Urban Space as Battleground: Housing, Precarity and Class Warfare in Aravind Adiga's Last Man in Tower and Neel Mukherjee's A State of Freedom
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24113/smji.v14i7.11830Keywords:
Urban Space, Housing Politics, Precarity, Class Warfare, Neoliberal Urbanism, Marxist Literary Criticism, Spatial Theory.Abstract
This article examines the relationship between urban space, housing insecurity, and class conflict in Aravind Adiga's Last Man in Tower (2011) and Neel Mukherjee's A State of Freedom (2017). Both novels portray the contemporary Indian city as a contested site where neoliberal capitalism reshapes social relations, intensifies economic inequality, and transforms housing into a mechanism of exclusion and power. Drawing on theories of urban studies, Marxist literary criticism, and spatial politics, this study argues that housing in these novels functions not merely as shelter but as a symbolic and material arena of class struggle. Through comparative textual analysis, the article explores themes of dispossession, precarity, speculative urban development, and the erosion of collective ethics under neoliberalism. The study concludes that both authors expose the violence embedded within urban modernization while foregrounding the vulnerability of marginalized citizens in contemporary India.
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