Nostalgia for Revolution in Calcutta: Violence and Spectrality in Jhumpa Lahiri’s the Lowland and Neel Mukherjee’s the Lives of Others

Abstract

The city in postcolonial Indian literature is important not only because of its primacy in national image making, but also because many contemporary Indian writers in English are based out of major cities. This paper focusses on Calcutta to explore how nostalgia for events in the city’s past, which have remained unmemorialized in official narratives, is mediated through literature to supplement the city’s sense of identity. By analyzing Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others (2014) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013), this paper examines the possibility of a nostalgic mode that is tied to violence, fragmentation and the spectral rather than the comfortable, narrativized and the familiar, and how that can still lead to a sense of affirmative urban identity. In doing so, this essay explores how literary nostalgia provides an alternative framework to understand the city as more than the sum of its spaces and history.