Essay: Envisioning Indian Cities in Indian English Literature

Title of the Thesis: Envisioning Indian Cities in Indian English Literature through selected works of Ahmed Ali, Zeenuth Futehally, Anita Desai and Jeet Thayil.
Introduction: The proposed work is an endeavour to present envisioning of Indian Cities in Indian English Literature through selected works of Ahmed Ali, Zeenuth Futehally, Anita Desai and Jeet Thayil. From the myths and legends that fashioned the identity of cities states to the diversity of literary performance in contemporary cities around the world, literature and the characters of involved cities have remained inseparably entwined. The team of scholars offers a comprehensive, accessible survey of the literary city, exploring the myriad cities that authors create and the genres in which allegorical cities appear. Early periods in literature consider the literary legacies of historical and symbolic cities from antiquity to the early modern period, while subsequent periods consider the importance of literature to the relationship between urban landscape and memory. It has been very interesting to know the changes in the city and behavioral changes of the characters in accordance with the time. It also gives insight of how different people react differently to the same situation in the same period.
Twilight in Delhi (1940) by Ahmed Ali gives the picture of the early twentieth century where the decline of the Indo-Muslim culture started. It was taking its last breaths, the culture which ruled over the sub-continents for centuries. In this novel memory is seen both as a source of personal identity and as a burden preventing to attain happiness. Each character is involved in a struggle to remember but more importantly in a struggle to forget certain aspects of their past. He has beautifully lyrical, lovingly etched portrait of a time showing the slow decay of a culture and a way of life.
Zohra (1951) by Zeenuth Futehally is based on Hyderabad, the City of Nawabs. It’s the story of Gandhian era; the story lags the time frame of first half of the twentieth century. Like ripples of water hit by a pebble, the social life of Muslim women in India emanated outwards from the center at a speed dictated by the Islamic ideology of purdah and its attendant concepts of ??izzat (honor) and sharm (dishonor) on one hand, and embracing Western education and its concomitants on the other.
Voices in the City (1965) by Anita Desai is based on the life of the middle class intellectuals of Calcutta. The time chosen for the novel emphasized on Calcutta of the early 1960s. In many ways the story reflects a vivid picture of India’s social transition – a phase in which the older elements are not altogether dead, and the emergent ones not fully evolved. The novel describes the bitter effects of the urban living on an Indian family.
Narcopolis (2012) by Jeet Thayil is based on Bombay now known as Mumbai, a city that never sleeps. Much of it can write itself if connected by the dots of history: a city made of islands reclaimed by the British, a polyglot culture where all of India’s languages, faiths and castes mingle, where the prevailing currency is money and its dreams are told, nay, sung, in those schmaltzy, kitschy Bollywood movies, and which lives on an edge, periodically blown up when terrorists set explosives, but returning to life the next day, resilient and resigned. The hallucinatory dream of a novel captures the Bombay of the 1970s in all its compelling squalor. Stretching across three decades and portraying a city in collision with itself.
A brief review of the work already done in the field:
According to our knowledge no such work has been done in India in this field.
But in this regard some work has been done in Sweden and that too in 2009. Details are furnished below:
Mohareb, Adrian K., Murray, Kate M., Ogbuagu, Chidi U.,Sustainable Cities ‘ Realizing the Seven Forms of Community Capital, 2009
This work is aimed to understand the reasoning that what efforts undertake to lead cities to move towards sustainability. Interviews and surveys were done with cities that are following the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development and some of the other models in moving towards sustainability, in order to understand the motivators and drivers, the barriers and challenges, and the benefits that these cities have encountered and realized through the move to sustainability. The motivators and drivers, barriers and challenges, and benefits were categorized within seven forms of community capital ‘ natural, economic/financial, physical/built, social, cultural, human, and political.
Objectives: The purpose of this thesis is to examine the treatment of cities in Indian English Literature by Indian Authors. The city is treated as a concept of reality in the fictional world of Indian Authors. To study city in literature is to know that how urban location has occupied imaginative space.
Noteworthy contribution in the field of proposed work:
After this we are going to study how the city is presented in the English Literature and what part a city plays in the life of a person. Cities are mirror of people’s personality which in turn in later years change vice versa and people become the mirror of the cities. There is a great influence on people of the place where they belong, to the culture of the city, food habits, clothing, language, life style, social life and family bonding.
Proposed methodology during the tenure of research work:
The proposed methodology for this research work will be particular to the panorama.
The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (7th ed., 2009) will be carefully followed.
Expected outcome of the proposed work:
Proving our hypothesis that how imaginative space is located in urban locations in the novels. How urban location has been treated and how the places become persona, as in the novels of R.K. Narayana.
Chapter Division for the Proposed Research work
Chapter I: INTRODUCTION
Chapter II: CITY AS A TROOP OF DECANDENCE OF INDO’MUSLIM CULTURE BEFORE INDEPENDENCE IN AHMED ALI’S TWILIGHT IN DELHI
Chapter III: DESCRIPTION OF CORROSIVE EFFECTS OF CITY UPON AN INDIAN FAMILY IN ANITA DESAI’S VOICES IN THE CITY
Chapter IV: THE CITY HYDERABAD IS DESCRIBED AS REPLICA OF PARADISE ITSELF IN ZEENUTH FUTEHALLY’S ZOHRA
Chapter V: MORAL DEGRADATION OF THE CITY MUMBAI IN JEET THAYIL’S NARCOPOLIS
Chapter VI: CONCLUSION
in here…