City Imaginaries From the Margins

Abstract

This chapter represents a critical inquiry into contemporary literary imaginaries of Bombay in the fictional world of Anosh Irani’s novels - The Cripple and His Talismans , The Song of Kahunsha, and The Parcel. Contributing to global literary urban studies, my chapter proposes an inquiry into literary representations of “citiness” (Simone, “City Life”) and urban lives from within geographies of exclusion. The chapter reflects recent scholarly interests in urban precarity and marginalization, such as Madhurima Chakraborty and Umme Al-wazedi’s Postcolonial Urban Outcasts: City Margins in South Asian Literature , from which it borrows the productive notion of urban outcasts. Constituting a framework of interrelated concepts, my approach is strongly informed by the recent emotional and affective turn in cultural geography (Bondi et al.; Dundon and Hemer; Thrift; Anderson) and seeks to engage literary imaginaries of urban lives at the margins in the light of the relationality of (urban) life, sentient human beingness, and the emotional and affective dimensions of experiencing and responding to urban exclusion. The Song of Kahunsha counterposes to a city that entraps its urban poor, street children, and pavement dwellers, an urban imaginary that entwines the beautiful and the just, transforming an emotional geography of exclusion into one of urban and human belonging. The Parcel, set in Kamathipura, one of Bombay’s large red-light districts, narrates the story of Madhu, an aging third-gender person whose task it is to prepare Kinjal, a Nepali girl trafficked into prostitution, for her fate. Amid a felt urban geography of embodied and emplaced marginalization, Madhu faces her own memories and the dehumanization of all that is human in Kinjal, until she begins to acknowledge a shared sense of human beingness that is worth protecting. In The Cripple and His Talismans, a once wealthy man sets out on a quest into the underbelly of the city and begins to see - through the lens of the arm he no longer has - the lives, suffering, resilience, and conviviality of those inhabiting palimpsest-like outcast spaces. In this, but also across his other novels, Irani suggests a different way of being with each other in the city, one in which a sense of empathy enables a recognition of the shared humanity of co-present human beings. The chapter concludes by calling for comparative urban literary studies that are attentive to the emotional and affective depths of human beingness under conditions of marginalization and urban precarity.