City Fictions of the New India: Literature, Infrastructure, Citizenship

The City Fictions of the New India: Literature, Infrastructure, Citizenship project explores formal intersections between literary and urban-infrastructural form in the writing of the so-called New India between 1991 and 2021.

How does contemporary Indian-English fiction imagine radical urban transformation?

Indian cities were once maligned as spaces of poverty and economic stasis, but in the era of the so-called New India (2000-present) megacities like Delhi and Mumbai have been recast as ‘engines of growth’ and reshaped, selectively, through showcase infrastructure initiatives. Indian-English literature has engaged consistently with the implications of these changes for governance, citizenship and equality, but they remain significantly under- researched in literary studies.

‘City Fictions of the New India' asks how recent Indian-English literature presents citizenship and civic agency as bound to and formally enacted through urban infrastructures.

Covering new developments in graphic fiction, genre fiction, literary journalism and tv serials, this interdisciplinary research project will lead to a major monograph publication in 2024.

City Fictions of the New India: Literature, Infrastructure, Citizenship is a Leverhulme Trust Project, led by Principal Investigator and the OU’s Postcolonial and Global Literatures Research Group Director, Alex Tickell.