ABSTRACT
In his novel Curfew in the City, Vibhuti Narain Rai creates a vivid semi-fictional account of the travails of poor urban communities in the face of a curfew imposed as a result of a riot in a UP city. As well as the police violence in the novel which is principally directed at the poorer Muslim communities in the town, Rai creates a satirical pastiche of the local town politics behind the scenes of the violence. Local politicians compete for influence, and a range of journalists and subversive political parties offer an anti-state critique. The novel depicts the quotidian interactions between local politicians, bureaucrats and police. But it also shows how such interactions, although ubiquitous, are constantly exposed and critiqued both internally and externally. What is particularly apparent in Rai’s work is the working of a symbolic rhetoric of government servant independence and neutrality, alongside a widespread knowledge of and belief in ‘corrupt’ transactions between political leaders and government servants.1
