ABSTRACT
Mumbai in the 1980s as represented in the Indian literature is a city with “provincializing” tendencies. Fast-forward to the present: Mumbai today is a center of finance, real estate, film industries, aspiring to be India’s global city. Much of scholarship on Bombay has emerged in the wake of the perceived dissolution in the 1990s of Bombay’s iconic status as the nation’s cosmopolitan center. The Satanic Verses uses the idea of culture as surface and fragment to mark the shift from the emphasis on modern production as the ground for the consolidation of the state and national identity to the postmodernizing emphasis on consumption and fragmentation in the economy. The impact of a neoliberalizing economy concentrated in the city’s topography. Contemporary forms of global capital and citizenship—articulated in the space of the city—are offering different challenges to the very being in the city.
