Introduction

Anuparna Mukherjee and Arunima Bhattacharya

The city as a mosaic of anarchic diversity and messy contradictions has always been a rich source of inspiration for practitioners of creative arts. Writers, painters, planners, photographers, performers have deemed the city as the loci of their desire, conflict, passion and memory to chart the minutes of quotidian life in various intricate forms and configurations. “The city came into being when a surplus of food allowed a diversity of tasks”, Lehan asserts in his introduction to The City in Literature. “Diversity is a key to urban beginnings and continuities, and diversity is also the snake in the urban garden, challenging systems of order and encouraging disorder and chaos” (8). As an eclectic site of cultural friction and contamination that simultaneously oscillates between polarities of belonging and non-belonging, order and chaos, the city unlocks myriad windows to the chroniclers of urban realities. The cities in their perpetual making and dismantling, bear an impression of what Amit Chaudhuri terms in a recent talk as the “unfinished-ness” in the context of modern cities[1]. The “unfinished” is a slippery term as Chaudhuri explains, while it may suggest the Modernist artists’ proclivity towards dereliction, ruin or fragmentation in metropolitan landscape, it also speaks of the “half-made”[2], the backward, or the liminal spaces within an urban conurbation. However, this “unfinished-ness” or the fact that “cities are not finished products” as Chaudhuri posits, is also indicative of their “radical openness” and their inexhaustible potentials for reinventing themselves.

The relentlessly evolving, mutating and transforming outlines of the urbanscape embodies a complex affiliation to spaces and affects. Spaces as manifestation of different social relations are in constant flux as they collude, interact, entwine, and flow into each other. Their mingling stimulates heterogeneous affects, which in turn attributes a place its specific character by re-signifying the cultural inscriptions embedded in the multifarious “spatial practices” of the communities that inhabit the space. Consequently, the maps of the cities charting multiple incongruous, interlocking spaces and built-in communities within that place, are as diverse as the city itself. Each of these maps offer a unique way of reading the city as a text. This issue brings together a collection of such maps of metropolitan life—its people, objects, ideas plying in space and time—from multiple vantages.

The engagement with the dynamics of space is fundamental to any stream of art. And interest in the city as an aesthetic object, animated radical art forms that experimented with manifold spatial relationships in visual narratives. An exhibition titled “Living Cities” in the Tate Modern Art Gallery, London brought together a constellation of artists in an innovative project to map diverse facets of modern cities in an array of images from the 1960s’ to the present-day around the world. In “Mogamma, A Painting in Four Parts”, for example, the Ethiopian born U.S. artist Julie Mehretu lays down architectural maps of the Government building (also spelt Mugamma) in Cairo to the south of the historic Tahrir Square where violent protests against the Mubarak administration erupted during the Arab Spring, with other sites of resistance in various parts of the globe. By projecting these digital drawing onto each other like a palimpsest on the surface of the canvas, she deliberately blurs the plan with overlapping images, smudges and scribbles in a way that their clarity and individuality are lost overall, though occasionally there are fuzzy glimpses of “recognizable spatial situations”. The images together talk about “spaces of power, about ideas of power”[3] as a “memorial” to the collective sites of people’s resistance against despotic regimes. Thus right from using digital images traced on canvas, the artists collaborating in the “Living Cities” project worked in mixed medium with miscellaneous materials such as paper, rubber, couscous—depending on the location and cultural contexts within which they operate, to weave together material objects into the narrative spaces in their exploration of metropolitan life and city sub-cultures.

In traditional photography as well as more experimental ones, charting a certain aspect of the city-space by serially following a singular object of enquiry has been an accepted practice. For instance, German conceptual artists and photographer duo Brend (1934-2007) and Hilla (1934-2015) Bechers created a series of iconic black and white photographs of industrial structures like gigantic Water Towers, coal bunkers, gas tanks or blast furnaces in post-industrial Germany.

