ABSTRACT
This chapter wants to track the citizen's response from the metropolis as well as the suburban belt regarding the political dictatorship of the 70s. Even at the highest political crisis (with national Emergency of 1975 as its zenith), Indian city-lit seems divided in its retort. We encounter the impassioned revolutionary call from Mahasweta Devi's Mother of 1084, the confused middle-class’ inaction in Sunil Gangopadhyay's Pratidwandi, the unbridgeable rift between the urban elite and the belligerent rural in U. R. Ananthamurthy's Bara, and the suburban angst and isolation in South-Facing House and Other Stories by Jagdish Mohanty. While talking about urban existentialism from Calcutta to the villages of Karnataka and Orissa, this chapter concurrently focuses on the volatile sociological condition in the Indian cities, economic deprivation, housing crisis and ultra-leftist guerilla warfare under Indira Gandhi's rule.
