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Writing the City: Looking Within, Looking Without

Corresponding to the 1970s call for a “spatial turn” and its subsequent “epoch of space”, the polymorphous interconnectedness between the city and literary imagination often infects and pervades critical discussions, observations, and interventions. There are several edited volumes which explore the representation of the urban, structured, and civilized realities of Global North cities but quite surprisingly refrain from plunging into the cities of South Asia. More specifically, Indian cities are rarely mentioned in these deliberations between literature and spatiality. Under the hegemonic discourse of Western urbanity, until now hardly any edited books have not envisioned a city (even if a literary one) from the objective metropolitan perspective. Quite uniquely in its approach, Stuti Khanna’s Writing the City: Looking Within, Looking Without places smaller cities and towns in juxtaposition with metropolitan and megacities considered together even if “the cities of South Asia are as distinct from each other as they share commonalities” (p. xi). Writing the City: Looking Within, Looking Without is thus an offshoot of postcolonial interrogation: the book’s timely and contextual introduction of South Asian cities through literature adds numerous dimensions to contemporary debates in spatial literary studies. Going beyond urban theoretical complexities, this volume includes writers of fiction as contributors whose deep personal engagements in respective cities heighten the literary construction of city not merely as a mimetic and static zone of action but incubating the diverse and fascinating interactions between imagination, spatiality, and culture as they explore “the symbolic relationship between form and content, specifically the ways in which city-spaces are produced in literature and in turn reshape the contours of literary writing” (p. xi). Therefore, in the process of accounting for the authors’ vibrant spatio-creative journeys, the collection itself becomes a “lived space” of memory, travel, nostalgia, geography, architecture, culture, and most importantly, imagination. This edited book does not resort to compartmentalized sections, but rather prioritizes the authors’ subjective spatial experiences and meticulously weaves a narrative on cities comprising fourteen essays as chapters by both established and emerging contemporary South Asian writers. The book begins with a brief introductory note by the editor that silhouettes the historical trajectory of English literature’s longstanding fascination with the city and its emerging counterpart among contemporary authors. Contrary to the soft utilitarian forms of social science research on a city that often shoves to the fringe the reality of human emotions, these essays are arranged intentionally to synthesize the literary reflections on heterogeneous subjective realities of cities and their effect upon individuals. The volume decodes the way in which the meanings of cities become quite chronotopic in a Bahktinian sense i.e., a very alignment of time-space, and the constructions of authorial mobile experiences become evident when Chandrahas Choudhury in the very first chapter narrates his own experiences in both Delhi and Bombay. He identifies his loyalties towards both cities, which give him the tacit feeling that “city is the presiding deity of my imagination” (p. 2). Zac O’Yeah in the second chapter offers scope to retrospect upon the genre of detective fiction and its storytelling method through which even a city can be breathed, as he does in “Majestic Trilogy” set in Bengaluru. While literary representation evolves around the experiential dimension in spaces, those experiences are never static, but rather happen across a temporality always in flux, as