Delhi: New Literatures of the Megacity

The spatial turn, an intellectual movement of the 1980s, revitalized interest in spatial studies across the disciplines of humanities and social sciences. Constructing places in literature, mostly through imaginative reconstruction and at times by its realistic recording, spatial studies ensured its layered dynamics within complex intersections. As far as cities are concerned, they appear fascinating to creative writers across ages. There are quite a few reasons behind the increscent literary interest in city, especially after the Industrial Revolution to the very contemporary postmodern era. One of the primary contributing factors is that literature never projects cities as mere background but more as a determining part of what constitutes a narrative; plot and character. Cities here become the focal point of everyday experience and culture. Through the narrative alignment of city space multiple identities and meanings are formed as literary characters’ experience of the urban. This is quite suggestive of the proactive presence of cities in literature as if they are “hardly not there” (Donald 1996, 121). Therefore, literary representation of cities is not a homogeneous mimetic construct, but also a process in which literature is often a reflection of the urban experiences and mediates it through the intersubjective associations of the characters’ political, sociological, and cultural networks within particular cities. It is imperative to mention at this point that literary projection of cities of the Global North has already received its due intellectual attention, but for cities of the Global South like Delhi, an important center of sociopolitical and cultural reflection through literature is still pending. The last decade of the twentieth century appeared to be fruitful and highly productive for South Asian literature in English and it often explicitly coincided with the urban centers of the Global South. Technologically hyperlinked global capitals and megacities started gaining prominence within the form and content of literary works, which definitely demands scholarly attention and intervention. In Delhi: New Literatures of the Megacity, editors Alex Tickell and Ruvani Ranasinha have brought together a diverse group of scholars to explore how the urban shift of Delhi the megacity, and national capital of India, has been produced across literary genres. This very timely collection sheds light on the ways in which the city space of Delhi shapes literature and also how literature in turn represents and reconstructs the city space of Delhi. The book begins with an introductory chapter by the editors in which they offer the dynamic contours of “literary consciousness of this radical urban change” (p. 1) from a postcolonial point of view. Rather than concentrating only on the architectural and topographical shift of Delhi as a megacity, this serves as an excellent overview of the trajectories, roots, and evolution of the urban in India’s capital city. This collection uses literary texts from various genres as data and therefore productively approaches the often invisible social, cultural, and political fragments and challenges of this entire urban shift because “literature, in any case, does not merely record times and places; it asks questions and raises issues, takes sides and introduces otherwise unheard voices” (Miles 2019, ix–x). Expanding on this literary reconstructionist framework, Delhi: New Literatures of the Megacity explores the multimodalities of urban and literature alignment particularly in the Indian context.