text unleashes his internal feeling: The city is full of these guys, these guys and dolls who bawl and holler and weep about bad luck all the hours there are. I read in a magazine somewhere that they’re chronics from the municipal madhouse. They got let out when money went wrong ten years ago … I hit a topless bar on Forty-Forth … I always expected some kind of Mob frat-house policed by half-clad chambermaids. (Amis 2011, 6-7)

The last reference is to Bangladesh-based Tanvir Malik’s story collection Short Takes: Stories from Bangladesh with its focal point in Dhaka. The following extract is an authorial narration regarding the situational grip of Bangladesh’s capital: It was becoming dark and the traffic was thinning. The busy city had almost finished heading home for iftar. Tired rickshaw-pullers counted the day’s income or lounged around, munching jhalmuri and sipping tea. This is the month to rake it in, they must have been thinking. A beggarwoman was stoking the fire under her cooking-pot squatting on the pavement. The starched, crispy folds of her new saree bellied out, drowning the little creature in it. The dying remnants of the day’s sun made the little nodules of prickly-heat on her bare back clearly visible. (Malik 2010, 125-6)

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After going through these three narrations in three different cities one can easily mark out that what is very common is the sensory perception through the self-same treatment of English. In spite of the categorical complexities in conceptualizations like the Third World English and the First World English, there is an expressive sameness in the narrative pattern. At this point Jonathan Raban’s observation in Soft City may come very relevant: “… this is where you live; it’s your city – London, or New York, or wherever – and its language is the language you’ve always known, the language from which being you, being me, are inseparable.” (1974, 1, original emphasis) It is only through the universalization of English that encoding or decoding a city is possible and Jha’s textualization of Mumbai celebrates that reflexive urban English. Vis-à-vis such uniformity of the English language in the cities, German philologist Jakob Grimm rightly observes: “Of all modern languages, not one has acquired such great strength and vigour as the English … [it] may be called justly a LANGUAGE OF THE WORLD: and seems, like the English nation, to be destined to reign in [the] future with still more extensive sway over all parts of the globe.” (Cited in Crystal 2005, 112, original emphasis) Irrespective of place, be it London, Dhaka, Delhi or Mumbai, English is metamorphosed into a new type of linguistic categorization – it is the language of global cities. Jha’s Mumbaistan, being set in the “underbelly of the Maximum City where Jha’s pen moves” (Singh 2013, 4) abounds with an urban speech style which captures the essence of sometimes a decadent world sometimes a developed world of speech patterns. The following extracts would prove that point. The first context is how Samir is being threatened in a city street: “Still in pain, the man now shook a thin fist at Samir’s face. ‘I will break two for every bone of mine that you have broken,’ he shouted at Samir. ‘I will break your jaw with one punch. I have watched Dabangg five times.’” (Jha 2012, 203) And later on we find code switching in the narrating pattern regarding political implication: “Acchibaathai, Raghu beta. I have envisioned a great future for you. For me, this is personal. I hope you will not let me down. The party chief sounded appeased.” (Jha 2012, 225) This type of colloquial speech pattern is a deliberate strategy of Jha: “Today we all speak in a colloquial manner, using English and Hindi/regional languages in a free flowing interchangeable form. This manner of speaking is prevalent across the ‘classes’ and the ‘masses’ across the country. So, I just used the style that we are all using anyway.”5Through such dialectical display of the city and the language Mumbai, as a space, is being produced and one reason of such production is undoubtedly the urban language space. At this stage Grewal’s observation seems to be very much relevant:

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Chapter III The politics of sovereignty did not give us English as a global language: the history of sociability did. It comes to us as the result of a particular history, the accretion of past choices that structure our current options, and is unrelated to anything special about English itself … a language becomes a global language because of its network power. (2009, 76, my emphasis)

Because of English’s networking power of sociability, representation of city is nothing new in English literature. Different writers have textualized different cities; for example - city comedies in Elizabethan times, Jonson’s Venice, Dickens’ London streets, Eliot’s ‘unreal city’ and many more. Without textualization, the proper sense of city is not fully perceptible: Cities are clearly material entities, products of some of the traditional concerns of geography such as labour, land and capital, but they are also textualized. In a sense, the city can only ever be understood textually, because it is far too complicated and labyrinthine to be encapsulated in its material totality: we only ever have access to a selective interpretation of it. (Moran 2007, 166)

Through the urban allegories of language, Jha’s textualization regarding the characterization in the cultural geography of Mumbai resembles Dickens’s characters in London streets: “An orphan who had made something of himself in the city, Tanvir did not get attached easily, but his connection with Rabia was something he was not willing to give up anytime soon.” (Jha 2012, 42-3) My point is that the cultural codes of a city determine (or predetermine?) the authorial narration. Since the city always provides a site of conflict, it is quite obvious that urban spaces, taking a cue from Lefebvre one can say, are always “over-inscribed: everything therein resembles a rough draft, jumbled and self-contradictory” (1991, 142). What is mostly common is linguistic accessibility. This accessibility has even been widened in the 21st century literalization of the city: “It is said that mornings in Mumbai are akin to mornings in New York, in that they infuse the same charged-up feeling in every Mumbaikar, getting him ready to spring into the new day to decimate it.” (Jha 1991, 67) Allied with the location/locution connotation, different cities nurture different issues [what is 9/11 in New York that is ‘26/11’ in Mumbai], but the ways of communication are the same. The stereotypical representation of London in Martin Amis’ Money, Dhaka in Tanvir Malik’s Short Takes, New York in Paul Auster’s City of Glass, Delhi in Khushwant Singh’s Delhi would prove that point.5 All these textualizations are the powerful product of the authors’ deep-rooted involvement with the particular city space. Jha himself unleashes his “writerly” self:

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Because of my in-depth knowledge of Mumbai, I didn’t have to do any research on the cityscape, which perhaps a non-Mumbaikar would have to. I just researched police procedure and Medical pharmacology and toxicology. All the other things I made up … I use every little experience that I’ve had to create the feeling of reality within my stories. I have walked all those streets that I write about, eaten the food, met the kind of people that I write about. Of course, I do make space for generous dollops of fictionalization without which all these would be dry and boring.6

In different texts, there are slight local variations of English. As English is not Eurocentric nowadays, all variations are welcomed and consequently inclusive. That’s why communications across culture are possible as we find in Mumbaistan: Two weeks later, they slept together for the first time. Five months later, her father discovered the passionate secret affair. Two weeks after that, following a lot of cajoling, she received permission to introduce her Parsi lover, Porus, to her Gujrati father. Both of them had started bonding over a common language and life was just beginning to look perfect when, one week later, unbeknownst to Saakshi, her lover killed her father. (Jha 2012, 94)

The above quotation establishes the fact that there is no ‘either/or’ parameter in the constructive elements of English in cities. Through the strategic adaptation of spoken speech pattern English becomes much more reflexive and elastic and to some extent lucid: “Arre bola na, come tomorrow.” (Jha 2012, 232) The colloquial narrative style configures a fast paced narrative, which befits the fast paced life style in city that Jha terms “rush of the city” (2012, 73); urban speech styles capture fleeting images as well. There are continuous references to local places - Mumbra, Juhu, Khandala, Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Chira Bazaar, Belapur, Mahim Church and Regal Cinema. Sometimes characters are found to nurture a distinctive repetitive and continuous use of English slang, which can be categorized as an urban speech style because most of the cosmopolitan novels exploits the free use of English slang (language of decadence) – the impact of which is almost the same irrespective of space and time – “Teri jaat ka baida maru!” (Jha 2012, 203) or “Saalalafanga” (Jha 2012, 198). Such codified usage of language is fit for an “urban wasteland” where the “urban decay is matched by a verbal decay.” (Carter and McRae 2001, 474)7 If one goes through different texts on different cities, he/she will easily mark a sense of local hybridization of English. The codification through the title word “Mumbaistan” is a case in point for nurturing the

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sense of hybridization. One can further add the title of the third novella in the text – “Injectionwala” that contains the germs of “Hinglish”. The hybridization has been done in such a way that the full perception of language will easily be understandable even for an outsider. That type of hybridization will not create any problem for him/her. The same speech pattern and its characteristic features like lucidity, transparency and opacity will be lacking when one goes outside the boundary of the city as happened in the case of Virkar: “… as he worked hard at the Maharashtra Police Acedemy in Nasik, a new kind of prejudice dogged his footsteps. A reverse prejudice. His being the only English-speaking boy from Mumbai became a millstone around his neck. The cadets and teachers who hailed from rural and interior Maharashtra couldn’t stand him.” (Jha 2012, 88) The typical urban narration becomes distinct from the language used in the countryside because, as Lefebvre observes, “a language arose speaking at once of the town and of the country (or of the town in its agrarian setting), at once of the house and the city. This language was a code of space.” (1991, 269, original emphasis) In a similar pattern Raymond Williams observes: “The contrast of the country and city is one of the major forms in which we become conscious of a central part of our experience and of the crises of our society.” (1973, 289)8 English, being “the locomotive of transformation all over the globe,” (Acharya 2012, 14) has transnational dynamics and Jha is very much concerned about that networking impact of the English language: Nowhere are the dynamics of network power clearer than in the domains of language and money. Within a single linguistic or monetary community, we take these systems of exchange for granted. Language and money are inescapable: they are the standards facilitating everyday communication and commerce, and thus also the stock examples of sociability in the history of political and social thought. As communication and commerce have gone global, so too have the tokens that mediate power, the disruption it generates focuses attention on an otherwise obscure process. (Grewal 2009, 70)

Language (a Sassurean sign) works as an agent for human interaction. The international presence of English makes it a global one and the cities are the hubs of such a linguistic domination of English. English, for its free usage and urban dynamics, becomes a universal language in any polyphonic city like Mumbai: “Just as a middle-class resident of New Delhi sees English as a gateway to success abroad in New York or London or Toronto, a dialect-speaking villager from Bihar may need to know Hindi in order to advance as a rural migrant in New Delhi.” (Grewal 2009, 81) Through the use of the language of global cities, Mumbai, as a text,

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has been produced and reproduced. Thus the decoding grip of the language in Mumbaistan, through a de-Eurocentric style of English, does reconcile the writer’s “mental space” and the city-dwellers’ “real space.”

CHAPTER IV BANARAS AND THE REPRESENTATION OF WIDOWS IN MONA VERMA’S THE WHITE SHADOW

“Banaras is not just the past revisited. Its enigma hits you instantly and takes you back to the atavistic fulcrum … an air dense with a rich repository of legends, myths and life so complacently settled with death is the true essence of this city. Banaras’ antiquity leaves an indelible relic on the mind, with its sepia toned ‘present’ of an ageless past.” (Verma 2014, 52)

The interplay of suppression, oppression, repression of identity is an apt summary of the widows living in India. Such a long practiced derelict, desolate state of the widows marks them to be somewhat “unwanted” in our so called progressive society. This chapter will take up Mona Verma’s novel The White Shadow (2014), a novel set in the socalled city of widows that is Banaras to discuss how the five-year-old Brinda is widowed after being married for a few hours. The child widow becomes an unwanted figure as her family refuses to take her back and she is placed in Nirmala Ashram, the marginal place within the very centre of the city.1 Allied with a sense of metaphor, this marginalization relegates Brinda in particular and the widows in general to be parasitic in nature, lacking any individual identity. Vis-à-vis the slender position of widows in society, Banaras becomes vibrant with the voices of these silent widows! It is an undeniable truth that the concept of widowhood bears a notion of negativity in Indian society. Women writers have formed a site of resistance by documenting their own experiences as women. Swarnakumari Debi’s Snehalata ba Palita, Shanta Debi’s Jeebandola, Ashapurna Debi’s Dui Meru, Bani Basu’s Shwet Patharer Thala, Usha Devi Mitra’s Pia and Indira Goswami’s Datal Hatir Une Khowa Howdah have all focused on the helpless and hapless position of widows in India. Mona Verna’s The White Shadow is the latest addition to this list where

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the problems of widows are scripted by women. The novel opens with a natural calamity that terribly hits the village of Ghurni: The villagers of Ghurni would be amassed into a heap and the funeral pyre will be lit. The back plumes of smoke would rise in soft swirls over the river and Ghurni would be forgotten. God had been unbending on his decision to destroy. There was no time to ruminate on the macabre that they were to leave behind – the untimely death of unused lives. (Verma 2014, 41)

Symbolically, the natural calamity strikes Brinda and her marital status becomes invalidated. The storm that causes death to many a villager including Brinda’s husband Bisbass causes death to Brinda’s childhood as well. In fact the spontaneity of childhood that remained even in the postmarital days is suddenly forced into the maturity of widowhood. With an obviousness, the birth of widowhood comes at the cost of the death of childhood as the novelist observes: “The life she was to live now was to be just the crocheted trimmings of the idyllic childhood she was living just a few days ago.” (Verma 2014, 66) It is the new world of restrictions where spontaneity is largely cabined, cribbed and confined. As far as long practiced social customs are concerned, widows have no right to enter temples or to even attend marriage ceremonies; even Kanta in the novel under discussion warns: “Showing those teeth does not suit a widow.” (Verma 2014, 79) Due to this hypocrisy of religion the widows are twice removed from opportunity; a latent sense of double marginalization is prevalent here: “A widow suffers from double deprivations for her dual status as woman and widow.” (Bhattacharjee 2014, 7, emphasis added) Virtually, the idea of widowhood contains a journey into the world of discipline and punishment and further into the world of surveillance. As far as the growth of the plot of The White Shadow is concerned, surprisingly enough, Brinda’s own father refuses to take her daughter back as the pradhan of that village warns: “She is a bad omen, ashubholokkhon … she brought misery upon a burgeoning flourishing village.” (Verma 2014, 44) The pradhan’s statement clearly establishes the fact that in this society female children are not valued as male children; rather they are often considered as economic and social burdens.2 The novelist comments that the social status of the child widows “decimated to a mere blotch of bad omen, they were relegated to spend their after years in Banaras or Vrindavan – begging and singing hymns outside temples” (Verma 2014, 48). Brinda’s father-in-law Bibhuti sends her to Nirmala Ashram in Banaras. In spite of his initial determination, Bibhuti cannot keep her in his own association due to his contagious disease. On the other

