Between the Epic and the Ordinary : locating the Politics of Contemporary Indian Urban Writing in English (Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata) (2024)

Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 42.1 | 2019

2020

At odds with the dystopic representation of globalizing Indian cities, Siddharth Chowdhury’s fiction re-invents Delhi as an ordinary city. Based on Homi Bhabha’s understanding of “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” this article argues that Chowdhury’s conversational prose, the small lens through which he looks at the globalizing capital of India, and his comic appropriation of hardboiled fiction and coming-of-age novel codes, construct a transcultural aesthetic of the urban everyday and a singular counterpoint both to the monstrous as well as the triumphalist imagination of the Indian city.

Re-imagining Delhi as an Ordinary City: Siddharth Chowdhury’s Quiet Revolution

Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 2019

The Precarious Rule of Aesthetics: Form, Informality, Infrastructure

Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English, 2022

This chapter begins by showing how, in Delhi as in other cities across the Indian subcontinent, the image and sensibility of ‘world class’ aesthetics now function not merely as a representational strategy but as a generative force, taking precedent over economic imperatives and legal rights in order to reshape the city in material ways. As D. Asher Ghertner writes: ‘For the first time in postcolonial India, slums were deemed illegal because they looked illegal’ (Ghertner, Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2015). The chapter suggests that this emergence of a rule by aesthetics in Delhi and India’s other megacities goes some way to explaining a coterminous trend towards the genre of literary non-fiction, especially in Indian writing in English. It takes three non-fiction case studies from three different Indian cities to evidence this point: Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City (2004) in Bombay; Rana Dasgupta’s Capital (2014) in Delhi and Kushanava Choudhury’s Epic City (2017) in Kolkata. In conclusion, the chapter shows how these non-fiction texts present urban precarity and informality as a concrete and organising infrastructure of the Indian city, one that resists ‘world class’ urbanism’s hegemony of form.

Indian Poetry in English in the New Millennium: A Tour

In its initial stage, Indian Poetry in English was often tagged as derivative. Now it has developed its own idiom—Indian in form and content. The seed that was sown in the poetry of Derozio and Kashiprasad sprouted in the Dutt Family Album. Toru Dutt, Rabindra Nath Tagore, Aurobindo and Sarojini watered the sapling of Indian Poetry in English, which began to yield flowers—varied in form and contents in the poetry of the post-Independence poets like Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Kamala Das, Arun Koltkar, Jayanta Mahapatra, Keki N. Daruwalla and Shiv K. Kumar. Today more than 600 poets are composing poems despite the challenges that they receive from fiction. From 2000 to 2015, more than 750 Indian poetry collections in English have entered the world of literature. This is the victory of Indian Poetry in English. The women poets in the new millennium are not inferior to their male counterparts. Indian Poetry in English, which presents the contemporary Indian landscapes, ethos and identity, is experimental in form and content.

The conjunctural spaces of ‘new India’: imagined geographies of 2010s India in representations by returnee migrants

cultural geographies, 2018

Focusing on returnee Indian authors, this article contributes to analytical perspectives on imagined geographies. We map the imagined geographies of 2010s Delhi and India as experienced and created by Indian returnee migrant authors, drawing on the hybrid nonfiction works India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India by Akash Kapur and Capital: The Eruption of Delhi by Rana Dasgupta. Juxtaposed, these texts sited on the borderline between fiction and nonfiction construct and produce knowledge on an imagined ‘new India’, textualised in literary form. Kapur and Dasgupta, having returned from long sojourns in the West are now India-based, privileged observers of and participants in the very subject of their study – the ground realities of contemporary, 21st century India – both temporally and geographically. As diasporic narrators of a ‘new India’, they stand within their physical landscapes as well as the created landscapes of their narrations. This article draws on the construct...

‘Beginnings: Rajmohan’s Wife and the Novel in India’ in A History of the English Novel in India, ed. Ulka Anjaria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 31-44

Resisting re-orientalism in representation: Aman Sethi writes of Delhi

Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2018

The Indian Novel in the 21st Century

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2018

The Indian novel has been a vibrant and energetic expressive space in the 21st century. While the grand postcolonial gestures characteristic of the late-20th-century Indian novel have been in evidence in new novels by established authors such as Vikram Chandra, Amitav Ghosh, and Salman Rushdie, a slate of new authors has emerged in this period as well, charting a range of new novelistic modes. Some of these authors are Kiran Desai, Aravind Adiga, Githa Hariharan, Samina Ali, Karan Mahajan, and Amitava Kumar. In general, there has been a move away from ambitious literary fiction in the form of the " huge, baggy monster " that led to the publication of several monumental postcolonial novels in the 1980s and 1990s; increasingly the most dynamic and influential Indian writing uses new novelistic forms and literary styles tied to the changing landscape of India's current contemporary social and political problems. The newer generation of authors has also eschewed the aspiration to represent the entirety of life in modern India, and instead aimed to explore much more limited regional and cultural narrative frameworks. If a novel like Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) took its protagonist all over the Indian subcontinent and indexed a large number of important historical controversies in the interest of broad representation, Padma Viswnanathan's The Toss of a Lemon (2008) limits itself to a focus on a single Tamil Brahmin family's orientation to issues of caste and gender, and remains effectively local to Tamil Nadu. There is no central agenda or defining idiom of this emerging literary culture, but three major groupings can be identified that encapsulate the major themes and preoccupations of 21st-century Indian fiction: " New Urban Realism, " " Gender and Secular History, " and " Globalizing India, Reinscribing the Past. "

“Handcuffed to History”: Partition and the Indian Novel in English

A History of the Indian Novel in English, 2015

Emergency Fictions