ABSTRACT
This chapter considers four texts as an autotelic critical zone, a bridge between the national politics of the 1970s and the post-liberalized 2000s in an attempt to briefly signal at Indian urbanism during the two decades (1980s and 1990s) and the resultant city-based literary practice. It posits the 1980s and 1990s as a rite of passage between two distinctive phases of the Indian national existence: the Nehruvian socialist strain and the neoliberal capitalist strain. The 1980s witnessed the very literal fall of the Indira Gandhi-led “old Congress” culminating in her assassination by her own bodyguards, initiating a long and nationwide ethnic feud. The Indian city-lit has responded to this crisis, represented through Manjula Padmanabhan’s Lights Out and Khushwant Singh’s Delhi: A Novel, ranging from the citizen’s negotiation with alienation, solipsism and acculturation to the Indian citizen’s complete disjunction from the essential historical nature of their habitat.