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hand, he, like a responsible father figure, protects Brinda and ‘benignly’ uproots her from a storm affected village to a colourful city. Metaphorically this journey contains a journey of Brinda from childhood to widowhood.3 Her new world Banaras is generally considered to be a city of transition and transformation as we find in Verma’s narration on the city space: The only city in the world with two cremation Ghats right in the heart of the city, the Harishchandra Ghat and the Manikarnika Ghat, Banaras still manages to retain its mystical beauty. Where death is feared in other parts of the world, it is currency in Banaras. The dead are evaporated in dark swirls of smoke and life’s stories are forever sedimented in the river’s womb. Entering into another world is everyday business here. (2014, 52-3)

As far as the spatial dialectics are concerned, the ghats of Banaras may well be compared to the streets of Dublin or Kolkata. It will be interesting to know how the future course of Brinda’s life would be changed in this proverbial city of transition. At this point it would be relevant to mention how the novelist warns the reader: “Child widows were ostracised, sent to ashrams in Banaras or Vrindavan to beg and fend for themselves.” (2014, 42) It is obvious that widowhood becomes an “industry” in this city. If Jaipur is called the pink city of India, Banaras, allied with a symbolic dimension, may be considered as the ‘white city’ because of the highest level of concentration of widows in this city. The outsider to this city Uday’s photography and the textual references to the vivid details of the city – rickety rickshaws, overcrowded streets, lanes and ghats, two thousand temples, paans of various flavours indicate how the city space is constantly there in the making of this novel.4 Led by Vasanti Bua, Nirmala Ashram, a shelter house for twenty-eight widows becomes Brinda’s new home – in fact, her new world. Bibhuti’s peeping into this world of widows reveals the pathetic, inhuman wretchedness of the dwellers: Bibhuti … was shocked to see a decrepit hovel where the widows, some no more than children themselves, sat hunched on their knees in a circle rolling cotton into long cylindrical wicks for the temples that ironically, they weren’t permitted to even enter … It would fetch them a measly sum for their frugal meal of boiled rice with just a pinch of salt thrown in for taste … each of them alone on the inside, bound by a common thread of betrayal on the outside. (Verma 2014, 55-6)

This outside-inside duality always plays a part in the representation of the widows. Irony is very much part of the widows’ lives in this part of the world: “Banaras was rife with widows being summoned for illicit relations and Vasanti had stoically resisted the intrusion of this infamy into her

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ashram.” (Verma 2014, 61) Abject poverty and begging become an unavoidable truth of their life. In spite of the textual reference to the Human Rights Commission’s attempt to eradicate this abject suffering of the child widows, the present text does not offer any picture of hope for the child widows. The literary critic Rajul Sogani in the oft-cited book The Hindu Widow in Indian Literature (2002) has tried to pick up the theme of widowhood in the writings of various parts of India; from this book the readers have come to know that the very first Indian novel on the theme of widowhood was Baba Padmanji Mulay’s Marathi novel Yamuna Paryatan (1857), a novel that focuses on remarriage of widows as a practical solution to the innumerable problems they face. In this book, through the analysis of the pre-Independence and the post-Independence Indian novels, the author points out the changing attitudes of progressive society towards widows. In Verma’s depiction of the city the widows are ironically living through plural deaths every day. At the critical juncture of Vasanti Bua’s death that occurs in the last part of the text, it would not be an exaggeration to say that sati dah (widow immolation) has taken a new sophisticated turn. Uday’s lens has been used to capture the plight of the widows in this city; in fact the following statements are the apt summary of the widows living in Banaras: “These women in squalid living conditions, on one meal a day, they don’t even have enough for their own cremation socially ostracised, they have separate ghats on the Ganga; and worse still, no individual history, just a collective end.” (Verma 2014, 168) Vis-à-vis the spatial dialectics of Nirmala Ashram and the group formation of the widows, it would be relevant to mention that the social critic T. Blockland in Urban Bonds (2003) notes how social groups are constructed in the city space for the common interest of the group members. Furthermore, in her seminal work The Cultures of Cities (1995), Sharon Zukin rightly hints the construction of unequal power relations in cities: “The look and feel of cities reflect decision about what – and who – should be visible and what should not.” (1995, 7) Vasanti becomes an institution to safeguard the status quo of the widows in mainstream society. But she gets no helping hand from this so called progressive urban society.5 Vis-à-vis the rapacious landlord’s hunger for young flesh and various adversities and oddities in this city Banaras does not offer nirvana. Thus Vasanti’s continuous reading out from Bhagavad Gita is a deliberate strategy of the novelist to indicate the ironical grip of the society – the impossibility of achieving nirvana in this so-called holy city and the ongoing marginalization within the very centre of the city. The social critic Adinarayana Reddy in the book Problems of

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Widows in India (2004) has pointed out that the death of the husband has been made to signify the social death of a woman. In a stark contrast to this observation, Verma’s text does not offer the message that the widows have to face problems because of the absence of their husbands; rather the text offers a note of dissatisfaction vis-à-vis the role of male characters in the women’s lives: “For once Kanta had a point. Men had a history of discarding their object of passion once they were done with them. Women on the other hand, more often than not, never considered lust as the motive to get involved. A touch clings to them for life.” (Verma 2014, 233) Taking its cue from Sandra Harding’s observation that “women’s lives” constitute an “objective location” (1991, 123), Verma’s novel offers a discursive probe into the issue of widowhood as not only the site of sexual death but also of social death. The fictional spaces in Munshi Premchand’s Bazaar-e-Husn (1919), Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Pather Panchali (1929), Pankaj Mishra’s The Romantics (1999), M.T.V. Nair’s Varanasi (2002), Chetan Bhagat’s Revolution 2020: Love, Corruption, Ambition (2011), Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (2011) have celebrated and textualized the city spaces of Banaras. Verma, like other writers of this city, goes into the roots of the city. The ironical nature of her title invites us to read the unsubstantial shadows in which whiteness, the metaphorical colour of widowhood, is thrust upon the virtually meaningless existence of the child widows: “Brinda, a white shadow, always there but never realised – just like our karma, it may elude its presence, but never lets its significance fail. The consequences never miscarry.” (Verma 2014, 260) When Bibhuti enters into Banaras with Brinda, Verma writes: “To be able to recognise, accept and surrender to the truth of life is what pulls them to this most ancient city.” (2014, 53) Vis-à-vis the representation of the ‘invisible’ widows and invisible problems in the landscape of Banaras, it is important to note that the city forms a major strand in the novelist’s awareness. The interplay of the modernization of the urban space and the marginalization of the widow clearly demands a reader-centric approach that Banaras is not a smart city.

CHAPTER V CITY AS MUSE: PORTRAYAL OF EDINBURGH AND KOLKATA IN SELECTED POEMS OF BASHABI FRASER

“Cities are clearly material entities, products of some of the traditional concerns of geography such as labour, land and capital, but they are also textualized. In a sense, the city can only ever be understood textually, because it is far too complicated and labyrinthine to be encapsulated in its material totality: we only ever have access to a selective interpretation of it.” (Moran 2007, 166, emphasis added)

In addition to Joe Moran’s critical engagement with the dynamics of urban space as reflected in the book Interdisciplinarity (2003), taking recourse to the two books of same title - J. Duncan’s The City as Text(1990) and Arup Rudra’s The City as Text (2003) – the critical juncture is quite obvious that the best way to read a city is to read it through the proper mode of textualization.1 In recent times, it is important to note how the sense of a city’s spatiality becomes a matter of serious concentration for the writers. The urban spaces of First World cities like London, New York, Dublin as well as Third World cities like Kolkata, Banaras, Lahore have randomly been textualized in different types of representations; serious attention and critical engagement have also been paid to Scottish cities like Edinburgh and Glasgow. This chapter will focus on the impact of two cities (Edinburgh and Kolkata) on the poetic world of Bashabi Fraser as expressed in her much celebrated poem “The Homing Bird”, the first poem of her book of poems The Homing Bird (2016). The cultural geographies of Edinburgh and Kolkata have not merely been used as the mere backdrops but rather become the strong characters in Fraser’s poetic narratives. Apart from the mundane habitus of both of the cities, the poet also focuses on the amenities and proclivities of the cities.2 The long poem “The Homing Bird” has been divided in two parts – the first part has been named “Kolkata” whereas the second part has been titled “Edinburgh.” In fact the poem, taking recourse to the Dickensian

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world, can be minutely read and critically interpreted as a tale of two cities. The concept of City as Muse goes with the spirit of the poem because the poem, to use Mario Relich’s observation, offers “a panoramic view of how these two cities have shaped her consciousness and imagination ... these world-renowned cities anchor her dual identity as Indian and British ... by means of the traditional technique of apostrophe, which involves addressing them as persons.” (2017, 1) In Part I of the poem the poet’s focus is on the urban spaces of the Third World city Kolkata and the poet’s personal encounter with the city’s avenues, alleys, pavements, shops, market spaces and factories. The poetic narrative where the intra-personal as well as the inter-personal relationship of the poet with the city are celebrated is not just an overview of the city; rather the poet goes into the very root of the city; by celebrating the local issues through the mode of textualization, Kolkata becomes, in the narrator’s words, “my city.” Professor Fraser in a conversation with Saptarshi Mallick published in the journal titled Asiatic (Vol. 12 No. 1) shares his emotional rapport with the first capital of the Raj in India: “Kolkata remains a city I return to again and again, its cultural vibrancy and liberal thinking drawing me like a magnet; its intimate streets making a space for me on my annual journeys where I return to do my research in its rich libraries and achieves ... My visit to Kolkata replenishes me as a writer and researcher.” (Mallick 2018, 188) In the poet’s engaging relationship with the city of flux, the poetic narrative in “The Homing Bird” has heavily been engrossed with the invitation offered by the cultural geography of Kolkata. By situating herself in “between your dreams and your formidable reality,” she goes through the streets, lanes, by-lanes and alleys of Kolkata to point out the typical traits of the city – cha and chawallah, rickshawallas, “mad” minibuses which “crash through milling crowds”, trams, men with “lungis” and “sprawling bungalows.” For a proper understanding of the appeal of the city space, she offers some space-specific references like the Victoria Memorial, the Maidan and Park Circus; the poet is habituated to these places right from her childhood days. The spectacular visitation becomes the typical fabric of Calcutta’s uniqueness. Much like Amitav Ghosh’s use of “veranda” in his Sahitya Akademi-award-winning novel The Shadow Lines (1988), Fraser refers to the balconies of the city buildings that bear testimony to the various types of encounters in the city space. For a proper unearthing of the cultural geography, she relies on the mode of walking through the streets of the city and has a cathartic understanding that the city is divided by various types of professions but united by everydayness because what is mostly celebrated in the city’s “intimate streets” is human bonding and relationships – “So Kolkata, you

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became my parents’ / City.” In a similar pattern the postmodern British novelist Iain Sinclair in Lights Out for the Territory (1997) describes the advantages of walking in the city as a self-fashioning mode of revelation: Walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city; the changes, shifts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water. Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, tramping asphalted earth in alert reverie, allowing the fiction of an underlying pattern to reveal itself ... noticing everything … Walking, moving across a retreating townscape, stitches it all together: the illicit cocktail of bodily exhaustion and a raging carbon monoxide high. (1997, 4)

Not only the creative writers like Sinclair and Fraser but also the cultural critics like Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) and Michel De Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) have observed that walking in the streets is the best way to properly explore a city. Fraser takes recourse to the repository of history that this city offered shelter to a million of people during the historical Partition of the nation – “... the whims / Of time that drove them at the stroke / Of midnight from a known history / To an unknown struggle.” The issue of the Partition has cast a strong psychological impact on the poet and she has poeticized this impact many a times: “And I was one of those postǦmidnight children / Who grew up with the tales of the ‘other’ nation / Beyond an uncrossable line of nostalgic distance, / Signifying my grandmother’s blushing bridehood / And my parents’ childhood of paddy field plenty ...” (Fraser 2016, 11)In response to the then projection of borders – both visible and invisible, Kolkata became a “city of migrants” that began to nurture the ‘new experiences / Of displacement and loss’: Enfolding new Dialects within your old quilted Network of cosmopolitan reality Of Parsis and Iranians, AngloǦIndians and Armenians, The spicy twangs from Marwar, Punjab, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, And then confronted with the flavour Of tones and accents from the breast Of the riverine districts Across Mymensingh, Barishal, Chittagong and Sylhet (Fraser 2016, 7)

By narrativizing the new experiences during the time of displacement, the poet wants to draw attention to the crucial spatial codes of the city’s

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cultural matrix on the characters’ psychology that is always full of what city critics map as “empirical nuances of city life.” (Hubbard 2006, 7) The “hypnotic grasp of open-armed intimacy” offers a multicultural space which is happy to bear “a burden of the past.” Being situated beside the river Ganga, Kolkata has a history of becoming “the second city of the Empire;” Kolkata, being “a city of contrasting histories” has always focused on the plurisignificant nature of discourse and has been hailed as a melting pot: A prison for the Nawabs A fort for the conquerors – Do you remember each epoch As one scroll was wrapped up And put away and another unfurled To record what you witnessed, Kolkata, As ships docked and sailed from your harbour, Attracting diverse nations to collide. (Fraser 2016, 10)