This issues brings together a collection of photographs by Twisha, of “cabins” in small eateries and in shoddy cafes across Calcutta. Cabins are interesting in the way they create a partition between the public and the private in communal spaces like the restaurants, cafes or tea junctions. These cabins were often private havens for young couples looking for seclusion in an otherwise vigilant society where the display of private, especially, amorous emotions in public are often discredited with acts of shaming. These cabins also had a significant place in the Post-Partition Calcutta, responding with a certain sense of immediacy to the problem of space crunch that became a major concern in overpopulate cities of India with the huge influx of refugees from the other side of the border. The cabins often compensated for the lack of much needed privacy in overcrowded homes. Yet the solitude in these cheap cabins were never absolute. They were fluid spaces, where the public often intruded into the private through constant interruptions from hotel bearers and Peeping-Toms, ever curious about the snippet of secret life behind the tawdry floral-printed curtains. These cabins were also important sites of political meetings over cups of tea and cigarette.  However, the images of stark desolation in the slightly derelict cabins in contemporary Kolkata are also indicative of the fact, the cabin culture in these low-end food joints are gradually waning out of existence in the city only to be replaced by more fashionable cafes and joints.

Moving from the images to the essays in the collection, our first article is an invited piece on the South African city of Johannesburg by Rebekah Cumpsty. Her article serves as an excellent introduction to the tone and recurring themes in our issue. It brings together the texts of three contemporary South African writers, Mark Gevisser, Ivan Vladislavić and Lindsay Bremner to foreground inequality in the post-apartheid South African city. The ritualistic aspects of mobility and writing are explored through the figures of the migrant, the flâneur and the driver. The concept of the flâneur, attached to imperial metropoles in the high modernist period undergoes significant reversal when contrasted to the idea of the black migrant worker who is denied the privilege of public transport and walks his/her way in the city. The stories that their feet tell articulate the economic insecurity, spatial dislocation and the general uncertainty of migrants. They become the hybrid, in-between subjects that link the white, residential part of the city with the urban slums of the labourers. This article also introduces our issue’s preoccupation with maps, it juxtaposes the inadequacy of maps, where the actual texture of life gets erased in an alphabetically organized and standardized representation of space, to ritualistic patterns of mobility. The patterns that the migrant workers etch over the surface of the city through gestures and routines unique to each person become a way of knowing the city and a way of constructing narratives of individual identities. The writers who are white and privileged enough to traverse the city by cars adopt this ritualistic pattern in writing the city and finding their roots in its layered sedimentation of memory and place. They create an intimate version of the city in their writing which is unique like the unique maps that each migrant walker of city path’s traces with reference to his/her socio-economic and cultural position.

The literary pieces in the current issue seem to weigh heavy on cities that have significantly undergone colonial experiences. Imperial expansion in the late nineteenth century brought the phenomenon of the modern urban metropolis to the peripheral colonies. Urban modernism was appropriated in the discourse of settler colonialism in distinct and diverse ways. In the context of the colonial, the “urban” and “modern” opened up heterogeneous places of cultural contact which facilitated complex formulations of race and class along the lines of socio-economic, political and aesthetic categories.  In this issue, a set of essays, which let us call for the sake of convenience, “The Calcutta Collective”, present a mottled map of the city’s encounter with multiple shades of colonial modernity and their protracted shadow over the postcolonial period.

