Spectrality and secularism in Bombay fiction: Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games

Observations on the future trajectories of postcolonial literary geography

“…Moreover, it may be observed that the crises of the postcolonial city, such as unplanned and uneven development, squalor and slums, and the juxtaposition of the modern city and the traditional quarters are conditions that are reoccurring in cities around the world. Thus, instead of globalization supplanting the postcolonial epoch, as observed by some critiques (Dabashi, 2012;Dirlik, 2022;During, 2020;Hardt and Negri, 2000), various postcolonial scholars have argued that the postcolonial situation rerouted through the neocolonial apparatus is being amplified globally, particularly in its manifestation through the spatial matrix of the city (Chambers and Huggan, 2015;Herbert, 2012;King, 2016;Varma, 2012).…”

Delhi: New writings on the megacity

“…In a break from the older sociological and planning approaches that have located the city as static or formed by bounded communities, or traversed by hyper-resistant citizen-pedestrians, researchers have increasingly turned to models of the urban that are connected, dynamic and "relative" (Amin and Thrift 2017, 17), drawing variously on concepts of the global and local, World Systems Theory (Wallerstein 2004) and Actor Network Theory (Farias and Bender 2010). Increasingly, as well, the politics of urban life has been gauged against the integration of military or defensive technologies and forms of "splintering" neo-liberal exclusion within cities and across urban populations and in relation to forms of variable citizenship (Ong 1999;Graham 2001;Davis 2006) and "spectral" subjectivity (Herbert 2012). Additionally, the issue of how urban agency depends on, and is imbricated in, improvised responses to infrastructure (Simone 2010;Boehmer and Davies 2015) and incorporates forms of urban "pirate modernity" (Sundaram, 2011) also promises to recalibrate critical understandings of the city as a space of political and social possibility.…”

Documentary Form and Spectral Citizenship in Madhusree Dutta’s 7 Islands and a Metro

“…Attuned to the potential limits of Derrida’s focus on the relationship between the past and the future, Peeren analyses contemporary figures who are imagined as ‘living ghosts’ in the present by virtue of their specific positions of social marginalisation, namely the undocumented migrant, the servant or domestic worker, the medium and missing person (2013, p. 5). As I argue elsewhere, literary and cinematic representations of Bombay/Mumbai have themselves frequently drawn attention to such ‘living ghosts’ or spectral citizens, figuring the city as haunted by spectral subjectivities, from the ‘invisible workforce’ of ‘wraiths’ who build its skyscrapers in Salman Rushdie’s Moor’s Last Sigh (1995, p. 212; see Herbert, 2012), to the ghost of a sex worker who haunts the streets in Reema Kagti’s Talaash (2012). Such texts offer narratives of visibility and invisibility to examine critically the inequalities of urban citizenship in the context of global capitalism and Hindu nationalism (Herbert, 2012).…”

“…As I argue elsewhere, literary and cinematic representations of Bombay/Mumbai have themselves frequently drawn attention to such ‘living ghosts’ or spectral citizens, figuring the city as haunted by spectral subjectivities, from the ‘invisible workforce’ of ‘wraiths’ who build its skyscrapers in Salman Rushdie’s Moor’s Last Sigh (1995, p. 212; see Herbert, 2012), to the ghost of a sex worker who haunts the streets in Reema Kagti’s Talaash (2012). Such texts offer narratives of visibility and invisibility to examine critically the inequalities of urban citizenship in the context of global capitalism and Hindu nationalism (Herbert, 2012). Hindi cinema and ‘Bollywood’ film has likewise been drawn to spectral frameworks (Herbert, 2010).…”