As “spaces and places need to be examined both through their situatedness and their connectedness to a variety of other locales,” (Brickell and Datta 2011, 4) Fraser uses poetic strategies that go in unearthing the typicality of the city space. Not only in Fraser but also in many other poets’ attempts, the urban spaces of Kolkata have randomly been poeticised. Arun Sen’s anthology of poems titled Kobitar Kolkata (1986) contains the Bengali poems written on the cultural geography of Kolkata.3 It is also important to note that Fraser’s exploitation of the spatial ambit of Kolkata has not the tendency of stereotyping the representation of the city that we find in many other poetic representations related to this cultural capital of India. The Part II of the poem “The Homing Bird” which has been titled “Edinburgh”, is not only about the city but about the diasporic relation of the two cities – Kolkata and Edinburgh – through transformation and difference.4 This section of the poem is out and out a celebration of the poet’s journey from the world of “Kolkata’s track-bound trams” to Edinburgh, the “City of Literature” which also has trams on the streets: “As Edinburgh made ready for a tramline / To slow down its pace and save its northern air / With the breathing relic of its imperial heyday.” (Fraser 2016, 12) Critics have read the poem as the poet’s “dialogue with Kolkata and Edinburgh” where she “has euphonically conjured a poignant narrative between the two cultures, two histories.” (Mallick 2018, 30) The two cities are identical with each other not only in the fact of the presence of trams but also in other atmospheric issues as well:

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It is like a silent film replayed as months Of madness that made hills sprout in the Maidan When the metro was the excuse for organized chaos In my old city, now transferred to the knotted Reality of Leith Walk and Shandwick Place, In my chosen dwelling space. (Fraser 2016, 12)

The cultural geographies of Kolkata, representing a typical Third World city and Edinburgh, representing a typical First World city and their transformations into texts through Fraser’s poetic representations draw the readers’ attention to the critical juncture of cosmopolitanism; the interplay as well as the duality of bringing and belonging have been overt here. Allied with the root-route configurations, the poet could not come out of the comparisons of the two cities; in fact the poem “illuminates two aspects of the poet’s psyche, how her consciousness was shaped by Kolkata and her imagination by Edinburgh.” (Relich2017, 2) Vis-à-vis the aforementioned poetic narratives, it would be relevant to mention Sophie Watson who in the oft-cited book City Publics: The (Dis)Enchantments of Urban Encounters (2006) tries to conceptualize the urban public space as “a site of potentiality, difference and delightful encounters.” (2006, 19) Fraser’s attempted comparative study is a reminder of the fact that amid the field of many similarities there are many obvious dissimilarities as well: So I crossed and recrossed the oceans, churning the depths For memories that followed me in exploring shoals Till I came to stay in the city where I learnt to drive according to set rules, Safe from the aggressive chaos of a motley crowd Of wheeled citizens locked in a competition To outwit and outspeed each other in Kolkata’s Undaunted sprawl – (Fraser 2016, 11)

To an outsider like Fraser, Edinburgh becomes an “intimate city;” it is interesting to note that many a times Fraser has addressed Edinburgh through the epithet “intimate.” In her topophilic understanding of Edinburgh, Fraser has attempted two significant anthologies - Peoples of Edinburgh: Our Multicultural City, Personal Narratives, Experiences, and Photographs (1996, co-edited with Helen Clark and Lorraine Dick) and Peoples of Edinburgh: Methodology and Evaluation (1999, co-edited with Helen Clark and Joyce Connan). Even the collection of poetry titled Edinburgh (2000) which Fraser has co-edited along with Elaine Greig has also been subtitled “an intimate city.” In the Introduction to this book Fraser writes

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that Edinburgh is a “city of hope” (Fraser and Greig 2000, 12) and she further assures: “Edinburgh will remain the intimate city it is.” (Fraser and Greig 2000, 12, emphasis added) In the Introduction to her edited book Edinburgh: An Intimate City (2000) Fraser observes the presence of a strong sense of inspiration that Edinburgh is ready to provide: Edinburgh has inspired both resident and visiting writers and artists through the centuries and remains an inspiration ... Poets are still to write about the city’s contrasting images ... The poetry that has come has proved beyond doubt that Edinburgh’s muse still works in mysterious ways and can continue to inspire poets to write about its protean quality, as it is always capable of surprising in a pleasant way. (Fraser and Greig 2000, 9, emphasis added)

In her every attempt to “embrace Edinburgh,” she relies on the walking rhetoric: “You were my student city Edinburgh, where bus fares / Were beyond my affordable dreams, / So I chose to walk ...” (Fraser 2016, 11) Thus in the fictional representation of Edinburgh that goes into the very hardcore root of the city by reconfiguring its existential route in sociocultural elements, there is some obviousness of knowledge production that adds something to the existing knowledge of the city. Thus, allied with the parameter of comparative study, “The Homing Bird” essentially becomes a tale of two cities. It is interesting to note that these two cities are poles apart – the one is a European First World city whereas the other is a South Asian Third World city. In Fraser’s poeticization, the experiences of the cities’ cultural practices are heavily used for the proper understanding of the social balance in those particular cities.5 Undoubtedly, the urban spaces of Edinburgh and Kolkata which have invited the poet to draw her ideological response(s) to the symbolic experiences of these cities have acted as the powerful Muse and it will not be an over-statement to say that the influences of the Muse have marked a permanent impact on the entire canon of Fraser. Through the multiplication of spatiality in different social contexts the urban spaces of Edinburgh and Kolkata become alluring to draw the attention of the different disciplines of critical studies.

CHAPTER VI “CITY PLAYS”: BOMBAY AND BANALITY OF SOCIAL EXISTENCE IN SHANTA GOKHALE’S AVINASH

This chapter will focus on eminent theatre critic Shanta Gokhale’s Avinash, a play about middle class characters living in Bombay and their vivid encounter with the city space that has been projected through the city dwellers’ self-narration of loss and pain. It is significant to mark how Gokhale’s text becomes a site of dialectical display of the middle class gloom through the characters’ debasement of ‘self’ that regularly encounters the drab banality of social existence in the so-called glamorous city like Bombay which was renamed Mumbai in 1995. Taking cue from the urban sociologist Sophie Watson’s much celebrated book City Publics: The (Dis)Enchantments of Urban Encounters (2006), this chapter will show how the play has been designed to reflect the middle class crisis through the spatial codes of the city’s cultural matrix. In 2004 the Kolkata-based publication house Seagull Books published a collection of three significant plays entitled City Plays, containing Mahesh Elkunchwar’s Party, Manjula Padmanava’s Lights Out and Shanta Gokhale’s Avinash. The collection also contains an erudite Introduction scripted by the Sahitya Akademi-award-winning theatre personality Mahesh Dattani. All the three plays, as the title of the collection indicates, focus on the experience of the city people – their regular life-styles that constantly encounter the explication of city poetics and the implication of power politics. As Dattani observes in the Introduction to City Plays: All the three plays deal with urban dilemmas. Hidden faces, visible screams that leave the characters in moral dilemmas and the denial of the growing void in their lives. It is an ugly face of Indian society but a face that has been successfully mirrored through these plays. This holding a mirror up to our society is necessary, in order to understand the source of its ugliness, and the beauty that eludes it. (2004, xii)

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Gokhale’s Avinash has all the elements to be categorized as a play of socio-political grip regarding power transition in the urban space of Bombay.1 The play, originally written in Marathi in 1988 and later translated into English by the dramatist herself, peeps into the middle class scenario of Tatya’s family with his wife Durga, their sons - Prakash, Vikram and Avinash, their daughter-in-law Vasudha and other characters like Lopkhande, Kiran and Anu. Avinash, the pivot round which the entire play gradually moves, is a bright absentee of the text. The dramatist herself explains the dramatic strategy that virtually goes into making Avinash an absent character: Avinash would not appear on the stage at all, and, through his very absence, create an overwhelming presence. The partition which cut him off was literally to loom, casting its long shadow on the others. A sense of physical and emotional claustrophobia was to be created from which there was no escape, driving even ‘good’ people to thoughts of murder. (2004, 86)

By projecting the existential dilemmas vis-à-vis the constant changing pattern of the city, the play becomes a mirror up to the hegemonic construction of city poetics against the backdrop of power politics. Essentially, the play nurtures the space specific realities – the dynamics of subjectivity/objectivity, culture/anarchy, public/private; much like Mohun Rakesh’s Halfway House and Mahesh Dattani’s Final Solutions, the play dramatizes the internal bickering of the family members: TATYA. Where are you going Durga? Sit down. I want to talk to you. DURGA. What about? Is there anything we haven’t said? I’ve asked myself the same questions over and over again these last six years. And got the same answers. Things changed these last eight months. The dark times seemed to be over. (Gokhale 92)

A claustrophobic, airtight domestic space is connected to Avi’s “drunkenness” and “madness” which forces Durga to cast her lamentation: “Things don’t work out the way we want.” (Gokhale 2004, 94) As the pictorial trope is hardly simple, Tatya accuses his own “destiny” while his son Prakash, representing a different generation, rejects this sense of superstition. Lack of employment and the demonic projection of the characters’ despair in this city space make a fateful dismemberment through the space-bound cultural crinkle. In such a paradigmatic crisis, Tatya cannot understand the present tormented shapelessness: “So who’s supposed to find a way out of this?” (Gokhale 2004, 95) Lived grass root experiences are necessary for the understanding of the existential labyrinth vis-à-vis the situational grip

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of social balance. Against the backdrop of Dickensesque “street noises” and “voices,” (Gokhale 2004, 95) the tone of the generation gap is very much visible in Lopkhande’s realization: “No point worrying about the children. They live their own lives.” (Gokhale 2004, 91) His moral enormity of proposition and speculation cannot tolerate the “exhausting” “pace” of this “age.” At this critical juncture it would be relevant to mention Furedi’s observation on the individual (dis)enchantment regarding his/her psychological status in the book Culture of Fear: Risk-taking and the Morality of Low Expectation: “Through the prism of the culture of abuse, people have been rediscovered as sad and damaged individuals in need of professional guidance. From this emerges the diminished subject; ineffective individuals and collectivities with low expectations.” (1997, 147) In an inter-subjective self-recognition, this is how Lopkhande projects the existential dilemma: “We are getting old. We hear things. It’s the fears we have within us.” (Gokhale 2004, 90) Vis-à-vis such gloom situation, Kiran’s simplistic notion of life seems to have no basis when she says: “People should eat, drink and be merry!” (Gokhale 2004, 98) On the other hand, Tatya’s repeated request to Durga to ‘sit down’ enhances the drabness and dullness related to the aporia of sensitive-insensitive existence. The scant heed of social realism that has been continuously occurring in the political fabrication of Bombay is being continuously reflected in the characters’ psychology. In Gokhale’s text, the “moderate livers” like Kiran and an “unemployed architect” like Vikram are put side by side in the domestic space of transferred resentment. Thus cultural dichotomization and cross regional repertoires contribute to a political solipsism of the social value system. As politics predominates over the conflux of characters, this apparently free space of domesticity is not free from the violence that ultimately makes the text reflect a valley of discontent. Political space is hard enough for those who do not know what they believe in the cross over culture of politicized probing. Through the relational rupture of socio-political instrumentality, Tatya accuses Prakash, “He drags politics into everything” (Gokhale 2004, 102) while Prakash rigidly targets the “economics”, “social structure” and “political system” of this city space because he thinks that these cultural machineries are not structured properly to give support to the people. During this increasing unreliability, the “psychology graduate” Anu arguably maps out the imbrications of space specific salient categories: “The environment has a lot to do with what people do and become.” (Gokhale 2004, 102) Through the heterogeneous mixing up of different identities, ideologies and anxieties, the family becomes a microcosmic representation of macrocosmic Bombay. Existing social boundaries and continuous configuration of

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boundaries have the typical tendency to denote the trajectories of convergence and divergence. In this psychodrama of sublimated self-expression, family tradition has been put in the mode of socio-political discourse. This is not a virtual world of expectations; rather it contains the disturbing germs of uncomfortable father-son relationship, having social and psychic splits: “I slogged all these year for you, my sons. Such sons. A madman, a pansy and a loafer. These are my sons.” (Gokhale 2004, 104) Against this interventionist shape of triangulated spillover, Dattani in the Introduction to City Plays wants to read the drama precisely as a ‘tragedy of Tatya’: “[Tatya] must suffer being trapped in the role that has been allotted to him by generations before him. He will live and he will suffer, but he will never know why he is suffering. That is the essence in Shanta Gokhale’s drama – the tragedy of Tatya.” (2004, xii) The continuous repetition of the word ‘understand’ throughout the text indicates the conjectural lack of understanding among the urban characters because there is no reciprocal relationship as Tatya warns: “Don’t scare us with big words.” (Gokhale 2004, 101) Even then there is also self-contradiction in Tatya’s presumptive reference to the proximity and distance that maps the fault line: TATYA. Enough! There’ll be no more treatment. I’ve spent enough on those quacks. Poured my hard-earned cash down their throats. (Gokhale 2004, 107)

and TATYA. I’m strong enough to look after my son while there’s still life in me. (Gokhale 2004, 107)

Thus through the cul de sac of psycho-sociological gloss, the characters pendulate between the notions of “flat” and “round” with the radical demarcation of orientation and distortion – upholding cultural distinctiveness in the social space. It is that social space which implies, as Doreen Massey writes in Space, Place and Gender, “a simultaneous multiplicity of spaces: cross-cutting, intersecting, aligning with one another, or existing in relations of paradox or antagonism.” (1994, 3) The Tatya family-chronicle brings the consensus conversion and commitment of different ideological standpoints of playing different roles in the discourse of anarchy. Daunting sense of scale and scope want the oxymoronic identity of one person: Avi is “a lamb one moment, a wild beast the next.” (Gokhale 2004, 107) Allied with the themes of scattering and disconnection, family members, surprisingly enough, always give ample excuses for Avi’s absence. As the

