Reading the Urban Space: Representation of Mumbai and Literary Imagination

Abstract

Being tossed between the periodic names like names like ‘Manabi’, ‘Mambai’, ‘Mambe’, ‘Mumbadevi’ and many more, Bombay officially became Mumbai in 1995. Being far away from the community centric chronotope of Raja Rao, the individualistic setting of Salman Rushdie exploits the urban space of Mumbai in his novel The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995). Mention may also be made of Vikram Chandra’s Love and Longing in Bombay (1997), Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters (2002), Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004), Gyan Prakash’s Mumbai Fables (2010), Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis (2011) and Naresh Fernandes’s City Adrift: A Short Biography of Bombay (2013). In these texts the authors brilliantly show how the city, the socialized space turns itself into a stigmatized stage where the players are playing their parts continually. In my article discussions will be made on the fact that how, in the abovementioned texts, Mumbai is presented in three dimensions - a mirror, a mirage and a magnet which reflects the people’s lives, eludes the dreams of its people and attracts people respectively. Thus the city becomes a character – to be precise, the city becomes the protagonist round which the entire plot builds up.