Events

The Centre for Policy Research (CPR) and Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH) invite you to a digital workshop on:

“… without a past, without history, free…”: the commercial, (g)local and the fringed Indian city-lit, 1980-90

Speaker: Dibyakusum Ray, Assistant Professor, Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar, Punjab, India

Tuesday, 20 December 2022, 3:45 PM IST onwards on Zoom.

About the Talk

The talk addresses the Indian city literature of the 1980-90s, and how it recalls and foreshadows the Nehruvian past and the neoliberal future of the urban imaginary. The speaker has chosen these two decades because the economic ‘reformations ’ in India created stark layers within cities, prompting slapdash agglomeration, development and overcrowding. In the talk, he explains how a deeply aware literary canon (one that he terms as ‘city-lit’) can produce a language that aptly represents the data-reliant, grinding, tangible reality of the Indian urban of these decades, and the possible ways of resisting bias, ennui, deprivation and marginalisation. What are the challenges of the fin de siècle city-life of urban India? How do the challenges vary depending on the type and class of the dwelling? What constitutes an Indian ‘city’, and who are its citizens? How does cultural abstraction respond to social tactility?

About the Speaker

Dibyakusum Ray teaches English, Philosophy and Cultural Studies at the Indian Institute of Ropar, Punjab, India. His publications include the book Postcolonial Indian City: Literature Policy, Politics and Evolution (2022, Routledge).

Find all the available videos of our previous workshops, here