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stable space is being traversed by frightening reminder of unassimilated otherness, characters like Prakash, Vikram and Tatya, with a note of unarticulated anxiety, may sometimes attain the cosmological sympathy from the readers. In this urban space of occult instability, money (or Money?) becomes a strong character in the text.2 The conflict between father and sons, regarding the money to pay Anna what Tatya calls his “father’s debts,” becomes a specific site of interrogation that casts an inescapable intractability of disgraceful and disgracing impersonation. Against the backdrop of contentious cultural issues, the dramatist exposes the psychological topography of Tatya: “My mind’s made up. I must do what I must do. Or there’ll be no peace for me.” (Gokhale 2004, 111) Explosive ideas of political preferences and patterns of polarization only result in a relational off-balance where the illegal relationship of Tatya’s father with Janakibai who “squeezed him dry” ultimately produced the step brother of Tatya – Anna who like Avi is also an absentee in the text. Tatya makes a ceremonious declaration that the customary inheritance of his family can be vested upon Anna. In this state of ontological reformulation, justifiable logicality regarding the moral grip of the character is cabined, cribbed and confined in a massive zone of relational chaos. Vis-à-vis Tatya’s dissident imagination to satisfy a foul intention, there is a definite intertextual echo of Shakespeare’s Macbeth: DURGA. Hush. Calm down, please. Here’s some water. Drink it. And don’t worry. You’ve decided what you want to do. You think it’s the right thing to do. That’s fine, then. That’s all you can do. Sleep now. Sleep. (Gokhale 2004, 113)

Durga’s repeated use of the phrases like ‘clamour in our mind’ and ‘screaming’ and later Avi’s sleepwalking reinforce the above note of intertextual observation. The long silence due to incapacitation as well as psychological impotence has been shattered by sudden revelation when Vasu utters: “He’s not there, not in his bed.” and Durga reiterates: “Our Avi has disappeared.” (Gokhale 2004, 115 and 116) In the incremental form of relational disintegration, the doctrinal boundaries, through the vantage point of isolationism, cast the verbal cudgels of defence dilemma: DURGA. Curse? Avi never did that with you … VASU. So you thought, because you didn’t want to hear. You handed him over to me and grew blind and deaf, waiting for a miracle to happen. (Gokhale 2004, 118)

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Though Vasu casts a hint of conspiration against Vikram, it is later revealed that Avi “sleepwalked and fell into the sea by accident.” (Gokhale 2004, 122) Lopkhande’s superfluous language at the revelation of Avi’s death reinforces the presence of masks in city life. Thus the political fabrication and ideological implementation, with the dialectic of demand and desire, excite a conjectural stupefaction of displacement and differentiation. Vis-à-vis this case Sophie Watson’s reading of city space may come relevant: “Moments of tranquillity or harmony can easily erupt into moments of antagonism and violence. Love and hate, empathy and antipathy co-exist in ambiguous and ambivalent tension.” (2006, 2) It is interesting to note that the ideological message of the text is to offer an individual’s fight (Vasu’s) against the libidinal energy involved in the cocalled process of discrimination. Against the series of polemical refutation, it becomes a world of possibilities and probabilities as Prakash thinks: “We are all strange” and Tatya realizes: “We all have to do with each other.” (Gokhale 2004, 125 and 123) Thus the room becomes a meeting place of different ideologies to be constructed as well as contested; fragmented city life reiterates the life-in-death and death-in-life interplay in the map of city ‘scape’ as Durga laments:3 “People don’t talk to each other any more in this house. It’s dumb. Like a cemetery.” (Gokhale 2004, 126) Now it is time to recall Chris Barker’s right observation in the book Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (2000) that goes against Durga’s realization: “Homes have been cast as the unpaid domain of mothers and children, connotating the secondary values of caring, love, tenderness and domesticity.” (2000, 293) At Vikram’s decision to go to Dubai to make money, Kiran emphasizes on the visionary voyage of social space: “It’s a terrible life out there. We need the warmth of families. Loneliness can drive you crazy.” (Gokhale 2004, 127) Vikram immediately reacts with sufficient counter-reason: “Too much family can also drive you crazy. You don’t get a job. You hit the bottle. You despair. Disappear.” (Gokhale 2004, 127) Finally the so long suppressed excision of masculinity of Vikram brings in the self-induced conformity to resist the economic imbalance prevalent in our society. At this critical juncture, it would be relevant to once again mention Watson: “Public space is always, in some sense, in a state of emergence, never complete and always contested, constituted in antagonistic relations, in that it is implicated in the production of identities as relational and produced through difference.” (2006, 7) The customary process of patriarchy that puts the woman in undemanding situation pitilessly exploits her social existence even in the so-called modern city like Bombay/Mumbai that Gyan Prakash in his book Mumbai Fables refers to as “Bombay’s pulsating modernity.” (2010, 128)

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In this picture of patriarchal society, women are playing nothing but the supportive roles: “The women carry on their roles as nurturers unquestioningly.” (Dattani2004, xi) Vasu who is always there to take up orders asserts life at the end of the play in an untraditional way through the off-beat reclamation of identity in a restructured and repatterned gendered positionality: “There’s only two ways open to us. We either despair and die, or hope and live. Who knows how this baby will be – perfect or imperfect, bringing joy or sorrow. But it’s a whole new life. And that’s something. A new life to live with and grow with.” (Gokhale 2004, 30-1) Thus in the monologue Vasudha claims the indestructibility of our ‘presentricentric’ predicament through the psychological exploration; it is that indestructibility which has been implied in the title ‘avinash’ – the word itself means indestructibility. The story of exclusion/inclusion, as reflected through the different snapshots of city life, is patterned through the “social stigma.” (Dattani2004, xii) Allied with the spatial and professional fabrics like ‘marketplace’, ‘wedding’, ‘school’, ‘beverages’, ‘nasty boss’, ‘college’ and ‘business’, the text marks Bombay to be a storehouse and powerhouse of cultural caricature. It is that urban space that has been referred to as the ‘maximum city’ by Suketu Mehta because it has offered to its citizens the maximum opportunities: “Bombay is the future of urban civilization on the planet.” (Mehta 2004, 3) No doubt, in the present postmodern trope of cultural transmission, the epistemological decentering through the paradigm of dislocation needs the positive politics of changeability that will disrupt the ongoing dominant sense of ‘terrifying emptiness’ (Gokhale 2004, 105) over the public city of Bombay.

CHAPTER VII THE URBAN FRONTIER: REPRESENTATION OF DHAKA IN TANVIR MALIK’S SHORT TAKES: STORIES FROM BANGLADESH

This chapter will focus on Bangladesh-based writer Tanvir Malik’s Short Takes: Stories from Bangladesh, a collection of eighteen short stories about the middle class characters of Dhaka and their regular encounters with the cultural geography of this typical urban space. In this collection, Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, is stretched like a canvas that nurtures varied vignettes of city life. By projecting the existential concerns vis-à-vis the constant changing pattern of Dhaka, Short Takes becomes a mirror up to the hegemonic construction of city poetics against the backdrop of power politics. Malik has dealt with the typical topographical issues through the dynamics of dialectics like subjectivity/objectivity, culture/anarchy, public/private and traditional belief/modern aspirations. This chapter is an attempt to refer to the crucial spatial codes of the city’s cultural matrix on the characters’ psychology that is always full of what city critics map as “empirical nuances of city life.” (Hubbard 2006, 7) The engagement of the city-dwellers in the space-specific cultural practices is necessary for the understanding of the social balance in a particular geographical place. Through the collectivities and individualities textualized by Malik, Dhaka is being unveiled and exposed as a city booming with life. Even the dedication letters are interesting: “to Dhaka city, where I took my first breath.” The sense and sensibility of Dhaka is crucial for the formation of the writer’s selfhood: Dhaka is like a limb without which I'm handicapped, so to speak. Like I said, I was born here and have known it as my home all my life, except for a year or so when I lived abroad. Sometimes I think that whatever I am is because of Dhaka. I know it's a crowded and often dirty city but just as one doesn't hate his mother because she's ugly, I can't bring

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The spatial codes of Dhaka are being produced due to the heavy nexus between the earthly geography and socio-political ethnography. In the first story of the collection “The Ancient Freedom Fighter”, Malik makes it very clear that people in the post-independence Dhaka are paying no attention to the country’s freedom fighters; freedom fighters like Tajuddin are now degraded to a beggar – an instance that metaphorically indicates the “poverty” of the city dwellers of Dhaka. Raihan’s incidental, but not regular, sympathetic rapport with Tajuddin shows us that the golden past has no meaning in this fragmented present where people live by moments. Ironically enough, Tajuddin’s historical struggle for his country’s freedom has ultimately made him dependent upon others – by begging from street to street. Thus existing social patterns, as reflected in the portrayal of lifestyle in Dhaka, have the tendency to denote the spatial coverage of sociohistoric possession as well as dispossession. Against the series of urban encounters, Dhaka offers a world of possibilities and probabilities; the city becomes a meeting place of different ideologies to be constructed as well as contested. In “A Lesson Learnt” we find that Dhaka is full of different inspiring slogans on child education; but ironically there is no practice in reality. The city is full of beggars and it is shocking to note that most of them are child beggars. Through Farhana’s observation the readers can understand that if one stands still for a moment in the public place, she/he will definitely be surrounded by child beggars and their continuous disturbing demand for money: “The uncanny relation between the white-painted sentiment at the back of the rickshaw and the begging children on the roads presented itself to her now.” (Malik 2010, 16) This is how beggars’ opera is being regularly performed at every corner of the city. Tinged with mock-epical dimension, “National Citizens’ Right Day” is being observed; but citizens’ basic rights are not being secured in reality. Marginalized people like hijras are not considered to be part of mainstream civilization. In her seminal work The Cultures of Cities (1995), urban critic Sharon Zukin rightly observes a valuable note regarding the construction of unequal power relations in cities: “The look and feel of cities reflect decision about what – and who – should be visible and what should not.” (1995, 7) In the story titled “Scary” readers find a dramatic encounter between hijras and the so-called civilized human beings in a shop and the encounter ends with

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a ruthless exclusion of the “scary” hijras who are vehemently beaten up for disturbing the respectable customers: “With normalcy restored, everybody now went about their business.” (Malik 2010, 87) Vis-à-vis the aforementioned incident, it would be relevant to mention Sophie Watson who in the oft-cited book City Publics: The (Dis)Enchantments of Urban Encounters tries to conceptualize the urban public space as “a site of potentiality, difference and delightful encounters.” (2006, 19) In these stories continuous references to the imams, gods and goddesses make it virtually clear that the citizens of Dhaka are deeply involved in religious rituals. In spite of the fact that religion plays a deciding role in their lives, the spiritual rituals are not being performed in sacrosanct modes. In “Fiesta” we find that Ramadan which should indicate the “month of fasting and prayers showing self-restraint” (Malik 2010, 119) is sometimes ironically considered by some citizens as a festival of food and fun. In a similar pattern of such religious caricature, “Murky Motive” tells the story of a fake Holy Man who, for his propelling influence, is respected and regarded by his disciples as “Huzur.” Ironically, the text shows us that how corrupt this “huzur” is! He even makes politics out of a dead body by pointing out that the person has died because other politicians are jealous for his entry into politics while in reality the old man has died from short-circuits. The story also reveals the religious grip of the citizens of Dhaka, who, even in this scientific globalized age, consider a human being to be their spiritual guru who will save them in distress. Lived grass root experiences are very much valuable to understand the situational grip of Dhaka’s social balance – “queues of rickshaws”, “a multitude of heads”, “ambulance siren”, “pop-corn sellers”, “labyrinth of alleys, lanes and by-lanes” etc. Money round which our society revolves plays the role of a crucial character in Malik’s stories. The characters’ typical traits can be described regarding their various responses to money. For a possession of other’s money, human beings can readily use suitable mask. The members of the political parties who anyhow try to grab money are the target in the story titled “Justice”. Vis-àvis the moral corruption, Shamim’s innocence is turned into foolishness in this satiric text. Thus through the psycho-sociological gloss, the citizens of Dhaka are being tossed between the notions of “flat” and “round” in the different parameters of social space – dystopic as well as utopic. It is that social space which implies, as cultural critic Doren Massey writes, “a simultaneous multiplicity of spaces: cross-cutting, intersecting, aligning with one another, or existing in relations of paradox or antagonism.” (1994, 3) Through the heterogeneous mixing up of different identities and

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categories, the space-specific realities in Dhaka - New Market, Bismillah Biriyani Palace, Dhakeshwari Temple, Boro Bazar, Jonokolyan Pharmacy, University of Humanities and Technology, Shantinagar – connote Henry Lefebvre’s sense of “code of space.” (1991, 269) Even in a post-imperial city like Dhaka, women are forced to wear burqas. Many devils’ logics are operative in the city-environment as we find in the story “Veil over Eyes”: Rapes and sexual crimes are rampant in today’s society … It’s because women of today have forgotten the purdah. Their shameless clothes are responsible. They’ve also come out of the home and now work side-byside with men. The so-called free mixing of the sexes is also responsible for this to some extent … but primarily it’s the lack of purdah in women today. (Malik 2010, 24)

Allied with the hegemonic construction of “public” man and “private” woman, patriarchal society does not sanction any space for career-oriented women. In the story “A Man’s Job,” Jyoti, during Eid-shopping, was physically humiliated. As women are considered as the “weaker sex,” their basic right is not safeguarded in the public space; in fact women have no place of their own. The customary process of patriarchy that puts a woman in undemanding situations shamelessly exploits her social existence. In the story “Gaping Truth,” against the backdrop of Shojol-Tamanna’s family space, the readers become acquainted also with the public spaces of Dhaka where “pretty” Tamanna becomes an object to be looked at. Underneath the voyeuristic implication, the story reveals the ongoing sexual perversion and physical attraction in this male dominated society: “Women’s looks were flames which could draw men like moths!” (Malik 2010, 75) The story ends with Tamanna’s rebellious germs through female assertion: “Why are you staring at me like that … huh? Haven’t you seen a woman in your life…? I wish I could pluck your shameless eyes out…!” (Malik 2010, 80) The off-beat reclamation of identity in a restructured gendered positionality resists the formation of undemocratic sphere for women in day to day reality. The convergence and divergence of social realism that has been continuously occurring in the textual fabrication of Dhaka, is being continuously reflected in the characters’ psychology as well as in the writer’s healing revelation: “City life is so important to me because this is what I’ve grown up in, seen from inside and understood all my life. I was born in Dhaka and am first-hand familiar with all the aspects of this city of millions. And, as such, the characters, the plots and other stuff of my stories are dominated by city life.”2Against the backdrop of such realization, it can be referred to how, in the writing of the postmodern

