"A deeply moving, funny, and brilliantly written account from one of India’s most original new voices." —Katherine Boo Like Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun and Alexander Masters’s Stuart, this is a tour de force of narrative reportage. Mohammed Ashraf studied biology, became a butcher, a tailor, and an electrician’s apprentice; now he is a homeless day laborer in the heart of old Delhi. How did he end up this way? In an astonishing debut, Aman Sethi brings him and his indelible group of friends to life through their adventures and misfortunes in the Old Delhi Railway Station, the harrowing wards of a tuberculosis hospital, an illegal bar made of cardboard and plywood, and into Beggars Court and back onto the streets. In a time of global economic strain, this is an unforgettable evocation of persistence in the face of poverty in one of the world’s largest cities. Sethi recounts Ashraf’s surprising life story with wit, candor, and verve, and A Free Man becomes a moving story of the many ways a man can be free.

In this book, leading scholars working on urban South Asia chart new forms of literature about contemporary Delhi. Incorporating original contributions by Delhi-based commentators and covering significant new themes and genres, it updates current critical understanding of how contemporary literature has registered the momentous economic and social forces reshaping India’s major cities. This timely volume responds not only to the contextual challenge of a Delhi transformed by economic liberalisation and commercial growth into a global megacity, but also to the emergent formal and generic changes through which this process has been monitored and critiqued in writing. The collection includes studies of the city as a disabling metropolis, as a space of marginal (electronic) text, as a zone of gendered spatiality and sexual violence, and as a terrain in which ‘urban villagers’ have been displaced by the growing city. It also provides close analyses of emerging genres such as urban comix, digital narratives, literary reportage, and city biography. Delhi: New Literatures of the Megacity will be of interest to students and researchers in disciplines ranging from postcolonial and global literature to cultural studies, civic history, and South Asian and urban studies. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

This collection offers an essential, structured survey of contemporary fictions of South Asia in English, and includes specially commissioned chapters on each of the national traditions of the region. It covers less well known writings from Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh as well as the more firmly established canon of contemporary Indian literature, and features chapters on important new and emergent forms such as the graphic novel, genre fiction and the short story. It also contextualizes some key ‘transformative’ aspects of recent fiction such as border and diaspora identities; new middle-class narratives and popular genres; and literary response to terror and conflict. Edited and designed with researchers and students in mind, the book updates existing criticism and represents a readable guide to a dynamic, rapidly changing area of global literature.

This book examines how urban narratives explore the complexities of city life, including the diversity of its inhabitants, the challenges of urbanization, and the impact of social and economic disparities. They may delve into such topics as crime, poverty, gentrification, and the struggle for identity and belonging in different bustling metropolis settings like Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Benaras, Edinburgh and Glasgow. This monograph provides a lens through which authors and storytellers examine and reflect upon the complexities, challenges, and opportunities of urban life. It seeks to reiterate how the discourse of urban narratives refers to the specific language, themes, and ideas that are commonly found in stories set in urban environments, and encompasses the ways in which urban spaces are portrayed, the issues and conflicts that arise within these settings, and the social, cultural, and political commentary that is often embedded in these narratives.

Can a history of cure be more than a history of how disease comes to an end? In 1950s Madras, an international team of researchers demonstrated that antibiotics were effective in treating tuberculosis. But just half a century later, reports out of Mumbai stoked fears about the spread of totally drug-resistant strains of the disease. Had the curable become incurable? Through an anthropological history of tuberculosis treatment in India, Bharat Jayram Venkat examines what it means to be cured, and what it means for a cure to come undone. At the Limits of Cure tells a story that stretches from the colonial period—a time of sanatoria, travel cures, and gold therapy—into a postcolonial present marked by antibiotic miracles and their failures. Venkat juxtaposes the unraveling of cure across a variety of sites: in idyllic hill stations and crowded prisons, aboard ships and on the battlefield, and through research trials and clinical encounters. If cure is frequently taken as an ending (of illness, treatment, and suffering more generally), Venkat provides a foundation for imagining cure otherwise in a world of fading antibiotic efficacy.

This book analyzes precarious conditions and their manifestations in recent South Asian literature in English. Themes of disability, rural-urban division, caste, terrorism, poverty, gender, necropolitics, and uneven globalization are discussed in this book by established and emerging international scholars. Drawing their arguments from literary works rooted in the neoliberal period, the chapters show how the extractive ideology of neoliberalism invades the cultural, political, economic, and social spheres of postcolonial South Asia. The book explores different forms of “precarity” to investigate the vulnerable and insecure life conditions embodied in the everyday life of South Asia, enabling the reader to see through the rhetoric of “rising Asia”.

India s cities have dramatically changed since the country s liberalization in the 1990s. Alongside open-air markets and crumbling apartment blocks, spacious air-conditioned malls now sell Louis Vuitton luggage and Swarovski crystal, new gated communities offer residents pools and indoor gyms, and towering office buildings house international firms. Landscapes of Accumulation is about this violent, sudden, and spectacular urban transformation. Anthropologist Llerena Searle gives an ethnographic account of how land is becoming an international financial resource rather than a site for agricultural or industrial production. Investors, consultants, and government officials are creating a system of clear land titles, well developed and securitized mortgage markets, and practices for financing, constructing, leasing, and maintaining buildings. But Searle shows that there is also considerable semiotic work involved. Drawing on fieldwork with investors, developers, real estate agents and others, she documents how stories about growththe growth of consumer demand, the Indian workforce, the Indian Gross Domestic Product, incomes, foreign investments, and real estate itselfbecome self-fulfilling prophecies. These imaginative statements, rather than specific state and city mandates, are shaping India s built environment, which has become increasingly difficult to navigate for all but a tiny urban elite. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the consequences of turning land into an international financial engine and, more broadly, the material ramifications of late capitalism s global reach."

Subaltern Geographies explores the intersection between subaltern studies and cultural, urban, historical, and political geography to unravel subaltern perspectives, acknowledging the intricacies involved in conceiving and representing these spaces.

"Analyses the politics of production and labour control characterizing the Indian readymade garment industry since its entry into the global arena"--

A journey through unexplored spaces that foreground new ways of inhabiting the urban One of the fundamental dimensions of urbanization is its radical transformation of nature. Today domestic animals make up more than twice the biomass of people on the planet, and cities are replete with nonhuman life. Yet current accounts of the urban remain resolutely anthropocentric. Lively Cities departs from conventions of urban studies to argue that cities are lived achievements forged by a multitude of entities, drawing attention to a suite of beings—human and nonhuman—that make up the material politics of city making. From macaques and cattle in Delhi to the invasive parakeet colonies in London, Maan Barua examines the rhythms, paths, and agency of nonhumans across the city. He reconceptualizes several key themes in urban thought, including infrastructure, the built environment, design, habitation, and everyday practices of dwelling and provides a critical intervention in animal and urban studies. Generating fresh conversations between posthumanism, postcolonialism, and political economy, Barua reveals how human and nonhuman actors shape, integrate, subsume, and relate to urban space in fascinating ways. Through novel combinations of ethnography and ethology, and focusing on interlocutors that are not the usual suspects animating urban theory, Barua’s work considers nonhuman lifeworlds and the differences they make in understanding urbanicity. Lively Cities is an agenda-setting intervention, ultimately proposing a new grammar of urban life.