The first in this series, Sanchayita Paul Chakraborti’s “Crossing the Threshold” maps the distance between the “home” and the “world” for women in nineteenth-century Calcutta under the aegis of Western education. The essay also talks about their incursions into the maps of others, especially in the way the rise of middle-class colonial subjects in Calcutta—men and women—the Bhadraloks and Bhadramahilas (from the Sanskrit word bhadra, meaning refined or gentle) heightened the marginalization of the urban poor and ousted them from the cultural map of the city. The eminence of the elite Europeanised Bhadraloks, who gradually established their control over the culture industry, supplanted the proletarian forms of entertainment and the folk culture of the street and the marketplace from the cityscape. Drawing on the vast repository  of indigenous traditions, musical compositions such as Kobi gaan,[4] tarjas (the battle of the poets), panchali (verbal recitations) and brata kathas, i.e.“various types of songs, recitation of rhymes during rituals […] which were performed by women with a view of fulfilling their aspirations” (Banerjee 137), or dramaturgical performances such as jatras, pantomimes or sawangs—had strong elements of orality laced with racy humour, quick-witted repartees and often explicit sexual overtones which made them easily accessible to the masses. These performative expressions incurred the ire of the colonial administration. Their contents outraged the prevailing standards of Victorian morality; and especially their language that was fraught with boisterous humour and erotic innuendos appeared too revolting to the tastes of the British and the new breed of Bengali bourgeoisie trained under them. Mass literature of the Battala also suffered a decline as vulgar and low-brow. With the gradual shrinking of their maps, the urban underclass and their forms of entertainment disappeared beyond the pale of visibility with the guilt of polluting the cultural ethos of the city.

The urban Bhadramahilas who were posited as “new women” were simultaneously products of the colonial education and the upsurge of anti-colonial nationalism in India which played a decisive role in conferring a new status to women in the nineteenth century. Tanika Sarkar in “Country, Woman and God”, proclaims that “its state of bondage, its imposed burden of silence and endurance in the face of exploitation”—traits often associated with women, seemed to confirm in popular imagination that the nation is indeed a female space. The arousal of this nation therefore could be “most accurately echoed through the awakening of possibilities in modern Indian women” (Sarkar 34). Tracing the trajectory of the emergence of the “New Woman” from the cloisters of home to the public domain of the city, Sanchayita’s essay makes a journey through the writings of nineteenth-century women, into the manifold negotiations women had to make in trying to create a place in the map that was essentially, if not entirely, dominated by their male counterparts.

The next essay in the “Calcutta Collective”—Arjab Roy’s “Confronting Epochs: The Many Faces of Colonial and Postcolonial Park Street in Kolkata” too partakes in the question of visibility and representation in a different context. Debates on selection and representation are at the heart of any branch of cartography. There often exist innumerable, non-synchronous and discordant maps of a given place. And not all of them get represented in the dominant discourse. The essays in this collection provide a range of readings of these maps of internal migration, displacement or underground subcultures in urban conurbations that are often at odds with the dominant representation. Arjab Roy’s “Confronting Epochs” interrogates such a conflict by delving into the history of Park Street at the heart of the “White Town” in colonial Calcutta. During the colonial period the land surveyors, geographers, town planners, architects and artists opted for a selective representation of the urban cartography. Barring a handful, the cartographic ventures sponsored by different wings of government, clinically erased the empire’s pre-colonial geography and there was little room in these accounts for anything that could not fit into the “grand imperial design”. Consequently, the adjoining “native” localities lining the English neighbourhoods in cities like Calcutta received little attention. They existed as the invisible underbelly of the thriving metropolis. The tradition continued unabated even after independence with places like the Park Street, which was for a long time caught up in a colonial time-wrap. When changes crept in with globalization, and some of the old structures were demolished to fit the new-age entertainment and shopping centers, retail shops and restaurants, it raised serious concerns among conservationists and public intellectuals from the civil society about the protection of Kolkata’s heritage that gave the city its unique character. However, the sweep of nostalgia completely overshadowed the “other” Park Street which remained hidden under the veneer of the iconic “entertainment hub” of city that has always been resistant to drives of decolonization. Arjab’s provocative essay opens the debate, whether this overemphasis on the colonial aesthetics of “white” Park Street for which it was portioned out from the rest of the locality for preservation and development, is occurring at the cost of the lesser known Park Street whose dismal state is seldom talked about in public discourse. 