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social theorists, attempts have been made to categorize “the ‘town’ as centre (centre of decision-making, wealth, information, of the organization of space). But at the same time, they cause the ‘town,’ as the historically constituted political centre, to fragment and disappear. Centrality collapses into the space which it has generated, i.e., into the existing relations of production and their reproduction.” (Lefebvre 1991, 17, original emphasis) Thus the sense of city symbolizes the economic centre where opportunity for jobs can be celebrated. The story “Consciously Unconscious” is an academic satire through the interplay of profession and pretension. For more money Dr Rehman, neglecting his duties in his own university never hesitates to take classes in other institutions. As he confesses: “Do you know I cancelled my classes at the university to take two-hour classes in this God-forsaken place?” (Malik 38) His wife rightly describes him as a ‘robot’ for his insensitivities. In spite of being very much conscious of his negligence, he shows no signs of responsibility to his university students. Not only Rehman but his colleagues as well desperately run after money, avoiding their basic duties for which they are being paid by the government. Not only in this story but also in other stories included in Malik’s anthology, the sacrosanct conceptualization of academic space has been questioned. In the story titled “By the Cover” Malik gives us a message that educated people sometimes unnecessarily overreact to fundamentalism. Regarding a fresh recruitment, the teachers are divided among themselves and they cast their own logic either in favour or against the applicant; consequently, no unified decision is taken. It is a pity that some of the teachers categorize a candidate (Mr Manzoor) as ‘fundamentalist’ because he has a “long beard”. In spite of Manzoor’s impressive presentation, he is not considered to be a suitable candidate for the post because ‘high recommendation’ is necessary for recruitment which Mr Manzoor has not. Malik makes it very clear that the academic space in Dhaka is being governed by hypocrites. It is a matter of irony that the teachers are expected to do one thing but they are involved in another. The story “Difference” that depicts the picture of Dhaka in a rainy session refers to an encounter between a young woman and a rickshaw-puller in a “vast waterlogged section of the city” and an accident they face in their journey and their responses to each other. There are ample examples of negotiations between rickshaw-pullers and riders in Short Takes. Even the rickshaw-pullers who, at the slightest opportunity, try to exploit people by demanding high fares, they, in return, are being exploited by muggers as we find in the story “Two of a Kind.” It is shocking that the muggers do not even spare women and rickshaw-pullers. Vis-à-vis such a dystopic picture, it is very much understandable that the

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law-and-order situation is worse in Dhaka. As the stable space is being haunted by the frightening reminder of exploitation and loot raj, the streets of Dhaka become a specific site of attention that casts a sense of insecurity. As the pictorial trope is hardly simple, the public spaces of Dhaka are now being produced through regular contestation. In “Relative Concern” Malik makes it very clear that mere blood relation does not make one a relative; rather a relative is one who is sympathetic to his/her relatives’ problems and concerns. Nahid realizes this bitter truth when his father is admitted to a hospital and his relatives who have come to visit his father are the least worried about his physical condition. Rather they, in the I.C.U. chamber, are engaged in gossip on different issues without paying any attention to the patient. The ending of the story shows us that when Nahid, having a critical time, wants the relatives’ help, they shamelessly erect some vague alibis to shun any kind of involvement and responsibility: Sitting in the car, Nahid was mulling options as to who-to-ask – someone had to stay the night in the hospital while he was away. He dialled numbers. The responses at the other end, however, weren’t exactly music to his ears. Everyone had an excuse: Boro Chacha had just had his ‘onslaught of rheumatism’, Choto Khala’s son Ornob was ‘up to his neck’ in studies, Khalu’s blood pressure had ‘shot up’, Boro Mama’s asthma had ‘acted up’, and so on, and so forth. (Malik 2010, 94)

A sense of impersonation is looming large as far as the mental status of these citizens of Dhaka is concerned. At this crisis period, Shawkat Chacha who has not any kind of blood relation with Nahid’s family voluntarily stretches his helping hand. Indeed a relative in need is a relative indeed! The picture of Dhaka will not be complete without mentioning the disturbing traffic jam. Even a critically ill patient cannot be out of the insensitive traffic jam. In “The Ancient Freedom Fighter” Raihan expresses his anxiety and disturbance: “It’s become impossible to live in this city. Traffic jams and beggars hold us hostage …!” (Malik 2010, 7) Traffic jams become a regular problem which is not at all a good advertisement for Dhaka to the Western travellers. In a similar pattern, the story “Ordinary” depicts not only the suffocating jam on the road but it also satires the government’s inability to safeguard a patient at a hospital. Thus the city which is supposed to provide smoothness through networking equipment is found to have nurtured many disturbing nets in reality. In “A Little Loss” Shihab becomes faint in the suffocating jam. He even loses his mobile phone which has actually been robbed during his unconscious state. Thus the word ‘little’ in the title ironically a huge

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amount of loss of potentiality. Such regular disfiguration of the citizens through the paradigm of dislocation needs the positive politics of changeability that will disrupt the ongoing humiliation of the city public.3 The stories titled “Gifts” and “Dark Truths” deal with pre-marital negotiations regarding dowry. In “Gifts” readers find that Rafi, in spite of his friends’ imposition to take a dowry, nurtures his strong decision not to take it on the pretext that “dowry is a social evil.” But interestingly enough, even the bride Farzana presses Rafi to take her dowry by internalizing dowry as a social custom. On the other hand, “Dark Truths” textualizes the problem of colour prejudice in marriage that makes Shahana’s life a bit problematic. In this part of the world, marriage is possible only for girls of good complexion. The story of Shahana’s marriage does not end here. Her family had to procure the money to send Shajib abroad. Her father scraped together all his savings and sold his ancestral home in Brahmanbaria. Shajib married Shahana on his return. He now works in a different foreign bank. They have two daughters. Both are dark-complexioned. (Malik 2010, 67)

It is also interesting to point out that there is no colour bar for the male members of society. As existential dilemma predominates over the conflux of characters, this apparently free space is not free from violence (psychological) that ultimately makes the story to reflect a valley of discontent. It is significant to mark how Malik’s narrative of the urban space becomes a site of dialectical display through the characters’ psychological topography that regularly encounters the cultural geography of social existence. Allied with professional identity, personal explication, political implication, pre-marriage as well as post-marriage sensibilities and traffic jams, the anthology offers a textualization of Dhaka’s different colours which are tilled with chills, spills and thrills.

CHAPTER VIII GLASGOW AS “TEXT”: MAPPING THE URBAN SPACE IN SCOTTISH FICTION

The best way to read a city is to read it through the proper mode of textualization. In recent times, it is important to note how the sense of a city’s spatiality becomes a matter of concentration for the writers. Phil Hubbard in the critical study titled City (2006) analyses the strategies that go in unearthing the city space: In essence, the urbanity of urban life is effaced: cities are written of as spaces where innovation happens, for sure, but the city becomes backdrop rather than active participant in the making of new cultures and economics. Again, to suggest the plays an active role in innovation is not to imply it has a deterministic influence on the trajectory of economy or society, but to argue we need to take the city more seriously if we are to articulate the importance of space in social, economic and political life. (2006, 3-4)

The experiences of a city’s cultural practices are necessary for the proper understanding of the social balance in a particular geographical place. The concept of the city as “text” has randomly been practiced in the literary milieu of Scottish fiction. The spatial ambit of Glasgow has recurrently been textualized in the Scottish literary space spanning from the 1935 attempt of No Mean City by Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley Longto the latest 2015 venture Glasgow: A History by Michael Meighan. Further examples may be cited at random –John McNeillie’s Glasgow Keelie (1940), John Burrowes’ Glasgow: Tales of the City (2010), William Lobban’s The Glasgow Curse (2013), Andrew Davies’ City of Gangs: Glasgow and the Rise of British Gangster (2014) and many more. Through the social centrality of the urban frame, Glasgow, located on the banks of the River Clyde as a space and the subsequent transformation of that space into text offers more representational than referential urban dynamics in the map of Scottish fiction. In addition, Francis Russell Hart’s

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The Scottish Novel: A Critical Survey (1978) and Cairns Craig’s The Modern Scottish Novel (1999) are remarkable accounts of the development of Scottish fiction. Further Moira Burgess in the book Imagine a City: Glasgow in Fiction (1998) makes a list of the literary ventures where the urban space of Glasgow has been turned into the literary pages. The urban galaxy of Glasgow and the fiscal implication through the act of spatializing as reflected through the abovementioned texts will be examined to point out what went into the making of novelists’ rigid statement about the city’s spatial coverage that Glasgow is a “mean city.”Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley Long’s celebrated book No Mean City which has been described by critics as the “influential Glasgow novel of the twentieth century” (Bryce-Wunder2003, 112) is a literary account of the slum dwellers of Gorbals of Glasgow in the inter-war 1920s.1The title of the novel, according to Wikipedia, echoes a passage from the Bible, where Paul the Apostle says that he is a citizen of Tarsus, which is "no mean city", i.e. no obscure or insignificant city. Through the negotiations of altered space and altered time (the contextual dynamics of urban issues through the interplay of “spatialization of time” and “temporalization of space,”) Glasgow has not merely been used as backdrop but rather becomes a character and at certain times becomes the protagonist in this narrative: Whit does it matter to the heild yins happens in Gorbals or Bridgeton or Garngad or Anderston, or in any ither bliddy slum in Glasgow for that matter, so long as we keep quiet? Do they care hoo we live or whit we dac or whit kind of derrtyhoose we have? No bliddy fears! They need wakin’ up once in a while, and it’s fellows like Razor King that makes them remember we’re alive. (McArthur and Long 1998, 304)

This statement by a character named Lizzie indicates a gradual formation of protest against Johnnie Stark, the notorious “Razor King,” a representative figure of exploitative nature that makes the slum dwellers terrorized and subsequently makes the urban space a “mean” one. The ideological standpoint of Johnnie Stark may well be summed up in the following statement: “A razor king doesn’t have to pay for his drinks. There’s more ways of making money than toiling for it.” (McArthur and Long 1998, 114, original emphasis) Being a savage and raw criminal, he is trying to be above his present status. As time goes by this type of projected meanness of the city space grows even more and it finally culminates in Malcolm Archibald’s direct epithetical description of the city as “a real mean” one in his book Glasgow: The Real Mean City (2014). Archibald’s book is a literal account of how the urban space of Glasgow is transformed

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from the dynamic innovation and the technical upliftment of the industrialization of the nineteenth century to the horrific aberration of the gang culture of the twentieth century – the ongoing practice of bloodshed, violence, bigotry and hatred.2 The representation of the urban space draws theoretical questions. The spatial ambit of Glasgow as represented in the abovementioned novels, by nurturing both what Henry Lefebvre in The Production of Space categorizes as “representations of space” (1991, 33) and “representational space,” (39) is full of encounters, attacks - a clear sense of somewhat disheveled space. As the stable space is being traversed by the frightening reminder of physical brutality, sexual rapacity and street fighting, the city dwellers, with a note of unarticulated anxiety, may sometimes attain the readers’ sympathy. In this hybrid age of cultural vacuity, the radical transformation from humane emotion to rough and tough machine is very much overt. It would not be an overstatement to say that the literary approaches mentioned above have placed the urban space of Glasgow in the social critic Stjepan. G. Mestrovic’s recent idea of “postemotional society:”3“… postemotionalism is a system designed to avoid emotional disorder; to prevent loose ends in emotional exchanges; to civilize ‘wild’ arenas of emotional life; and, in general, to order the emotions so that the social world hums as smoothly as a well-maintained machine.” (1997, 150) In this urban space of occult instability, gun, revolver, knife become the strong characters in the texts. Andrew Davies in City of Gangs: Glasgow and the Rise of the British Gangster (2014) makes a similar nature of representation where the rampant use of machines has cabined, cribbed and confined the city dwellers’ emotions. To have properly acquaint themselves with the city space critics have generally focused on the walking rhetoric as the French critic Michel De Certeau points out: “… space is a practiced place … the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers.” (1984, 117) In addition, Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) equates the street to a theatre and thereby establishes the fact that the citizens are players/actors who play their assigned role with a social mask.4 After the emergence of the notorious identity of Glasgow as Britain's gang city in 1920s and 1930s, gangs like the Billy Boys, the Kent Star, the Savoy Arcadians and the South Side Stickers became the owners of the streets; drunken brawls, robbery, theft and absolute disregard for the law were the essential subject of everydayness. As far as the historiography of the city is concerned it is an established fact that the gang culture of Glasgow came in prominence during 1880s and later on in 1920s and 1930s, the gangs became active to the fullest. Unemployment problems may be cited as an influential force

