ABSTRACT
This chapter pursues an understanding of perceptions of the urban environment at the level of the everyday. It considers the city with all its contradictions, as a distinct space of routines produced and governed by processes of urbanization, where, as Lefebvre stated, desires take birth and normalization takes place. Literary works or cinema can capture the lived realities of the city in India, bare in a flash, an expression, a gesture or impulsive words, the deeply embedded private thoughts and feelings that betray the psychological states created by urban conditions of living. Since India’s self-rule, the urban obsession in fiction and cinema have dealt with the many facets of urbanization, tracing radically different cultural and social practices required in this environment. But also the un- and under-employment, the poverty and the misery in this space, narrating the everyday struggles of common people desirous of integrating into the new world.
