Entangled Margins: The Portrayal of Marginalized Urban Spaces in Contemporary Indian English Fiction

The modern Indian metropolis is a site of profound contradiction, where gleaming symbols of global capital coexist with vast zones of deprivation and informality. While official cartographies and state-led urban narratives often render these marginalized spaces invisible or pathologized, contemporary Indian English fiction has emerged as a crucial counter-discourse. This review paper argues that novelists such as Arundhati Roy, Aravind Adiga, Deepa Anappara, Vikas Swarup, and Jeet Thayil employ marginalized urban spaces—slums, ghettos, wastelands, and forgotten peripheries— not merely as backdrops but as central, agentive landscapes that are inextricably entangled with the city’s core. Drawing upon the spatial theories of Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja, and contextualized by insights from Indian urban studies, this paper analyzes how these literary works function as a form of spatial critique. By foregrounding the “lived space” of the urban poor, these novels challenge the dominant “conceived space” of planners and politicians, revealing the margin as a constitutive element of the urban whole. Ultimately, this fiction acts as a form of literary resistance, mapping spatial injustice and reclaiming the narrative of the city from the bottom up.