'Wonderful Poison' Hindi and English Post-1970s Era Novels and the Body (Dis)Morphic Dimension of the Urban Space

Abstract

As disillusionment with the Nehruvian era became the mainstay of Hindi literature in the 1970s, with the emergence of ‘experimentalism’ as its major vehicle, cityscapes became the principal concern of middle-class writers. These writers seek to depict how urbanisation and migration accentuate already existing social divisions that trigger an entirely fresh set of predicaments like mental distress, pollution, overpopulation, and poverty. The dystopian visions of the post-1990s era, of economic liberalisation further enhances this initial sense of disenchantment. These dystopian visions came to be sharply represented by especially those authors and protagonists who lacked access to caste and class privileges. A striking feature of such works is that they engaged with urban spaces portrayed the corrosive effects of the city on the human body and consequently the mind. They depicted phenomena like metamorphosis (Ek Cūhe Kī Maut), rotting flesh (Murdāghar), decaying bones and organs (Animal’s People; A State of Freedom), or mental illness (Maĩne Māṇḍū Nahī̃ Dekhā). Seen from the inside, cities like Bhopal, Delhi, or Mumbai become maze-like, oppressive, and hostile spaces where daily wage workers’, sex workers’, clerks’, but also the bodies of middle-class and aspiring writers underwent deterioration, transfiguration, and abjectification, consumed quite literally by disease and by the city itself. This article analyses these texts as pathographies and examines the aesthetic choices made by authors to describe their experiences of maladies, and the unresolvable crisis that their writings foregrounded.