The city resisting the mythic land

Wiley-ISTE , 2019

Alternative Takes to the City presents the mosaic of relations and socio-spatial conditions which compose the plurality of contemporary everyday space(s) in cities, offering "a view from below". It proposes a multidisciplinary and gendered approach to the (relational) spatialities and temporalities of the everyday, of new mobilities and of global and local networks which constitute urban life in contemporary cities. The book raises an empirically informed theoretical proposition which springs from the multiplicity of everyday experiences, as a laboratory for understanding recent socio-spatial, political and ideological transformations. Each chapter takes forward the theoretical argument based on one or more examples of concrete cities, in order to unveil the complexity and diversity of the urban condition in changing conjunctures, in which local practices connect and collide with global developments.

The present essay attempts to trace the vicissitudes in the modes of image making and worship of local goddesses during the last three decades in the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad in the newly formed state of Telangana, India. When one thinks of the 'visual culture' of a city what largely comes to mind is advertising, film banners and enamel paintings on the walls of the roadside shrines. The focus of this essay however, is the idol and images of the goddess, the rituals and paraphernalia around the temple as a visual space. The visibility of the deities provides an inevitable 'Darshan' i to public, not necessarily belonging to one faith. The sacred spaces burgeon in the middle of the roads (Pic.1), at street corners as well as inside the compound walls of private houses. Small shrines enlarge into more wider and spacious Pic. 1 A small roadside shrine. ones by encroaching into public spaces. Is it possible to look at this phenomenon as merely religious and social practice or does it serve in understanding the city and its visuality as a discursive space? The study becomes relevant at this juncture as there was a massive cultural and political struggle that went into the Telangana state's bifurcation from its earlier dominant geographical and cultural existence. Through a framework of intermediality, this essay shall try to map the visuality and its refractions which shape into a socio-cultural and political identity unique to the region.

McGill GLSA Research Series

The year 2009 shall remain a milestone year in the century as the year which witnessed the major shift of diaspora in urban centers of India for the first time in human history. In this context, it is essential to understand the socio-spatial negotiations happening and may happen ahead between the physically growing city and the everyday life, work-live relationship of these invisible communities within the city. Does the growing city with an economic disparity and tremendous polarization of amenities consider their criticality and social aspects which are deeply rooted within these communities, thriving in the vast and continually changing physical fabric?The planning framework of the cities are manifestations of a bigger play of byelaws and demonstration of power often blurs out the existence of inculcating the ‘excluded’ quarters of the city within a holistic whole. As a result, these quarters grow sporadically within the city creating a sense of anarchy. This paper tries to seek...

Samyukta: A Journal of Gender and Culture, 2022

The city is a heterogeneous space. It is home to large numbers of people belonging to diverse classes, religions, gender, and ethnicity. This paper is an exploration of the questions, what makes it possible for all the diverse groups to be able to call the same city their city? How does the city accommodate such a divergent population? Such questions will be explored through an interdisciplinary study of a particular metropolitan character, Rahul Adhikari, a Mumbaiite from Altaf Tyrewala's work No God in Sight. The character Rahul Adhikari is peculiar, as he differentiates the city of Bombay as he calls it, 'My Bombay' and 'Your Bombay'. Tyrewala addresses Rahul Adhikari as 'Siddhartha in denial', giving his character a religious colour. Hence the first part of the study is an analysis of the religious significance of his story. The second part will inspect how far the attitude of Rahul Adhikari can be equated to the 'blasé attitude' of metropolitan citizens which George Simmel claims is characteristic of city life. This will be done by inquiring how the diverse population of the city experiences the city and how they react to the multiplicity of sensory experiences the city exposes them to. Also, since the character under study traverses the city in his car, the effect of mobility on the social relations of the urban citizens will be investigated.

Diálogos: revista del Departamento de Filosofía, Universidad de Puerto Rico., 2020

The current pandemic forced restrictive measures upon the population’s way of life and spatial confinement of citizens in their homes. This summons urban thought to reflect about the present but also, or mostly, the future of the cities. I will grasp this opportunity to draw a few lines of flight that depart from the streets’ silenced rhythm, and to deal with relationality as the city’s own constitutive matter. Cities are usually thought in a dualistic mode (understood as oppositional or even as an ontological dualism), and they actuallygather different elements: physical city, discursivity, human, non-human, subjectivity, sensitivity, body. To take into account this relationality and its current outbreak from invisibility (like a virus), can help transform and diversify theoretical and practical perspectives on the cities, where the majority of human population is currently living.

