Cartographies of Dislocation: Urban Alienation and Embodied Memory in Dilip Chitre’s Bombay Poems.

This paper examines how Dilip Chitre’s urban poetry represents Bombay/Mumbai as a fractured landscape of alienation, memory, and displacement. By analyzing six poems—Father Returning Home, The View from Chinchpokli, Pushing a Cart, Mumbai, Ode to Bombay, and I Built a Warehouse—the study seeks to understand how Chitre constructs “cartographies of dislocation,” poetic maps that underline the tension between industrial modernity and subjective memory. The objective is to demonstrate that Chitre’s Bombay is not a space of belonging but a site of estrangement shaped by urban planning, migrant labor, and contested cultural memory.