ABSTRACT

As opposed to more popular, ctional treatments of life in slums, as in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980), and Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995), Trickster City is a rst-person witness account, a narrative-from-below wherein the residents of these bastis express their experience of everyday life in unauthorized colonies, about the coercive evictions and demolitions, and being forced to move to the peripheries. These events were also catastrophic blows that resulted in a crisis of faith in the city and their place within it. At rst glance, the marginality of these urban outcasts is seemingly all-pervasive and operates at several levels. For instance, the authors do not evoke it as a mere trope but an empirical reality, an affective subject-position that denes their relationship with the

city, and nally, a representational space. However, the central claim of this chapter is that marginality is not a natural or given state, but, rather, a product of specic processes involving the state, as well as the bourgeois public. I argue that these urban outcasts, owing to their marginal or liminal location, on both the spatial and representational fringes of the city, are in fact, privy to an imagination of the city that counters the bourgeois imaginary. Thus, I employ the term “heterotopic imagination” to dene this empowering locale and perspective. In other words, the mantle of marginality is constantly resisted and challenged through recourse to creative expression and self-representation. I contend that Trickster City reformulates our perception of the urban outcasts and that, viewed through their representative lens, the imagination of the city also undergoes substantial change so as to provide an alternative conception of what the experience of urbanity constitutes. Both form, what I term a bricolage, as well as content, which is creative, non-linear, and personal, are tactics which complicate their status as outcasts or to use the postcolonial term, subaltern. Finally, I argue that they present a more nuanced perspective of their lives and of the city, which also demands new strategies of reading from the self-conscious bourgeois reader.