ABSTRACT
This chapter is thematically bound by a narrative of resistance against the millennial, corporatized cities, in a bid to reinstate the original, heteroglossic ethos of the “public city.” This attempt of reclamation has several sides, like Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games indulging in a noir narrative through dark alleys of Mumbai, Sarnath Banerjee's The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers’ serpentine Calcutta bylanes full with mysteries, memories, rumours and ghosts, Adiga's chaotic sabotage against the feudal elite in The White Tiger and Nabarun Bhattacharya's anti-Anthropocene, anti-civilizational dystopian Lubdhak [Sirius, my translation] calling for a rejection of the decadent city. In the era of halted urbanization, inflation, corporate encroachment and cruel disparity, the chapter ends with a final note of unending resistance and politicization, much in Henri Lefebvre's vein.
