Ulka Anjaria, Brandeis University

What is it about the city that stretches our sense of time? And how have the various attempts to write the city in the last decade in India contributed to a new aesthetics of the contemporary? This paper explores these questions by considering how contemporary fictional and non-fictional accounts of the city differ from the static visions of urban life we saw in earlier postcolonial fiction such as A Fine Balance or The Death of Vishnu. In these texts, the city is the place where India’s cosmopolitan history comes to die. By comparison, today’s city writings see the city as the site of India’s present. Representing the city thus becomes an act of contemporaneity itself. In books such as Maximum City, A Free Man, Sacred Games, Capital and many others, the city becomes a way for authors to capture a sense of time that cannot be reduced to teleological, developmentalist or nationalist accounts. This time is neither modern nor postmodern, but exists right at the edge of aesthetic experience and political reason. In this way, the city indexes a futurity precisely where it eludes the realist impulse to represent it.