ABSTRACT
The relationship between cities and modernity has been very well documented and explored in a wide range of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. The universalist tendencies of both mainstream urban theory and mainstream modernity theory are heavily, and rightly, critiqued, and researchers offer both ways in which Northern cities might learn from those in the South and new frameworks for theorising 'alternative' urban modernities. This chapter suggests that one way to open up urban theory to more diverse perspectives, and thereby deepen the author understanding of urban modernity, would be to pay as close attention to imaginative accounts of the city as to urban policies, the practices and outcomes of planning and design, and ethnographic data. It focuses on a close reading of Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, a 2006 novel that is in many ways a conventional crime thriller, with a conflicted, hard-boiled detective, Sartaj Singh, as one of its protagonists.
