From Nation to World: Bombay/Mumbai Fictions and the Urban Public Sphere

In this essay, attention is focused on the very centre of the neo-liberal metropolitan scene. Seen as a city which is transforming its post-independence Nehruvian character into that of a global late-capitalist conurbation, Mumbai is caught in the transition from secular to post-secular policy, while its customary cosmopolitanism appears threatened on the one hand by the phenomenon of rabid parochialism and on the other by both extreme, and/or rather subtle, forms of social violence. Since in the metropolitan compartments of media, entertainment, news, and fiction, English, as a pan-Indian, globalized language, intersperses the bhashas with unrestrained frequency, playing the leading role in the appropriation of globally inflected cultural models, the outcome is a metropolitan landscape in which Anglophone literature itself is imbricated in an ongoing process of conversation with the other agencies at work in the contemporary urban public sphere.