Articles
Mother India and Paradise Lost: Myth, History, and Fiction in the City of Mumbai
Rossella Ciocca
abstract
This article seeks to articulate a description of the city of Mumbai viewed through a variety of perspectives offered by fiction and essays. Central to India’s imaginary landscape,
Mumbai is seen as a quintessential representation of its contradictory urban modernity, investigated in all its emancipatory anonymity both through the terrible conditions of life in its slums and its cinematic appeal as a city of dreams come true. Caught in the transition from secular to post-secular policy, traditional cosmopolitanism turns into a most parochial form of communalism. Its never-sleeping frantic nights and affluent capitalistic transactions make of Mumbai the outpost of the West and at the same time the gateway of India, connecting the Subcontinent to the Globe. A cartography of its hybrid identity is drawn through the contrasts and ambivalence of its narrative renditions as well as by analysing the onomastic strategy of its administrators and its recent coming to the fore as the target of integralist terror and violence.
biography
Rossella Ciocca is professor of English Literature at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. She has worked on early modern literature and culture, Shakespeare, Modernism, Postmodernism, literary and critical theory, colonial and post-colonial history and literature. Her recent research interests lie in the area of the contemporary Indian novel in English. Her publications include volumes on Shakespeare (Il cerchio d’oro. I re sacri nel teatro shakespeariano, 1987; La musica dei sensi.Amore e pulsione nello Shakespeare comico-romantico, 1999) and a study on the literary representations of otherness from early modern to pre-modernist periods (I volti dell’altro. Saggio sulla diversità, 1990). Recent works include essays on contemporary anglophone writers.
keywords
Mumbai; names; myth; history; fiction; slums
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