Sarbani Mohapatra and Tirtha Pratim Deb’s essay, “Mapping the Cityscape” extends the debate on conservation and “Beautification” to another colonial metropolis in India—Bombay (the present-day Mumbai) in Rohinton Mistry novels, in Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance. The essay brings out another aspect of decolonization, colonial nostalgia and its impact on the peripheral population. While like the previous essay, this one too points out how the overpowering nostalgia for the imperial past can become an apology for the colonial rule by underplaying its violence, it also reflects on the question of how certain forms of decolonization can potentially lapse into parochialism and get co-opted in totalitarian revivalist nationalism. The essay addresses the clash between the status-quoist forces of the government and the restive population of an underprivileged locality in Mistry, when the project of urban “Beautification” was thrust upon them during the period of national Emergency by destroying the fabric of their everyday life. As opposed to the maps and policies laid down by the developers, architects, planners technocrats and other agents of administration to re-envision the colonial city space in the postcolonial period, the essay highlights some alternative ways of classifying the city, for instance, by evoking different “smells”, distinct in their singularity, that permeates the urban landscape every day:

The process of identification by odour, simultaneously, becomes a strategy of difference between the habitable and the dangerous, the socially privileged and the socially inferior, and the public and the private, chiefly enforced by the dominant order in a social structure.  In A Fine Balance, Dina discerns strangeness in the odour of urine after both Om and Ishvar have used her bathroom. “Different diets, different habits—it was only natural their urine left a strange odour” (Mistry 83), she muses. (Mohapatra and Deb)

This almost hilarious invocation of the “urine stench” as a way of mapping out differences, also brings to mind how studying the rubbish heaps and accretion of wastes can also become an ingenious way of archiving the city. As Michael Sheringham tells us: “One of the city’s archives is its detritus: hieroglyphic blobs of gum splattering the sidewalks, runic streaks and crevices on pavements or blank facades, encampments of bottle banks, hoppers for supplements and household non-desiderata” (1).

In Haydon Hughes’ piece, “A Flâneur for the 21st Century: DeLillo’s Cosmopolis” we shuttle between maps in the physical world to cartographies of the digital space. Against the backdrop of post-9/11 New York of DeLillo’s novel, Haydon explores the question, what happens when we embed the classic figure of the nineteenth century flâneur in the millennial setting. Thus along with the flâneur, the author looks at the changing configurations of the urbanscape and its spatial dynamics in the digital era that profoundly affected and altered the practice of walking so deeply romanticized by the Moderns. Haydon attempts to locate how the contemporary flâneur, straddling between the virtual and the real, constantly strives to reinvent himself in the digital world and reimagine the contours of the postmodern cities where the traditional flâneur becomes a misfit.

From the flâneur in the digital age, our trajectory shifts to the mapping of the “posthuman” in Megan E. Cannella’s “Unreliable Physical Places and Memories”. Megan’s article builds a complex dynamic between place, memory and characters and superimposes it with subversive connections between the human and the post-human in Ishiguro’s Never Let me Go. Though located in a remote enclave, Hailsham takes on the regulated aspects of city space; its double panoptic construct directs the subject’s interaction with its surrounding space and invests or divests places off political and affective significance.  This space of surveillance is juxtaposed with spaces beyond obvious regulatory measures; but it is interesting that the characters carry residues of control within themselves into their interaction with physical places beyond Hailsham. Memories become a way to claim personhood, but they demand contextualization and make visible the physical structures and places, where they were lived or are imagined in. It brings into play an uncomfortable dynamic between the human emotions that the clones lay claim to and the regulatory architecture and ambience of the psychologically limiting space of Hailsham that has determined their fate within its structures.

The exploration of the flâneur against different backdrops continues in “A Journey through Aesthetics of Utopia within a European Experience” where Heloisa Rojas Gomez combines the experience of the flâneur with other ways of seeing the urban landscape. Her essay presents an affective association of city space and human subjectivity. She combines the bird’s eye view, the flâneur, and the window as analytical frameworks to probe the interaction of the material physical space of the city and the cultural iconography that encodes its history. The article reads Artur Kilnau’s Minsk. The Sun City of Dreams to foreground the topographical and architectural influences of Soviet reconstruction of Minsk in relation to the European ideal of a utopian happiness that the epithet “sun city of dreams” implies. However, it progresses to locate the cracks that open up this abstract happiness to reveal the ordinariness of everyday life. The article makes a case for a nostalgic exploration of remakings of cities that have made place for the contemporary capital of Belarus. These past cities constitute Minsk’s alter-ego, widening the geographical limits of the Belarusian identity to accommodate its cosmopolitan past that lies interred beneath the stately buildings of Minsk.

