ABSTRACT
Psychogeography, a term coined way back in 1955 by the French Marxist theorist Guy Debord to denote the ways different places make us feel, act, react, and behave, became a term of multi-layered significance being subsequently associated with the Situationist International movement. By a timely revival of the idea of flãneur, a figure conceived by Charles Baudelaire in the nineteenth century France and later popularised by Walter Benjamin in the Western academia, Debord tried to show how the idea of dérive or “drift” or a kind of purposeless wandering in a city becomes a powerful vehicle of having a sense of place. Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004), hailed by New York Times as ‘narrative reporting at its finest’, attempts to show how human psyche is often moulded by a place.
