Urban Space across Genre
The Cities of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23623969 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gregory Goulding (0000-0003-2852-8846, University of Pennsylvania, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Pages | 531-545 |
| Publication date | 2023-10-23 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197647912.013.25 |
| OpenAlex | W4387871740 |
| ISBN | 9780197647912 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 9 |
This chapter takes up a major writer of post-Independence Hindi through a focus on his depiction of urban space. The works of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (1917–1964) are set in different small- and medium-sized cities across the urban landscape of central India. In his fiction, poetry, and criticism, Muktibodh combined a detailed examination of urban space with a keen sense of local, national, and international scale. The resulting works reveal the unstable grounds of the mid-century Indian city. Through readings of Muktibodh’s short story “Claude Eatherly” and his poem “Cāṁd kā muṁh ṭeḍhā hai” (“The Moon’s Face Is Crooked”), this chapter considers how Muktibodh’s idea of the city was expressed through experimentation with form. These two works consider a range of responses to urban space, from utopian revolutionaries pasting posters across a surveilled, midnight space, to a paranoid internationalism in which an American pilot is held in the center of a newly planned, wealthy city. Both of these pieces present new formal techniques for depicting the city that incorporate both the subjectivity of Hindi modernism and tropes from popular fiction. Muktibodh’s imagination of the city, the chapter argues, offers a unique set of case studies for considering the discomfiting, alienating experience of everyday life.
Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Hindi · Literature · Poetry · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · Subjectivity · Urban space · History · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South Asian Cinema and Culture · South Asian Studies and Diaspora
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |