City Speaks

Subashish Bhattacharjee is Assistant Professor of English at Munshi Premchand Mahavidyalaya, University of North Bengal, India. His doctoral research, at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, is on the interstices of continental philosophy and architecture. He has authored/edited several volumes including Queering Visual Cultures (2018), New Women’s Writing (2018), Japanese Horror Culture (2021), and Hororo Cogitaire (forthcoming).Goutam Karmakar, Ph.D. (English), is Assistant Professor of English at Barabazar Bikram Tudu Memorial College, Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, Purulia, West Bengal, India. His forthcoming and recently published edited books are Nation and Narration: Hindi Cinema and the Making and Remaking of National Consciousness (forthcoming), Narratives of Trauma in South Asian Literature (forthcoming) and Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature: Traversing Resistance, Margins and Extremism (2021). He has been published in journals including MELUS, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, South Asian Review, Journal of Gender Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, National Identities, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, and Asiatic among others.

• Foreword: From Spatial Experience to Experienced Space: Representations, Recollections and Reproductions of the Urban Spaces in Indian LiteratureMustafa Zeki ÇirakliIntroduction: Writing Cities: Appropriating the Urban in Indian LiteraturesSubashish Bhattacharjee and Goutam KarmakarPart 1: Fictions of the ‘Cities at the Centre’1. City’s Deity: Exploring the Urban and Sacred Space in Anita Desai’s Voices and the City and Journey to IthacaDeeptangshu Das2. Khushwant Singh’s Delhi: A Multi-Layered Projection of an Anthropomorphised CitySarani Ghosal Mondal3. Diasporic Return to Calcutta in Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter and Days and Nights in CalcuttaRima Bhattacharya4. Stories by the Sea: Memories and Space in Amit Chaudhuri’s Friend of My YouthSayan Aich Bhowmik5. ‘…not exactly fear, but unease, an apprehension’: flânerie and the tactics of survival in Baumgartner’s BombayRupayan Mukherjee6. Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis: The Networked CityAmrutha Kunapalli7. At Home in City (?): Reading the Destabilising New City in Raj Kamal Jha’s She Will Build Him a CityKuheli Singha8. The Radical, the Bourgeois and the Alienated in the City in Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of OthersNilanjan Chakraborty9. Discovering New Cities and Their Underbellies within the Old: Seeing the Periphery of Kolkata through the Lens of Kunal Basu’s KalkattaAvijit Das and Shri Krishan Rai10. Palimpsestic Jungle/Jumble: Visceral Urbanism in Rajat Chaudhuri’s Hotel CalcuttaSubhadeep Paul11. Mumbai Queered: Perils and Pleasures of the Sexual Metropolis in Murder in MahimSomdatta Bhattacharya12. ‘Botanising on the Asphalt’: Towards an alternate cityscape of Delhi and its urbane citizenry in Ravish Kumar’s Ishq Mein Shahar HonaRajarshi RoyPart 2: Fictions from the Fringes13. Rohinton Mistry’s city by the sea: a place to call home?Natacha Lasorak14. Urban Spaces and Fading Culture in Mamang Dai’s Fictions: A Postmodern Reading of City LifeDebajyoti Biswas15. Evolution of Heterotopic Space: Unearthing the Toxic Cityscape in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s PeopleSomasree Sarkar and Neha Kumari16. Cosmopolitanism and Trade Relations: Analysing the port city of Muziris through Sethumadhavan’s The Saga of MuzirisMaya Vinai and Revathy HemachandranPart 3: Staging the City17. ‘Cities Imprison and Kill the Blood’: Exploring the Politics of the Representation of the Country and the City in Rabindranath Tagore’s Red OleandersArnab Chatterjee18. Girish Karnad’s Consideration of ‘Urban Spaces’ for His PlaysJolly Das19. A Tale of Two Cities: Showcasing the Façade of the Indian Metropolis in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Lights Out and HarvestPraggnaparamita Biswas20. City, Space & Spectacle: Parsi Theatre’s Indar SabhaSib Sankar MajumdarPart 4: Poetics of the Cities21. Imagery of Revolt and Withdrawal: The City-Country Interface in the Poetry of Keki N. Daruwalla and Adil JussawallaBaisali Hui22. ‘How can she feel at home in so many places?’: City, home, and diasporic subjectivity in Sujata Bhatt’s poetryJoyjit Ghosh23. When a City Speaks: Tracing the voices and visions of Mumbai in Gopal Lahiri and Sunil Sharma’s Cities: Two PerspectivesGoutam KarmakarPart 5: The City in Itself24. Liberating the Cursed City: Looking through Jiddu Krishnamurti and Sisirkumar GhoseGoutam Ghosal25. Journey from Alienation to Integration: Travel, Urban Space, and Chronotope in Bharati Mukherjee’s Days and Nights in CalcuttaBasundhara Chakraborty26. Psychogeographies: Urban Space and Situationism in Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and FoundUjjwal Kr. Panda