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behind the formation of these groups of gangs. Many times there were wars between the police forces and the groups of gangs regarding the ownership of the streets of Glasgow.5 Sometimes there were rivalries between gangs that created a pool of bloodshed in the streets. Since cities always provides a site of conflict, urban spaces, taking their cue from urban critic Henry Lefebvre’s oft-cited book The Production of Space, are always “over-inscribed: everything therein resembles a rough draft, jumbled and self-contradictory.” (1991, 142) Allied with the implication of power politics, the image of Glasgow's infamous razor gangs has been exploited in many narratives. William Lobban’s The Glasgow Curse (2013), essentially becomes a memoir of the author’s own engagement with the underworld culture. He begins with how his childhood days were virtually affected by drugs, murder and fighting and how gradually he became part of the violent, inhuman gang of robbers. In this world of crime, punishment and surveillance, his association with notorious gangsters like Arthur Thompson and Paul Ferris had driven his life in a blacker course of corrosive direction – false acquisition, prison riots, murder etc. The different parts of Glasgow like Exeter Prison, Perth and Full Sutton have official records of Lobban’s criminal career which he tried to come out of in his last part of life. Vis-à-vis the crisis through the spatial codes of the city’s cultural matrix, it would be relevant to quote a passage from Alasdair Gray’s Lanark: A Life in 4 Books (1981) which, according to Cairns Craig in the essay “Devolving the Scottish Novel,” is “probably the most influential Scottish novel.” (2006, 128) The following conversation between McAlpin and Thaw offers a decoding of the spatial coverage of Glasgow’s urbanity: “Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?” “Because nobody imagines living here,” said Thaw. McAlpin lit a cigarette and said, “If you want to explain that I’ll certainly listen.” “Then think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively. What is Glasgow to most of us? A house, the place we work, a football park or golf course, some pubs and connecting streets. That’s all. No, I’m wrong, there’s also the cinema and library. And when our imagination needs exercise we use these to visit London, Paris, Rome under the Caesars, the American West at the turn of the century, anywhere but here and now. Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a musichall song and a few bad novels. That’s all we’ve given to the world outside. It’s all we’ve given to ourselves.” (Gray 1981, 243)

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Christopher Tunnard in The Modern American City maps that in postmodern time the city gets its emergence as “a national rather than a sectional institution” (1968, 9) and he further adds: “The very notion of a city is eclectic; and a sociologist, a psychiatrist, an architect, and a city planner would all have their own ideas of what a city is and ought to be.” (1968, 10) It is evident from the above quoted passage from Gray that is allied with the clash of tradition and trend, intimation and imitation, that the novelist’s epic endeavour to textualize the shifting stance of the city offers a polysemous grip of the city - a modernized metaphysics of the city’s place, space and landscape through the city dwellers’ identical association with the veritable cultural centers of the city. The scant heed of social realism that has been continuously occurring in the underworld fabrication of Glasgow is being continuously reflected in the characters’ psychology in the Scottish fictional space. John Burrowes’ Glasgow: Tales of the City (2013) depicts the tales of individuals like Mark McManus and Billy Connolly who represented the city indifferent parts of the world. Allied with the nostalgic look at the recurringmetamorphosis of the city space, John Watson in Once Upon a Time in Glasgow: The City from the Earliest Time (2003), Jack House in The Heart of Glasgow (2005), Carol Foremanin Lost Glasgow (2007), Piers Dudgeon in Our Glasgow: Memories of Life in Disappearing Britain (2010) and Michael Meighanin Glasgow: A History (2015) have textualized the city’s historical legacy through an episodic manner that went through layers of evolution. By projecting the existential dilemmas vis-à-vis the constant changing pattern of the city, novels become mirrors of the hegemonic construction of city poetics against the backdrop of power politics. In John Burrowes’ Glasgow Characters (2010) we find the story of Johnny Ramensky, a notorious criminal of the city. Colin MacFarlane in The Real Gorbals Story: True Tales from Glasgow's Meanest Streets (2007) recreates the atmospheric zeal of No Mean City and set the novel in the same place named Gorbals which is now full of hard-working people. This note of positivity Colin MacFarlane further draws in No Mean Glasgow: Revelations of a Gorbals Guy (2008) and demands that life at the Gorbals have many pleasing notes as well. Vis-àvis MacFarlane’s representation, urban critic Sophie Watson’s reading of city spacein the book City Publics: The (Dis)Enchantments of Urban Encounters (2006) may come relevant: “Moments of tranquillity or harmony can easily erupt into moments of antagonism and violence. Love and hate, empathy and antipathy co-exist in ambiguous and ambivalent tension.” (2006, 2) In the present postmodern trope of cultural transmission, the epistemological decentering through the paradigm of dislocation as

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reflected in the abovementioned novels needs the positive politics of changeability. In the fictional representation of Glasgow that goes into the very hardcore root of the city by reconfiguring its existential route in socio-cultural ethnic elements, there is some obviousness of knowledge production triggering new paradigms through the intercultural exchange of standpoints.

CHAPTER IX THE “CINEMATIC CITY”: KOLKATA IN SUJOY GHOSH’S KAHAANI

“Film explored the ways in which the city’s inhabitants responded to vast changes in visual technologies, to architectural transmutations and to destabilizing flux within essential urban structures; film-makers became preoccupied with exile and with the creation of peripheral spaces within the city, spaces of both social subjugation and dissidentopposition.” (Barber 2002, 9)

In recent time it is quite a habitual pattern of movie makers to focus on a very specific metropolitan space on the celluloid.1 Even the critics map a sense of preoccupation for the continuous exploitation of urban space in the archive of cinema: “The spectacle of the cinema both drew upon and contributed to the increased space of modern city life, whilst also helping to normalize the frantic, disadjusted rhythms of the city.” (Clarke1997, 3) The nomenclature of cinemas in India sometimes captures that specific explication of urbanity - sometimes in generalization, sometimes in particularization – Metro (2007) by Anurag Basu, Delhi 6 (2009) by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, London Dreams (2009) by Vipul Shah, New York (2009) by Kabir Khan, Once upon a Time in Mumbai (2010) by Milan Luthria, City of Gold: Mumbai 1982 (2010) by Mahesh V Manjrekar Shor in the City (2011) by Raj Nidimoru and Bombay Talkies (2013) by Karan Johar et al. More examples of those films which project city-scape as a pivot round which the entire plot builds up may be provided at random. Sujoy Ghosh’s directorial masterpiece Kahaani (2012) is a case in point that projects the metropolitan space of Kolkata where there occurs a saga of revenge melodrama: Set in the backdrop of the Durga Puja in Kolkata, Kahaani is a desperate, heart wrenching and suspenseful tale of a pregnant woman; Vidya Bagchi (Vidya Balan), in search of her missing husband. Just like the city Kolkata, there are many twists and turns in Vidya’s quest, wherein nothing is what it seems and danger larks in every corner. Vidya’s Kahaani moves deeper and deeper into the mystery, raising the stakes

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Some recent Bengali film makers’ lens have also focused on the urban space of Kolkata, unleashing the colourful ‘city of joy’ and its many shades – Hello Kolkata (2008)by Monoj Michigan, Le Chakka (2010) by Raj Chakraborty, Mahanagar@Kolkata (2010) by Suman Mukhopadhyay, Autograph (2010) by Srijit Mukherjee, Bye ByeBankok (2011) by Aniket Chottopadhyay, Maach, Misti and More (2013) by Mainak Bhaumik, Target Kolkata (2013) by Kartick Singh and many more.It would not be an exaggeration to say that the city has drawn the attention of a national as well as of an international audience. The city in practical sense influences the dwellers to be involved in a rush for space vacated by crisis. The exploration of imageries of the contemporary city becomes a favourite tool of the directors, not only of Kolkata but also on an international level. In his Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space Barber observes: The digital and corporate imageries of the contemporary city, despite their built-in fragilities, relentlessly attune and habituate urban space to their projections, and may now – by a final urban aberration – be the perfect realization of the city. But even such an ultimate state of complicity between image and city opens up an infinite zone of visual conflict, originating in the permanently discordant form of the body, its traces and eruptions inscribed across the entire history of urban cinema. (2002, 196)

Experiences of a city’s cultural practices are necessary for the understanding of the social balance in this particular geographical place.3 The projection of such symbolic experiences has been put in the focal point under Sujay’s lens. Taking its cue from Clarke’s oft-cited editing project The Cinematic City, this chapter will focus on how Sujoy exposes and exploits the specific urban space to find a fitting ending to a metropolitan dilemma and how Sujoy’s directorial venture has established the fact that “the cinema emerged as an allegory of the urban experience.” (Mazumdar 2007, xx) The relationship between urban and cinematic space is always in a reciprocal mode: It is no exaggeration to say that after globalization, city life witnessed an accelerated flow of images at every level. Everyday life became infused with a new visual display of signs, which were shock-like intimations of the commodity space. This global regime of signs has affected all forms of representation in India – music, television, radio, print, and film. (Mazumdar 2007, xxi)

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Vis-à-vis our rapid networking sociability, cinema becomes a powerful mode that unearths the consolidated fusion of urban space and celluloid space: “In its interaction with the city, film carries a multiplicity of means through which to reveal elements of corporeal, cultural, architectural, historical and social forms, as well as to project the preoccupations with memory, death and the origins of the image that crucially interlock cinema with urban space.” (Barber 2002, 7) The prototype of such a ‘screenscape’ is the flâneur that literally means a ‘city stroller’ who virtually becomes an agent to decode the encoded city streets.4In Sujoy’s directorial venture that is being operated through tactile images, Vidya Bagchi who is playing the role of a flâneur unleashes the colourful vibrancies of urban spaces in her dramatic quest for her missing husband in pre-puja Kolkata. By using the representational strategies through technical abundances the space of metropolitan Kolkata becomes a typically cinematic one: “The imagined city of cinema is born at the intersection of mental, physical, and social space … The traffic between the ‘real’ city and the represented cinematic city is a complicated movement driven by a subjective and psychic projection.” (Mazumdar 2007, xviii) The issue of film theory will remain untouched because the debate over the representation of cinema whether it is “real” or “edited”is not the issue of this chapter. Clarke has rightly pointed out: “It is in accordance with this situation that cinematic space cannot be simply equated with a perspectival representation of (another) space, its dynamism contained by its narrative form (thereby offering the spectator a seemingly coherent position of phallocentric visual mastery).” (1997, 9) Though city in cinema is sometimes represented as either utopic or dystopic, Sujoy’s treatment is somewhat ambivalent. The lonely outsider woman as a protagonist who is in search of a hidden truth and which gears her to be on the streets and by-lanes of the dingy city is an iconic one that puts the readers at what Brinda Bose calls “the crossroad of cities and sexualities.” (2008, 44) Other urban critics have also focused on the problematic issue of gender identity in the city space: This relation between being seen and going unseen is critical not only to women’s freedoms in the city, but also to their safety… One of the starkest forms in which gender difference and gender inequality appear in the city is in the geography of violence against women… many women’s perceptions and use of urban space are restricted by logics of sexual dominance and fear… The gendering of space becomes especially evident in this geography of danger, as women’s fear of male violence is manifested as a fear of space. (Tonkiss2005, 95)

Vis-à-vis the characterization of Vidya, the pregnant woman on the public space, it would also be relevant to refer to Bose: “Sexing and/or gendering

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the urban space unpacks the political possibilities for rethinking boundaries of private and public domains within the city as well as in connection with suburban and rural spaces.” (2008, 40) On a metro platform Bob Biswas (played by Saswata Chatterjee) warns Vidya that Kolkata is a “dangerous city” that offers more hindrance than help. In fact the film begins with a dystopic vision of terroristic gas attack that causes massive death in the city. In spite of his disinterest to go to Kolkata, Arup Basu (Vidya’s husband) becomes a victim in this attack. The sudden disappearance of a man from a city causes his wife to make an appearance in this city from London. When this pregnant woman is in search of her missing husband, the anti-urban theory will focus on the presence of the disturbing male gaze on Vidya right from the airport and then in the police station and even in the Monalisa Guest House.5 It is also true that in spite of the presence of the male gaze in the city Vidya has not been solely used as a mere voyeuristic object. Not only Sujay but also Satyajit Ray have handled this off-beat valency regarding city and sexuality. As Brinda Bose points out: Ray’s 1963 film Mahanagar (The Big City) is a gendered representation of the tribulations of an economically and socially challenging big-city life, and I see it as a significant precursor to the three films that make up his Calcutta Trilogy: Seemabaddha (Company Limited, 1971), Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1972) and Jana Aranya (The Middleman, 1975). (2008, 46)

Madhabi Mukherjee in Mahanagar and Vidya Balan in Kahaani are playing the same role to assert a typical performative identity in the streets of Kolkata. In addition, Vidya in Kahaani and Madhabiin Charulata play the same - an urban educated woman who reconfigures her own identity in an assertive way. The characterization of Vidya has been projected in such a strategic way that Kahaani may also be read a “text” that reflects “this perceptual nexus between metropolitan and sexualized consciousnesses” (Bose 2008, 37) Subrata Sen’s 2012 film Koyekti Meyer Golpo (Those City Girls) and Agnideb Chottopadhyay’s 2013 film Tin Kanya have also that same impact marked by modernity and contemporaneity.6 Through the “conceptualization of the cityscape as screenscape” (Clarke1997, 1) each city projects its own particular traits. Ganesh Chaturthi in Mumbai as we find in Farhan Akhtar’s Don (2006) and Karan Malhotra’s Agneepath (2012) is equivalent to the Durga Puja in Kolkata that we find in Kahaani and in Suman Moitra’s Dasami (2012). Sujoy starts the film with a high-pitched musical invocation to Kolkata. The song celebrates the uniqueness of Kolkata by describing it as “strong and

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powerful.” The pro-urban theory of cities will capture the advantage of different professions in the city – owners and workers at fast food stalls and tea stalls, newspaper sellers, constables, taxi drivers and many more. An outsider to this city finds it typically interesting to note the two names of a same person e.g., Poltu/Subrata, Rana/Satyaki; as a police constable (played by Parambrata Chottopadhyay) clarifies that one is a pet name and the other is the official name. More interestingly, in Kolkata the two words ‘Vidya’ and ‘Bidya’ which should have definite tonal differences are considered to be the same. The networking impact of this city like other cities may be established through its connections with different cities Delhi (Intelligence Bureau) and London (Airport). In addition, the nocturnal killing in Naranpur Tran Depot unleashes a sense of power relation ongoing in society. Through the visualization of trams and queue of taxis the streets of the city with different sounds are exposed with lively vibration.7 The difference of North Kolkata (full of old buildings) and South Kolkata (highly modern), the presence of rickshaws, the political grip through the CPM/TMC poster, the picturization of the beautiful Howrah bridge at night – all make Kolkata truly tillotoma: What however did create a warm ambience is perhaps the depiction of the city of Kolkata. Trams, the Howrah Bridge and the Durga Puja are unfailing traits of the city. The metro got added to that. There is some deft imagery not in the landmarks but in the broiling smoke of the chai at the roadside tea-stall, in the unwound last tram that ferries people to a different world and the lanes and by-lanes of the city.8

Through the particular visualization of Sarat Bose Road, R.N. Mukherjee Road, National Data Center and Thakurpukur, the ending of the film projects a sense of revenge tragedy that occurs in the Triangular Park when the brutal hitting on pregnant woman Vidya by one mysterious Milan Damji is followed by the woman’s strategic rescue and shooting on the notorious Milan. The image of the woman as a savior has been parallelly interplayed by the projection of the Durga idol that destroys Asur and Vidya’s plan that resists the growth of villainous Milan. Allied with the huge gathering for vasaan, the sound of shouting, sindurkhela, and beatings of dhak the conclusive part has been very strategically conceptualized on dasami.

