Desire and disappearance in Delhi

Abstract

This article examines some recent writings in Hindi and English that are set in Delhi, and the ways in which their forms challenge established narrative conventions of fiction and reportage. It suggests that there is a fundamental relationship between their generic instability and formal experimentation and the fact that they are about a postmillennial, global, “rising” city riven with contradictions. They introduce a new city-aesthetic and -idiom into contemporary writing, and confront the interpenetrability of space and narrative form. While they draw their narrative energy from the city of Delhi – particularly its far-flung, unglamorous, marginal(ized) locales that would never make it to the pages of a glossy travel magazine – they represent, in formal terms, the unclassifiable line between fiction, non-fiction, biography and poetry. The article explores the relationship between the spaces elaborated in these texts, their often experimental narrative forms and their delineation of character and action.