The Ambivalence of Urbanity The City as an Open and Closed Space

Abstract

This essay thinks through the importance of the urban context for understanding post-Partition Punjabi cultural formations, through the example of the writing of Ajeet Cour (b. 1934). Cour’s work engages with the possibilities available—particularly for women—in the urban context, at the same time that it foregrounds the limits and constraints of that context. Analysis centres on two collections of short stories from the early 1990s. One explores the lives of urban women, and the constraints as well as new possibilities they find in the city; the other addresses the violence enacted against the Sikh community in Delhi in 1984, and the ongoing violence in the Indian state of Punjab in the 1980s. Through both of these collections, quite distinctive in their subject matter and focus, Cour exposes the ambivalence of the urban space: it can act as a place for both coexistence and solidarity, and for possible new modes of existence, outside of the constraints of patriarchy and other forms of social hierarchy, and at the same time as a place of violence, brutality, and the re-inscription of hierarchy and difference. Such work allows us to appreciate the need to account for the shape of urbanity—in all its complexity—in Punjabi culture, and to situate Punjabi-language writing in its urban contexts.