CONCLUSION OF “POSTNATIONAL CONSTELLATION”: THE CITY SPACE IN AMIT CHADHURI

“To live in one land, is captivity.” – John Donne, “Change”

In his decoding of the city space in novels like A Strange and Sublime Address (1991), Afternoon Raag (1993), Freedom Song (1998), A New World (2000), The Immortals (2009) and Odysseus Abroad (2014), Sahitya Akademi-award-winning novelist Amit Chaudhuri explores the impact of the city space on the psychology of the city dwellers. It is through the lens of city spaces that Chaudhuri attempts to configure his knowledge of nation and nationality. Calcutta, Bombay, London and such other cities appear in the mind of Chaudhuri as necessary nodal points which are connected through a complex network of ideas that seem to critique the notion of national territory. Interestingly, in his novels, Chaudhuri represents the characters by situating them within the locational boundaries of cities, but the nation, as a result of the cross-border development of economic and social processes, rarely figures in Chaudhuri’s narrative. As the characters migrate from one city to another, through these multiple migrations they become citizens of not one nation, but a large landscape that consists of many cities. Chaudhuri’s urban narratives generally depend on the experiences of the “self” which repositions and relocates within the city space. The virtual disappearance of national boundaries and the emerging concept of cities that connect to form a large territory of business enclave are the defining features of the postglobalization era. Taking its cue from Jurgen Habermas’s notions of “postnational constellation” and Arjun Appadurai’s “deterritorialization,” this part of the monograph will interpret the representation of the city in Chaudhuri’s novels from a broad perspective. Chaudhuri’s novels bear testimony to the fact that the city is essentially an amorphous concept, lacking any definite geographical identity. The city, as conceived by Chaudhuri, is a symbol of the urban mentality of the people residing in it, and it is also deeply engaged with the anxieties of human life located in a particular geographical territory.

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This disloyalty to a fixed territorial identity comes to be radically celebrated in the 1950s. As Mike Featherstone in the book titled Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity (1995) pertinently observes: More people are living between cultures, or on the borderlines, and European and other nation-states, which formerly sought to construct a strong exclusive sense of national identity, more recently have had to deal with the fact that they are multicultural societies as ‘the rest’ have returned to the West in the post-1945 era. (1995, 10)

The city as a space evolves and configures itself according to the changing realities of human life. It is therefore reflective of a fluid spatial entity. There is also an ongoing sense of formation of selfhood in the exploration of the urban space vis-à-vis the myriad impressions received by the city dwellers. When seen from the perspective of the subjective self, Chaudhuri’s narratives seem to offer an insightful study of the growing-up of the characters in an urban environment. As the characters in Chaudhuri’s novels migrate from one city to other, they try to negotiate with the changing locations and, in doing so, the selves of the characters are transformed. Referring to this act of negotiation that takes place between the self and the city environment, Chaudhuri in his non-fiction titled Calcutta: Two Years in the City states: “After twelve years in Calcutta, I realize this notion of ‘home’ is an invention; that, though I was born in Calcutta, I didn’t grow up here, and don’t belong here. Each year, I suspect I’ll begin to understand this city better, be more at ease with it: and every year I find this is less true.” (2013, 286) Apart from this prominent issue of the interface between the self and the city, Chaudhuri’s representation of the city is remarkable in terms of capturing the various images of urban life. These images are to a large extent phantasmagorical in nature. In this context, we may refer to Steve Pile, who in Real Cities: Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life, reads city life from the perspective of “phantasmagorical make-up” (2005, 19) of urban life. The phantasmagorical images related to the urban space are referred to in The Immortals, in which Chaudhuri uses the word “phantasmagoria” to render a mental picture of city life: “This – phantasmagoria of roaring, maddened waves and darkness – was what stood behind, at least momentarily, the city they were becoming intimate with.” (2009, 25) What is interesting to note in Chaudhuri’s fictional world is that the cities’ cultural landscapes are strongly marked by a range of images – the continuous construction of image patterns is very much present in the

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narratives. The following passage from the novel, Afternoon Raag shows the vast range of images used to describe a particular place: In Oxford, the modes of social existence are few but tangible. But the tangibleness of this existence – conversing at parties, studying at libraries, going to lectures – is at the same time dreamlike. Sometimes the occasions seem like images that one has projected from within for one’s own entertainment, until they fade, as they must after a certain hour at night. Night brings darkness, the emptying of the images that made up the day, so that, in the solitary moment before falling asleep, the day, and Oxford, seem to be a dream one is about to remember. (2001, 229)

The pervasive political rhetoric and the history of a city are strongly prominent in Chaudhuri’s textualization of the urban environment. The following passage on Calcutta from Freedom Song elaborates the fact very well: In Little’s history, in fact, the history of Calcutta could be seen to have been written. First the company created by the Englishman of the same name eighty-five years ago; then the buying over of the company by an enterprising Bengali businessman of the name of Poddar; then the death of Poddar after Independence; quarrels and disputes between his sons; the company gradually going on to seed; the take-over of the company by the state government in 1974; and what it was now, something that had a kind of life and death, an existence, but not a real one. (2001, 357)

In his novels, Chaudhuri also depicts the relationship between the elite and the proletariat class in a city. Though Chaudhuri’s fictional characters are mostly representative of the urban elite or the upper middle class, yet there are some minor characters who belong to the lower middle or the proletariat class. Thus, beside the “upper” classes’ grand narrative, Chaudhuri’s novels also present the mini-narratives of the people belonging to the lower strata of the society. Chaudhuri’s representation of the city space shows the characters’ veritable journey from transplantation to acclimatization – a process of establishing identity/identities. His portrayal of urbanity acquires different dimensions in his novels, because cities in his fictions are engaged in a somewhat subliminal appearance that contains as well as celebrates the inclusive nature of city space resemblance and reassemblage, ideation and materiality, transparency and elusiveness, strategies of condensation and elongation, enigma of urban ruins and blessings of urban network as well as effigy and efficacy. This particular aspect is addressed by Ali Madanipour in Public and Private

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Spaces of the City and he calls it the “interpersonal space of sociability.” (2003, 95) At this point, it would be relevant to mention that the conception of a city as a discourse was initiated through the emphatic focus on the plausibility of a city’s essential structure. Through the implication of the paradigmatical aversion, urban sociologist Kevin Lynch in The Image of the City has also focused on the fact that the city is a “construction in space.” (1960, 1) Through the referential constructive element of cities like Calcutta, Bombay and London, Chaudhuri literalizes the ongoing toponymic reconstruction within the very center of the urban space. The city space, in spite of nurturing many complexities, offers the broad “relationships between production, consumption, savings and investment.” (Lauria1997, 6) In fact, after globalization, city life has witnessed an accelerated flow of images at every level. As far as the representations of the images of the different cities in Chaudhuri’s novels are concerned, urban spaces are put at the cross road of different spaces of flows and they have a typicality of their own. In his textualization of the urban spaces, Chaudhuri’s propositional immersion into the city space is always marked by a sense of immanence – an obvious hallmark of any city space. Through the itinerary vagaries of city life and its additional psychological impact, Chaudhuri hints at the ‘aleatoriness’ of the cities. Thus Chaudhuri’s novels offer textualizations of different cities’ different perspectives and such type of figurative literalization of the urban spaces turns his writing into “text” that welcomes the readers to be involved in rigorous reading and rereading. If we carefully examine Chuadhuri’s representation of the city in his novels, then we find that in the mental map of the author, the idea of nation is perhaps elusive. It is through the lens of city spaces that Chaudhuri attempts to configure his knowledge of nation and nationality. Calcutta, Bombay, London and such other cities appear in the mind of Chaudhuri as necessary nodal points which are connected through a complex network of ideas that seem to critique the notion of national territory. Interestingly, in his novels, Chaudhuri represents the characters by situating them within the locational boundaries of cities, but the nation rarely figures in Chaudhuri’s narrative. His outlook is typically evocative of the idea of “deterritorialization” as the characters migrate from one city to another, and through these multiple migrations they become citizens of not one nation, but of a large landscape that consists of many cities. This perspective of “deterritorialization” has become a dominant feature in the post-liberalization era, and referring to this particular perspective, social commentator Arjun Appadurai in his seminal text Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization states: “There is an urgent need to

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focus on the cultural dynamics of what is now called deterritorialization. This term applies not only to obvious examples such as transnational corporation and money markets but also to ethnic groups, secretarial movements, and political formations, which increasingly operate in ways that transcend specific territorial boundaries and identities.” (1997, 49)1 The virtual disappearance of national boundaries and the emerging concept of cities that connect to form a large territory of business enclave are the defining features of the post-globalization era. In fact, the notion of “postnational constellation” that sociologist Jurgen Habermas foregrounds in his seminal work, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (2001), may help the readers to interpret the representation of the city in Chaudhuri’s novels from a broad perspective: One alternative to the forced cheerfulness of a ‘self-dismantling’ neoliberal politics would consist in finding the appropriate forms for the democratic process to take beyond the nation-state. Under the pressure of denationalization, societies constituted as nation-states are ‘opening’ themselves to an economically driven world society … What would a political response to the challenges of postnational constellation look like? (2001, 61)

Vis-à-vis the rapid growth of globalization, the old idea of cartography no longer exists. We are going/growing to live in a borderless world as we are habituated to take part in the collapse of borders particularly of the national territorial border. At this critical juncture, it would be relevant to point out that cultural critic Simon Malps in his book The Postmodern very precisely observes: “We inhabit a multinational, multimedia, interdependent world marketplace.” (2007, 2) Through the disseminated impact of spatial and social fabrication what is mostly stressed in Chaudhuri’s fictional world is the local sense of place that invites the readers to take part in the cursory reading of metropolitan genealogies. The lived experiences in the city-spaces are heavily allied with the mode of identity formation – the set of identities that individuals always crave for in the urban space because the urban landscape has the limitless potentiality to offer endless opportunities to the city dwellers who inhabit as well as inhibit it. It is an obvious fact that the reflected dimension of the city is mostly psychological in Chaudhuri’s fictions; the city space and its longitudinal and latitudinal colours are exposed through the characters’ psychological realization and most of the time the psychological dimension of the novels posits a single individual as a lonely and isolated character on the street ruminating on his/her life. As the “spaces have dynamic trajectories,” (Byrne 2009, 80) credit must be given to Chaudhuri for capturing the transformation of the urban drama

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associated with city space to the textual space of his fictions. This transformation undoubtedly celebrates the declining relevance of the nation-state.

NOTES

Introduction 1.

2.

3.

4.

Rob Shields analyses Lefebvre’s conceptions of “perceived space”, “conceived space” and “lived space” thus: “‘… perceived space’ (‘le percu’) of everyday social life and commonsensical perception blends popular action and outlook but is often ignored in the professional, and theoretical ‘conceived space’ (‘le concu’) of cartographers, urban planners or property speculators. Nonetheless, the person who is fully human (l’hommetotale) also dwells in a ‘lived space’ (‘le vecu’) of the imagination which has been kept alive and accessible by the arts and literature. This third space not only transcends but has the power to refigure the balance of popular ‘perceived space’ and official ‘conceived space.’” (Hubbard et al 2004, 210) For a proper identification through location what is essential is to have an idea of geographical sense. As Griffiths rightly points out: “… geographical sense needs to take account of contradictory and contestatory readings of once seemingly absolute colonial and neocolonial discourses of place, and of their overlapping and reflexive reconfigurations in the modern world.” (2009, 448) Critics have observed a contrasting standpoint between Edward Said and Edward Soja because, in Said’s conceptualization of space, there is, unlike in Soja’s celebration of space, always a gap between real space and social space: “Space acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process, whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning.” (Said 1991, 55) Phil Hubbard explains why most of the urban geographers focus on Los Angeles: “Likewise, much postmodern urban theory took shape in the Los Angeles of the late twentieth century, a city whose landscapes were taken as symptomatic of not only North America urbanization, but also the wider restructuring of socialspatial relations in postmodern times.” (2006, 6)

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5.

6.

7.

8.

Julian Murphet in the essay “Postmodernism and Space” observes: “Geography – borders, access to key materials, distance from nodes of accumulation, proximity to neo-imperial centers, rapid urbanization, the ability to manage pollution, the rise of tourism and heritage industries – mattered as never before in the new world system. If the imperialist order had simply seen colonial space as an arena for unfettered expansionism and exploitation, the consolidation of a world of nation states ideally meant the delicate management of a global space now fully occupied by responsible agent …” (Connor 2006, 128) Chris Barker in Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (2000) very precisely comments: “Culture is political because it is expressive of relations of power.” (2000, 49) Stuart Sim in Irony and Crisis: A Critical History of Postmodern Culture (2002) very succinctly comments: “Human geography is also deeply concerned with social relations, this time as they are affected by our physical environment – as in our cities. In common with their peers in so many other areas of the social sciences, for human geographers postmodern theory represents a means by which to challenge the dominant assumptions about social relations in their field.” (2002, 111) Tim Woods in Beginning Postmodernism writes: “Space is the new cultural dominant … The politics of space, the cultural function of geography, and the importance of place are increasingly being contested and asserted.” (2010, 141) Katherine Brickell and Ayona Datta in the Introduction to Translocal Geographies: Spaces, Places, Connections (2011) observe that “spaces and places need to be examined both through their situatedness and their connectedness to a variety of other locales” (2011, 4) The following statement when the nameless narrator tells about Ila in Amitav Ghosh’s Sahitya Akademi-award-winning novel The Shadow Lines (1988) may be generically cited to indicate the additional meaning involved in “space”: “I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that It has to be invented in one’s imagination; that her practical, bustling London was no less invented than mine, neither more nor less true, only very far apart. It was not her fault that she could not understand, for as Tridib often said of her, the inventions she lived in moved with her, so that although she had lived in many places, she had never travelled at all.” (1996, 21)

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“Cities are, to borrow Maitland’s phrase, “a marvelous palimpsest”, reflecting in their physical structures the institutions and patterns of social stratification of societies which created them.” (Pahl1968, 3-4)

Chapter I 1.