The flâneur’s position is a contrast to the hierarchy of height that becomes the premise of social critique in Sujaan Mukherjee’s “Cities from Above in Literature”, the last article in our “Calcutta Collective”. Sujaan’s piece creates an intersection of two texts, Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita and Nabarun’s Kangal Malshat (The War Cry of the Vagrants) to explore the cityscape from a bird’s eye point of view. The article weaves a rich texture of textual reference that connects the transgressive act of flying high over the city in the moral philosophical context of Bulgakov’s novel to Nabarun’s use of the same trope as an act of playful disregard and abandon with its own subversive impact. Sujaan’s reading pays close attention to the hierarchy that verticality constructs in the modern day cityscape of towering buildings and critiques it from the vantage of flight and elevation. The Fyatarus perform a class based critique of the architectural hierarchy that inspired standardized historical narratives and socio-cultural bias and includes, the trivial, quotidian and mundane as modes of inspiring a social revolution.

In his book, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move, Reece Jones grapples with the greatest paradox of our times, when he posits that while we live in the age of globalization characterized by free flow of commodities, cultures and capital, much of the world is, nonetheless, progressively trying to restrict “the free movement of people” by regulating their frontiers with strictest vigil and threats of violence when bordered spaces are transgressed. In the last few decades, the acceleration of internal and global migration on an unprecedented scale on the one hand, and an equally strong xenophobia backed up by the trumpets of immigration ban on the other, has placed the “migrant question” at the centre of urban discourse. The ways in which dislocated communities and individuals after being deracinated from their homes, struggle with different forms of alienation, violence  and discrimination in their everyday existence, have fostered a rich body of literature, focusing on the material situations and their emotional experiences— ranging from shock, bereavement to insanity and death, of ethnic minorities, migrant labourers, refugees, and asylum seekers who were often compelled to leave their country of origin under arduous circumstances. With David Clinton Wills in his “opinion piece” based on his field research, the focus specifically shifts to the figure of the “migrant” who is expelled from socio-cultural assimilation in host societies as an infiltrator and threat, yet held within the boundaries of that society as an asylum seeker by international conventions. The article explores the movement and representation of Eritrean and Sudanese migrants in the city of Tel Aviv rendering visible the experience of dislocation in the way the migrant body experiences the city of Tel Aviv. The identity of a migrant and its ensuing socio-political claims is a harshly conflicted terrain defined by categorization and surveillance. “Home” is contrasted to the make-shift camps that the asylum seekers/migrants occupy in a different country. It posits a critique of “home” framing it as a paradox where a safe and stable society is no longer possible and the precarious life of an “infiltrator/ asylum seeker” is a better alternative. Community and possibility is expressed in small rented community spaces within the public space of the city where education, vocational training and language skills are taught and shared to make the transition into the host nation favourable.

***

Recent research around cities have defined and created new ways of understanding the urban phenomenon by concentrating on specific forms of urban categorization. In an effort to locate this issue in an ongoing dialogue about cities and urban geography in general, we have selected a few of the many such contributions to this field of study to find resonances with the kind of response we have received to our call for papers. Kamran Asdar Ali and Martina Reiker’s in their issue titled “Urban Margins” (2008) question the efficacy of city as a category following the changes that have moulded the “city” as it existed in modernist discourse, through its establishment and growth as an   urban phenomenon in different parts of the globe. The economic, social and political structures ensuing from such growth have set in motion “complex processes” through which “gendered, classed and raced citizen-subjects have negotiated and been the object of urban projects in these regions” (4). Ali and Reiker redefine the oppositionality between rural and urban by concentrating on semi-peripheral small cities and provincial towns. The issue seeks to revisit conceptually and theoretically the question of marginality and the “production” of the “urban modern” and the “citizen-subject”. Incidentally, Megan’s article makes an interesting correlation between the “production” of citizen-subject by the modern urban metropolis and Ishiguro’s conception of Hailsham as a similar structure combining surveillance strategies with traditional conventions to produce “inmates”.

