ABSTRACT
Whereas the city promises immense opportunities to people, it also becomes the embodiment of Pandora’s Box, which houses in it a world full of vices. This, however, does not deter people from seeking fortune in city life by traversing the unpromising village frontiers. The journey from the village to the city is also a symbolic journey from the primitive ethnic world to a modern space fraught with stories of loss and gain, nostalgia and escape. It would therefore be an interesting exercise to read into the dialectics between this modern and postmodern intersection negotiated in the creative domain of the fictional world. This chapter attempts to examine Mamang Dai’s novels The Legend of Pensam and Stupid Cupid and offer a critique of the inevitability of modernity and a desire for urban spaces on the one hand, and how modern cityscapes turn into postmodern ghettos of loss and nightmare on the other. While examining these two works from a post-development perspective, the chapter will argue how the desire for a modern space was necessitated within the schema of progress and development since colonial times in India, and how this project was judiciously carried out in postcolonial times.
