Urbanity in the Vernacular_Hans Harder_ASIA 2016 702 435 466 (original) (raw)
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and 2017. Finally, the Seminar of materialist literary criticism (SLAC-ENS) and its football extra-time also helped me sharpen my intellectual and physical abilities. My several stays at the University of Warwick as a cotutelle PhD student have considerably enriched my perspective on world-literature and on literary theory at large, through reading seminars, workshops as well as everyday conversations with students from my cohort. I am grateful to my various roommates in Coventry, who have welcomed me with great (Italian) warmth and kindness. The intellectual and practical guidance provided by Lise Guilhamon and Jules Naudet helped me prepare my research stays in India. I owe particular thanks to Lise for her reading suggestions, including Siddharth Chowdhury's fiction, which has made its way into this thesis. This work owes much to the time I have spent and the people I have met at the Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities in Delhi, and at Jadavpur University in Kolkata. Special thanks to
International Journal of Management, Technology, and Social Sciences
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Viewing Bombay as a tent: A study of the city in texts
Bombay is both a part and a product of the culture industry in India. From the spectacle of the great Indian Bollywood cinema to its international appeal of the poverty-stricken Dharavi slums — it has come to represent the paradoxes that co-exist in the Indian mind. The city carries its migration of rich histories, scattered geographies, pidgin languages, and misfit inhabitants with an aura of pride, prejudice, and purpose. The research highlights through texts — fiction, non-fiction, films, and music, the various thematic strands that are woven in the fabric of the city. It also focuses on specific and recurring cultural artifacts and motifs in Bombay’s fictional representation. Largely addressing the questions of ‘city-ness’, cultural composition, philosophical discourses, and ‘being and becoming’, its transformation from Bombay to Mumbai is also traced. The paper probes questions of belongingness, alienation, marginalization and location — elements that comprise the identities of communities and individuals of the city. It explores the idea of an interlinked collective consciousness of Bombay which is deeply etched with the lived experiences of the people.
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In "Imagining the Urban", Shonaleeka Kaul turns to Sanskrit literature to discover the characteristics - both physical and social - of ancient Indian cities. Kaul examines nearly a thousand years of Sanskrit kavyas to see what India's early historic cities were like as living, lived-in entities, and discovers that they were vibrant and teeming with variety and life. As much about Sanskrit literature as about urban spaces - insofar as that literature reveals significant aspects of the Indian urban past - "Imagining the Urban" shows that Sanskrit literature is a rich source for historical understanding. Advocating the kavyas as an important historical source, Kaul provides a fresh view of the early city and shows distinctive ways of thought and behavior that relate to tradition, morality, and authority. With its provocative new questions about early Indian cities and ancient Indian texts, this book will be an essential read for scholars of urban history, Sanskr...
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South Asian authors of the twenty-first century have gained impetus from the creative works of Rushdie, Mistry, Adiga, Vikram Chandra, and Suketu Mehta, among others. These writers have discovered the palimpsest histories of Indian metropolises like Bombay, Kolkata, Delhi, etc. One of India's most prominent writers, Jeet Thayil, portrays Indian culture in "hard focuses" in his debut novel Narcopolis (2012), which further trivializes Bombay, a global city with its postcolonial quandaries. Thayil claims that opium khanas, brothels, and slums are where you may find the true India instead of the "mangoes and monsoons". The intentional celebration of exoticism in the book and the propagation of colonial stereotypes are linked to the idea of Orientalism, which postulates how the image of the East grew inferior to the West throughout time. Using the idea of Orientalism as a framework, the research looks at how Bombay in the novel, portrayed as the city of "Opium", differs significantly from Bombay in reality, which is renowned as the city of dreams. Additionally, despite highlighting India's urbanity, the research paper draws attention to how Bombay's portrayals in English literature concurrently disparage India's stature.