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.

Keywords:

• Delhi
• Hindi
• form
• Ravish Kumar
• Uday Prakash
• Aman Sethi

Notes

1. The other two books in the series are Girindra Nath Jha’s Ishq mein Maati Sona (Love turns dirt to gold) and Vineet Kumar’s Ishq koi News Nahin (Love is no news).

2. See, in a related context, Emma Bird’s (2017) essay on Bombay poets.

3. All translations from this text are mine.

4. Khap panchayats are patriarchal community organizations made of the union of a few villages, mainly in north India. Of late, they have emerged as quasi-judicial bodies that pronounce harsh punishments, based on regressive customs and traditions, on romantic relationships that, albeit consensual, do not obey caste and community taboos and rules. Anti-Romeo squads are police teams set up recently by the Yogi Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh with the express purpose of “protecting” women from unwanted attention and harassment by men, notorious for their heavy-handed attacks on any unmarried young couples who may be seen together.

5. To quote Ashis Nandy, “Perhaps the cultural logic of an Indian city demands the presence of the village” (2001, 20).

6. I refer to Arjun Appadurai’s (2000) essay on “spectral housing” as the habitation of the urban poor, living as they do in shanty-towns or slums: “housing that exists only by implication and by imputation” (638). See also Caroline Herbert (2012), who draws upon Appadurai’s work.

7. The narrator’s name, Vinayak Dattatreya, is both apt and ironical: as the composite of two Hindu deities, he is all-knowing but at the same time, however, practically as disenfranchised and powerless as the Ramnivas whose tale he relates.

8. The city itself is not given a name in the story; as the generic “shaher” or “city”, it stands for the brutal, nightmarish experience it constitutes for a rural newcomer like the narrator’s father. Some of the landmarks referred to in the story are located in Delhi, although they could also be located in other cities.

9. Though the collection was published in 2001 and the story originally appeared in the 1980s or 1990s, the ending cannot but resonate deeply with several such communally inspired acts of public violence during 2017–18 in the Indian subcontinent.

10. All translations from this text are mine.