Production of the urban modern and the citizen-subject have been the subject of research inquiry for a greater part of the last century and the migrant labourer has figured majorly in such inquiries. However, Gita Hariharan’s article in the Moving World’s issue on Postcolonial Cities South Asia articulates how this figure has reinvented itself. She rewrites the participation of the economic migrant in the Indian capital Delhi as a mutually transformative interaction between the cosmopolitan, technologically advanced, global economic city of Delhi and the patriarchal caste based politics that the migrant labourers weave into the urban social fabric of the Indian capital. Hariharan states, “A kind of khap panchayat (rural kangaroo courts) mentality seems to have spread to Delhi, city of new and old outsiders. Such mentality feeds into the existing power set up, and allows for brutal violence against other castes through their women, routine” (179). In our issue, Rebekah and David put the focus back on the visibility, representation and movement of the migrant’s body. While Hariharan talks of a class based demographic of poor migrant labourers from neighbouring semi-urban and rural constituencies to the capital city, David and Rebekah delve into the multivalent body of the migrant, different in race, religion and class, repelled as an infiltrator and threat and tolerated as an asylum-seeker and used as a source of cheap labour. The comparison draws attention to the wide spectrum of analysis that each category of modern urban demography inspires and the way they evolve in specific spaces, creating very different manifestations of a general category and demanding diversity and intersectionality in our approach to such categorizations.

Several of the articles in our issue also look into the affective aspect of architecture and air becomes an important conduit of resistance. The bird’s eye view which is linked to a panoptic vigilance is also used to explore the moral and emotional texture of texts. Rojas talks of the affective atmosphere of Minsk, the chiaroscuro of light and elongated shadows cast by minarets and the imposing soviet architecture attempting to find the Sun City of Light and the happiness it promises. Sujaan explores flight in its two variations, as an act of power and as an act of subversion. The Russian cityscape that Margarita flies above and the postcolonial, urban Calcutta that Nabarun’s fyatarus hover above are imbued with moral and political tension.

The concept of verticality as is explored in the work of Stephen Graham takes into account the political geography of the vertical city. It reimagines the world we live in as more than a tw0-dimensional map. What Rojas and Sujaan describe as “bird’s eye view” is the way google maps operate and tie-in technology, infrastructure, politics and economics of the current day world in the representation of space. Satellite mapping tools function in the discursive configurations of borders, international trade, law and global economy. It also affects individual’s perception and interaction with space as we travel with Google’s voice alerting us at each bend. We see our real time position on the screens of mobile devices held in our palms vis-a-vis the way economy and information industries choose to structure space around us. The articles in this issue concentrate on the cultural and socio-political nexus of city space and its representation and function in literary narratives. It is the sensual, immediate and subjective perception of space that is foregrounded in these studies where the personal experience and private space is linked into the discourses of power, surveillance and categorizations. Sarbani and Tirtha Pratim’s article explores this interweaving of the personal and the public and Twisha’s photo series question the blurred lines between the two categories of the personal and the public.

Another important distinction that emerges in the way this issue reads space and the human subject borrows from the distinction between the “global city” and the “postcolonial city”. Graham Huggan and Claire Chambers in their “Introduction” to the special issue of Interventions on postcolonial cities draw a distinction between global cities and postcolonial cities. The global city “is perhaps best understood as a relatively recent phenomenon, coextensive with economic developments in late-capitalist modernity and allied to spiraling increases in world population, both of which help account for accelerated rates of urbanization – the unevenly developed transition from rural to urban ways of living – all over the world”(786). Whereas the postcolonial city is defined as, “ connected to a more distant past: it is both informed and transformed by the ‘long’ colonial histories that shape it, as well as by more recent patterns of migration, and the social dynamics tied in with these, which are in turn often linked directly or indirectly to the colonial past” (786). Arjab’s article engages with this distinction in an informed way tracing the colonial influence in the contemporary modernization of Park Street. The long colonial history of this street’s iconic architecture is co-opted into the global economic development scheme towards making Calcutta a “smart city”. To borrow from Huggan and Chambers, the contemporary focused urbanization “finds new ways of reproducing the colonial conditions from which it seeks to disengage” (787).

