ABSTRACT
The present chapter, through a reading of Hugo Baumgartner’s ‘Bombay story’, proposes to evaluate the tactics of survival undertaken by Baumgartner - the passive protagonist of Anita Desai’s critically acclaimed novel Baumgartner’s Bombay. In doing so, the chapter tries to consider the possibilities (if any) of reading Baumgartner as a flaneur and his tactical engagement with the city and reality at large as an instance of flânerie. The flâneur, a literary and cultural archetype which was first coined by Charles Baudelaire and was later drawn into prominence by the German-Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin, has been the subject of consistent theoretical ruminations, especially in the context of urban studies. The present chapter proposes to proceed by these recent interventions that have traced Baudelaire’s coinage in geo-politico-cultural and aesthetic contexts that are outside the limits of its historical origin, that is nineteenth-century Paris.