The film Aamir presents us with a set of problematics about the Indian nation-state and its minority communities, specifically the Muslims. Those of immediate concern here are first, the extent to which the principles of exclusion and othering are foundational to the formation and sustenance of the nationstate;and second, the ways in which these manifest cinematically. While examining these, this paper will examine the ways in which the city is made to function as a signifier in cinema and in this film. It will link this to the ways in which discursive continuities are cinematically established between a country as an exclusive and unequal nation-space and a cityscape.

Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2013

Deep into the second half of the twentieth century the traditionalist definition of India as a country of villages remained dominant in official political rhetoric as well as cultural production. In the past two decades or so, this ruralist paradigm has been effectively superseded by a metropolitan imaginary in which the modern, globalised megacity increasingly functions as representative of India as a whole. Has the village, then, entirely vanished from the cultural imaginary in contemporary India? Addressing economic practices from upper-class consumerism to working-class family support strategies, this paper attempts to trace how 'the village' resurfaces or survives as a cultural reference point in the midst of the urban. "Village women wear such fabulous clothes. Really, I think they know how to dress like nobody else. Villages are beautiful. They are the real India": This praise of rural chic comes from Bina Ramani, up to her self-chosen retirement in 2005 one of India's most prominent fashion designers, lifestyle professionals and glamorous socialites (qtd. in Tarlo 1996, 301; emphasis in original). Of course, Bina Ramani has never actually lived in an Indian village. Nor have her creations ever been rustic. Instead of Gandhian homespun, Ramani offered "ancient fabrics-modern designs," and catered to the tastes and desires of the late-twentieth-century urban high society in India's megacities, an elite with an apparent yearning for precisely that kind of rural flavour that Ramani's fashion seemed to provide. Bina Ramani's success apparently bespeaks an upper-class nostalgia for the village in the heart of the metropolis. Her enthusiastic endorsement of village India as "the real India," however, will come somewhat unexpectedly at least to the European reader familiarised with a wholly different notion of subcontinental culture today. After all, the most prominent and powerful genres that shape the image of contemporary India in the West emphatically construct India as buzzing and chaotic but metropolitan and urban. With few exceptions, 1 high visibility Indian fiction-at least the one that is mostly received in the West, i.e. Indian fiction in English-virtually omits the existence of villages altogether and is instead set in fast-paced, buzzing megacities like Mumbai, Delhi or Kolkata: the mythologisation of Mumbai, in the wake of Rushdie, by writers like Vikram Chandra, Sukethu Mehta, Kiran Nagarkar, Vikas ___________ 1 The most prominent of such exceptions-Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, and the village chapter in Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance-relentlessly demystify village India as a dystopian site of underdevelopment, stifling caste oppression, and destitution.

Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 2019

Indian life is plural, garrulous, rambling, lacking a fixed centre, and the Indian novel must be the same. Delicacy, nuance and irony apparently belong properly to the domain of the English novel and to the rational traditions of the European Enlightenment. (Chaudhuri 2008, 115) 1 In his essay on the theories of the Indian novel after Rushdie, the writer and critic Amit Chaudhuri attempts to debunk this enduring topos of literary criticism, which mimetically connects a supposedly chaotic country with formal aspects of its literature: "Since India is a huge baggy monster, the Indian novels that accommodate it have to be baggy monsters as well" (114). This assumption is based on several misconceptions, among which the notion that the Indian novel in English has to represent India as a whole, and the canonization of Salman Rushdie as an emblem of Indian literature. In fact, Indian writing has often been read in the light of Rushdie's capacious epic novels, thus obscuring other aesthetics, genres, and languages. 2 This is particularly the case with the reception of post-1990s Indian urban writing, frequently narrowed down to the register of the monumental novel, which portrays Indian globalizing megacities as sprawling organisms beyond control. 1 Imbued with a Rushdian sense of profusion and excess, Suketu Mehta's, Rana Dasgupta's and Raj Kamal Jha's works, among others, do represent Indian metropolises as "huge baggy monsters," illegible maelstroms which defy all understanding. They regularly offer an all-encompassing view of the city and imagine its accelerated urban mutations as spectacular crises and cataclysmic eruptions, thus turning it into an exceptional space and a site of heroic struggle. These formal, scalar and thematic features delineate an epic geography of the Indian city, 2 which sometimes verges on the dystopic mode.