Finally, the broad thread that connects all the essays across the board, is the act of “seeing”, which as Berger reminds us, is crucial in establishing “our place in the surrounding world” (7). Seeing is both reciprocal and relational. You “see” and you are “seen” and when we see, “we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves” (9). Grounded in the spatial framework, the dialogical, differential and sometimes incommensurable ways of “seeing” the urban reality crisscross each other in this collection, to speak to us from multiple perspectives. The gaze of the colonizer, administrator, clash with the ways in which “precariat”, refugee and the global poor envision the city. From the flâneur—the quintessential watcher of the city, in different spatio-temporal situations, to the women, stepping out of their homes for the first time—they all define the city in their own terms as they see it.

We would like to thank the editors of Sanglap for giving us this amazing opportunity, of weaving these diverse narratives together in an issue on city, space and literature.  It has been an incredible learning experience and we owe a lot of gratitude to the technical editor Arunava Banerjee for his patience and support. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank all those people who have shown interest in this issue. Special thanks goes to the reviewers and their attentive reading and response to the articles. Finally, we would like to thank each one of the contributors. It has been an enriching experience to read and participate in discussions on such a varied range of work across time and space.

Notes:

1. Cf. YouTube Lecture (5.25). “The Here and Elsewhere-with Amit Chaudhuri”. Hellingdon Literary Festival. ↩

2. Chaudhuri takes the term from V.S. Naipaul who primarily uses it in the context of third-world cities. ↩

3. Julie Mehretu: “I don’t think of architectural language as just a metaphor about space, but about spaces of power, about ideas of power”. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/mehretu-mogamma-a-painting-in-four-parts-part-3-t13997  originally quoted in Brian Dillon and Joan Young, Julie Mehretu: Grey Area, exhibition catalogue, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin 2009, p.29. ↩

4. Kobi gaan, sometimes known as Kobir Lorai is a musical contest where usually two groups of poets perform against each other. The leader of each group is called Kobiyal or Sarkar, and is accompanied by his assistants or dohars. Originally, they were performed in village gathering. They became equally popular in the city in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Such contests were held in wealthy households during festivities, and patronized by the landlords who took active interest in the duel.  ↩

Works Cited:

Ali, Kamran, Asdar, & Martina Rieker. “‘Introduction’, Urban Margins”, Social Text  2008 Volume 26,Number 2 95: 1-12 doi: 10.1215/01642472-2007-026, Accessed 26th February, 2017.
Banerjee, Sumanta, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta. Kolkata: Seagull Books, 1989.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2009.
Chambers, Claire, & Graham Huggan. “Reevaluating the Postcolonial City” Interventions 2015 17:6, 783-788, DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2014.998260 Accesed 26th February, 2017.
Graham, Stephen. Vertical: Looking at the city from Above and Below. London: Verso, 2016.
Hariharan, Githa. “Making the City Hers, Postcolonial Cities South Asia” Moving Worlds, ed. Caroline Herbert VOL.13 no.2, 2013 Leeds: School of English, University of Leeds, 2013.
Jones, Reece. Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move. London: Verso, 2016.
Lehan, Richard. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Sarkar, Tanika. “Many Faces of Love: Country, Woman and God in The Home and the World”. Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World: A Critical Companion. Ed. P.K.Dutt. New Delhi Permanent Black, 2003.
Sheringham, Michael. “Archiving”. Restless Cities. Ed. Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart. London: Verso, 2010.

Anuparna Mukherjee

The Australian National University

mukherjeeanuparna@gmail.com

&
Arunima Bhattacharya

University of Leeds, U.K.

arunima.1108@gmail.com