ABSTRACT
The worlding of South Asian cities has brought deep structural transformations in their governance and planning paradigms, and in the cultural bases of what constitutes desirable urban habitats and livelihoods. Contemporary literature in English on these cities tends to reflect these pervasive changes: They manifest most visibly as an abiding tension between form and content, medium and message in writings from across the region. With specific reference to literature on Delhi, this is potently apparent in Trickster City: Writings from the Belly of the Metropolis. Published in 2010, Trickster City is a unique literary artefact. Originally in Hindi, it is a collection of anecdotes, recollections, and musings from and on various bastis in Delhi. The book emerged from the Cybermohalla project, an innovative alternative education programme which de-territorialised information and communications technology by providing open platforms to young people from bastis in Delhi to generate life narratives on their experience of and role in urban life. Operating at the cusp of the formal and informal, the materiality of these narratives in Trickster City as product, as record, and as archive of ways of life and of settlements is what interests this paper. In a context wherein regular demolition erases all tangible trace of marginalised settlements such as bastis, compilations such as Trickster City act as substitutes for the materiality of built form by narrating the unnarratable. Hence, this paper is interested in engaging with the psychosomatic wreckage of the experience of urbanisation in cities like Delhi so as to understand how their articulation acts as a publicly available, tangible record of vulnerable urbanisms in South Asia.