2.

3.

4.

We find in the opening lines of John Keats’ famous poetic piece “To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent”: “To one who has been long in city pent, / ‘Tis very sweet to look into the fair / And open face of heaven, - to breathe a prayer / Full in the smile of the blue firmament.” “A city traditionally contains a walled citadel at its center, but in Dickens’ novels the center of the metropolitan labyrinth is typically a prison or criminal underworld cut off from the ordinary urban life surrounding it.” (Parrinder2006, 226) “The flâneur fully embraced the uneasy, fleeting life world of the modern city, enthralled by the pleasures and potentialities of a world removed from the presence, stricture and restraint of tradition, but also from the functional efficacy of modern rationality.” (Clarke2011, 5) By focusing on Los Angeles in particular in City of Quartz (1992) and American cities in general in Dead Cities (2002) the cultural critic Mike Davis deals with economics, geography and sociology and metaphorically indicates the death of the cities’ spontaneity through disturbing issues like terrorism. In a similar pattern, Don Mitchell in The Right to the City: Social Justice and Fight for the Public Space (2003) projects the emergence of the critical condition of cities as reflected in post 9/11 public urban space. In such critical time the exploration of the city space offers a clash between the individual self and the social system. Having a different type of approach Allen, Massey and Pryke in their editing project Unsettling Cities: Movement and Settlement (1999) focus on the structural pattern of city through ethnic and racial sites which, they think, are integral parts of a city’s cultural, political and psychic geography. Such sweeping treatment of the urban space projects the city as a place of voyeuristic desire. Sibley in Geographies in Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (1995) draws the readers’ attention to the stereotypical process of exclusion/inclusion through ethnic identity. In addition, Castells in City and Power (1978), Borden

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in Skateboarding: Space and the City (2001), Amin and Thrift in Cities: Re-imagining the Urban (2002), Madanipour in Public and Private Spaces of the City (2003), Short in Global Metropolitan: Globalising Cities in a Capitalist World (2004) have all focused on the spatiality and the social centrality of city/cities. 5. Raban in Soft City writes: “Cities, unlike villages and small towns, are plastic by nature. We mould them in our images: they, in their turn, shape us by the resistance they offer when we try to impose our own personal form on them. In this sense, it seems to me that living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living.” (1974, 2) 6. “What was to become modern Indian literature was largely produced by an English-educated urban middle class.” (Tharu and Lalitha 1993, 9) 7. Bangalore-based Grey Oak Publisher’s recent venture on the anthology of short stories titled Urban Shots (2013) depicts different writers’ projection of compatibility and incompatibility in different cities across India. 8. D.H. Lawrence in his famous essay “Why the Novel Matters” observes: “In the novel, the characters can do nothing but live.” (Enright and Chickera 1962, 291, original emphasis) Taking cue from Dominic Head’s The State of the Novel (2008) it may well establish the fact that a broad sense of interconnection is the hallmark of the fictional space: “The novel … enacts a form of interconnected temporal consciousness that is necessary to our existence, but which is largely uncultivated in the routine experience of a secular society.” (Head 2008, 38) 9. For a proper analysis of the cultural codes of the city readers may go through Wirth-Nesher’s book City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel (1996) and Westwood and Williams’ joint editing book titled Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory (1997). 10. In Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988) Ila says to the nameless narrator: “It’s you who were peculiar, sitting in that poky little flat in Calcutta, dreaming about faraway places. I probably did you no end of good; at last you learnt that those cities you saw on maps were real places, not like those fairylands Tridib made up for you.” (1996, 23-4) At this point, considering

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Ila’s illustration, it would be relevant to mention Nilanjana Gupta: “The city thus becomes a universal and anonymous subject which takes over the functions that previously were scattered over groups, associations or individuals.” (2014, 216)

Chapter II 1. 2. 3.

A famous Hindi novel by Uday Prakash has been translated by Jason Grunebaum into English as The Walls of Delhi. Mehrotra, Aakash. 2013. “Inside Delhi’s Belly.” The Sunday Statesman Evolve (1 September), 5. British novelist Penelope Lively authored a book titled City of the Mind (1991).

Chapter III 1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

Jha’s Mumbaistan is composed of three crime thrillers set in Mumbai – ‘Bomb Day’, ‘Injectionwala’ and ‘Coma Man.’ Smith precisely explains what a global city is: “Global cities are characterised as locations of networks of flows of capital, people, and culture that connect disparate places across the globe.” (1997, 55) “According to Gadamer, all understanding is linguistic in nature. Language is the center from which our whole experience of the world unfolds. Therefore, language is the real mark of our finitude. It is only through expressing a thought in my specific language that I am able to come to an understanding of something expressed in another language. The limits of my language are the limits of my horizon and thus the limits of my reason. For Gadamer, this embeddedness in language is a transcendental and universal condition.” (Acharya 2012, 143) Cosmopolitanism reflects a “philosophy of world citizenship which simultaneously transcends the boundaries of the nationstate and descends to the scale of individual rights and responsibilities [with] a particular set of skills and attitude towards diversity and difference.” (Binnie 2006, 13) Readers are also advised to go through the introduction of Schone’s book The Cosmopolitan Novel (2010). Jha, Piyush. 2012. “Living on the Edge.” In Conversation with Gopali Bondopadhyay. The Statesman Evolve (7th October), 11.

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6. 7.

8.

Jha, Piyush. 2012. “Living on the Edge.” In Conversation with Gopali Bondopadhyay. The Statesman Evolve (7th October), 11. “The city slang in Money is used to create a sense of place which is both every metropolitan city and nowhere … slang is generally regarded as below the level of educated speech and is sometimes a way in which less educated characters ca be presented to a reader. An important function is, however, to mark membership of a group and to underline in-group identity. Slang is often looked down as a vulgar; yet it cuts across all social classes and everyone has access to slang in one form or another.” (Carter and McRae 2001, 474) “It was always a limited inquiry: the country and the city within a single tradition. But it has brought me to the point where I can offer its meanings, its implications and its connections to others: for discussion and amendment; for many kinds of possible cooperative work; but above all for an emphasis—the sense of an experience and of ways of changing it—in the many countries and cities where we live.” (Williams 1973, 306)

Chapter IV 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

Famous film-maker Deepa Mehta’s critically acclaimed film Water (2006) is also about child widows and is also set in an ashram of Banaras during late 1930s. “With marriage and child bearing being identified as central female functions, the redundancy of higher education for women was thus sought to be sociologically and scientifically validated.” (Sen 2002, 4) A mention may be made of the three year old girl’s journey into faith in Verma’s other novel God is a River (2011). Vis-à-vis the urban frontier of Banaras, the city space is famous for paan and this obsession of the city with the flavor of paan is well captured in the Amitabh Bachchan-starrer Don (1978), directed by Chandran Barot. Even in recent times Bengali film director Arindam Sil focuses his lens on this city space in his movie Har Har Byomkesh (2014). Urban critic D.B Krishna Kumari in the essay “Urbanization Policy – An Evaluation from a Gender Perspective” writes: “Pauperization, marginalization and casualization are considered as features of women in the urban areas. Therefore, recognition of women’s needs like practical gender needs and strategic gender

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needs must be given priority in the policy of urbanization.” (Venkateswarlu 2006, 28)

Chapter V 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

“The landscape has a textuality that we are just beginning to understand, for we have only recently been able to see it whole and to ‘read’ it with respect to its broader movements and inscribed events and meanings.” (Soja 1989, 157) Apart from The Homing Bird, Fraser’s other books are Tartan and Turban (2004), A Meeting of Two Minds: The Geddes– Tagore Letters (2005), From the Ganga to the Tay (2009), Ragas and Reels: Visual and Poetic Stories of Migration and Diaspora (2012) and Letters to My Mother and Other Mothers (2015). Against the background of the palpable bond between the poet and the city, Arup Rudra in his book mentioned above has also discussed many poems on the city in the chapter titled “Calcutta Is a Poem”. Stuart Hall in the much-celebrated essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” writes: “The diaspora experience … is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.” (1990, 235, original emphasis) The reading strategy of the present article follows the standpoint of Kevin Lynch in his oft cited book The Image of the City (1960): “We must consider not just the city as a thing in itself, but the city being perceived by its inhabitants.” (1960, 3)

Chapter VI 1.

Many writers have focused on the urban space of Bombay/Mumbai. Amit Chaudhuri in his novel The Immortals (2009) has exploited the city space of Mumbai whereas Dattani focused on the city by describing it as a ‘big fat city’ in drama of the same name in the year 2014; by surrendering to the streets of the city Piyush Jha wrote the crime thriller Mumbaistan (2012). In their editing project titled Bombay, Meri Jaan: Writings on Mumbai (2003) Jerry Pinto and Naresh Fernandes capture forty-six passages

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2. 3.

written about the cultural life of the city. A mention may also be made of Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), Vikram Chandra’s Love and Longing in Bombay (1997), Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004), Gyan Prakash’s Mumbai Fables (2010) and Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis (2011). Martin Amis in his celebrated novel Money: A Suicide Note (2011) has focused on the issue that money is the driving force in urban spaces in general and London and New York in particular. To theorize this topsy-turvy sense of fluidity, Arjun Appadurai in his oft-cited book Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1997) conceptualizes the idea of ‘scape’ to monopolize the radical overflows of continuous exchange, simultaneous attraction and repulsion and kinetic modality towards both the known and unknown territory of identical zones connotating “a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing centreperiphery models.” (Appadurai 1997, 32)

Chapter VII 1. 2. 3.

Malik, Tanvir. 2012. Message to Ankur Konar. 4 September. Email. Malik, Tanvir. 2012. Message to Ankur Konar. 4 September. Email. “In essence, the urbanity of urban life is effaced: cities are written of as spaces where innovation happens, for sure, but the city becomes backdrop rather than active participant in the making of new cultures and economics. Again, to suggest the plays an active role in innovation is not to imply it has a deterministic influence on the trajectory of economy or society, but to argue we need to take the city more seriously if we are to articulate the importance of space in social, economic and political life.” (Hubbard 2006, 3-4)

Chapter VIII 1.

Bryce-Wunder’s essay is mainly focused on “McArthur and Long’s treatment of class and gender ideology, and its effect on the representation of working-class masculinity and feminity in modern Scottish fiction.” (2003, 112)

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3.

4. 5.

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“Cities are usually called as the cradles of civilization. However, since antiquity, the city has also been perceived as a bastion of criminality. Crime is largely the urban phenomenon.” (Venkateswarlu2006, 273) Similar to the idea of Postmodernism and Postcolonialism, the corporeal sense of emotional spillover has been replaced by Mestrovic’s idea ‘postemotional society’: “… one might interpret the ‘post’ in my use of ‘postemotionalism’ as ‘after-emotion’. In this reading, I would be seen as agreeing that spontaneous emotion is dead, and postemotionalism is a concept that falls into a well-reorganized Western tradition emanating from Nietzsche and culminating in Marx.” (1997, 25) He further writes: “Postemotional society has McDonaldized death. Funerals are quick, efficient and rational. The contemporary disposal of the dead body has become part of machine culture as a whole.” (1997, 130) Cited in Hubbard 2006, 18. As far as the historical records are concerned, Britain’s police force was introduced in the city in 1800.

Chapter IX 1.

2. 3. 4.

On the interlacing issues of the fusion of cinema and city there are only a few books. A mention may be made of - Burgess and Gold (eds). Geography, the Media and Popular Culture (London: Croom Helm, 1985), Aitken and Zonn (eds). Place, Power, Situation, and Spectacle: A Geography of Film (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994) and Jameson’s The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (London: British Film Institute, 1992). CD endorsement in the back cover of Kahaani: A Mother of a Story. “Considerations of space, spatiality and geography have more recently come to the fore in critical attempts to grasp the changing shape of the social world.” (Clarke1997, 13) “The flâneurfully embraced the uneasy, fleeting life world of the modern city, enthralled by the pleasures and potentialities of a world removed from the presence, stricture and restraint of tradition, but also from the functional efficacy of modern rationality.” (Clarke 1997, 5)

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5.

6. 7.

8.

The fusion of woman space and cinematic space and its development in the popular medium has in details been analysed in Media, Gender, and Popular Culture in India (2011) edited by Sanjukta Dasgupta et al. One may also refer to the popular Bengali song in 90s “Ami Kolkatar Rosogolla” in the film Rakte Lekha (1992) by Ram Mukherji. “Sujoy Ghosh’s Kolkata … wanted to be a benevolent character in this saga rather than a heinous conspirator in perpetuating terror.” (Nag, Amitava. 2012. “Tracky and Deceitful?” The Sunday Statesman Evolve (8 April), 11. Nag, Amitava. 2012. “Tracky and Deceitful?” The Sunday Statesman Evolve (8 April), 11.

Conclusion 1.

This perspective of ‘deterritorialization’ of national boundaries stands in a stark contrast to T.K. Oomnen’s observation: “The nation is a territorial entity to which the nationals have an emotional attachment and in which they invest a moral meaning; it is a homeland – ancestral or adopted.” (1997, 19)

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