Cityscapes of Dissent: Postcolonial Realities and Futuristic Visions in Indian Fiction

Urban imaginaries in Indian literature have become pivotal in deconstructing not only the spatial organisation of cities but also the lived experiences and embodied resistance of those navigating them. This chapter examines how gendered and caste-based urban experiences are articulated in literary representations of Indian cities, drawing upon the spatial theories of Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, Edward Soja, and David Harvey. These theorists underscore the city as a palimpsest — a contested site of social production, symbolic control, and resistant imagination. Through a close reading of selected Indian English literary texts—including Meena Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess and Anjum Hasan’s Lunatic in My Head—this chapter foregrounds how informal settlements, gendered geographies, and public/private dichotomies function as terrains of negotiation. The works reveal how marginalised communities (Dalit, working-class, and female protagonists) inscribe the urban landscape with narratives of trauma, desire, and survival. The “walking subject” of de Certeau (2011) finds its Indian counterpart in the defiant female flâneur, who tactically appropriates urban space despite its patriarchal surveillance. Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) notion of “the right to the city” echoes through these literary voices, asserting space not as an inert backdrop but as a site of ongoing struggle and redefinition. The contested spatialities in Indian cities, especially in Bangalore, Delhi, and small-town Northeast India, reflect a dynamic interplay of neoliberal urbanisation, ecological precarity, and socio-spatial inequality (Harvey, 2008; Massey, 2005). Simultaneously, Soja’s (1996) “thirdspace” emerges in feminist speculative fiction by authors like Samhita Arni, where mythic and futuristic cities become spaces of both rupture and reimagination. This chapter argues that Indian English literature reconfigures the city not merely as a setting but as a character that bears witness to fractured identities and subaltern aspirations. It highlights how gendered, caste-inflected, and ecologically burdened urban sites can no longer be treated as peripheral in urban theory or literary discourse. Rather, they are essential to understanding how cities in India are constantly being re-read, rewritten, and reimagined. References Certeau, M. de, & Rendall, S. F. (2011). Walking in the city. In The Practice of Everyday Life (pp. 91–110). University of California Press. Harvey, D. (2008). The right to the city. New Left Review, 53, 23–40. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Wiley-Blackwell. (Original work published 1974) Massey, D. (2005). For space. SAGE Publications. Soja, E. W. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Blackwell.