| The archetypal dialectic of the country and the city grounds some of the critical antithesis of western thought: tradition and modernity, spiritualism and secularism, the home and the world. With colonialism, this dialectic also came to represent the perceived ontological distance between the metropolis and the colonies, with the metropolis as the centre of reason and progress, and the colonial periphery its cultural "other." Nationalists in colonial India, in a debate that still persists, modified the paradigm to argue the future of the Indian state, with the Indian city signifying the promise of modernity, and the Indian village the hope of cultural selfhood. In the peculiar overlap between these sets of binary discourses, this dissertation looks at representations of the postcolonial city in the fiction of three writers from India: Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai and Amitav Ghosh. It studies how these writers represent the postcolonial city---too marginal to be metropolitan, but too cosmopolitan to epitomize a unitary identity---as the space where the contested threshold between modern and traditional narratives has to be negotiated before postcolonial subjects can be at home in the world.; In chapter one, I argue that though Rushdie's novels attempt to diffuse the violent dialectics of 'self' and 'other' by presenting images of the city as hybrid, protean, and palimpsestic, in order to celebrate a mixed, evolving, and layered form of social being, they reveal an anxiety that these metaphors of cosmopolitanism are vulnerable to fundamentalist discourses that perceive them as images of cultural sterility, grotesquerie, and erasure. In chapter two, I argue that Desai's novels trace how the alienations of modern urban life sustain, rather than undermine, the segregations imposed by traditional structures of dharma, family, and community. In chapter three, I argue that Ghosh's comic exaltation of the freedoms of modernity becomes an ironic counterpoint to his exploration of the stringent control of dissent in modern cities. I conclude that by narrating the contiguities between optimistic and ominous versions of modernity, these novels reveal the contradictions in the promise of modernity as it plays out in postcolonial locations. |
