The City Speaks: Urban Spaces in Indian Literature

This book studies the significance and representation of the ’city’ in the writings of Indian poets, graphic novelists, and dramatists. It demonstrates how cities give birth to social images, perspectives, and complexities, and explores the ways in which cities and the characters in Indian literature coexist to form a larger literary framework of interpretations. Drawing on the theoretical concepts of Western urban thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre, Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Edward Soja, David Harvey, and Diane Levy, as well as South Asian thinkers such as Ashis Nandy, Arjun Appadurai, Vinay Lal, and Ravi Sundaram, the book projects against a seemingly monolithic and homogenous Western qualification of urban literatures and offers a truly unique and contentious presentation of Indian literature.

Unfolding the urban-literary landscape of India, the volume lays the groundwork for an urban studies approach to Indian literature. It will be of great interest to scholars and students of literature, especially Indian writing in English, urban studies, and South Asian studies.

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.