ABSTRACT
The rst two decades of the twenty-rst century saw a veritable international publishing boom in English-language nonction works about the rise of India, including a substantial sub-genre of works on the global Indian city.1 This chapter considers a sub-species of that sub-genre: literary nonctions that simultaneously narrate the emergence of the Indian city’s global form and a formerly diaspora-based author’s return to that city in the era of what is known, in popular parlance, as the liberalized “New India”: Rana Dasgupta’s Capital: The Eruption of Delhi; Amitava Kumar’s A Matter of Rats: A Short Biography of Patna; Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. Despite key differences, such nonctional works match the grandiose, expansive sweep of historical estimations of India’s rise with intimate accounts of the returned author’s memories, family history, and everyday life. Each also offers a narrative triangulation of the author’s return to India, India’s rise, and the author’s encounters with other, ostensibly more rooted Indians, whose personal itineraries illuminate the nation’s experiments with globality in ways otherwise unavailable to the diaspora-returned.
