Construction and Destruction—Making Delhi World-Class: A Critical Study of Trickster City and A Free Man

Abstract

In post-independence India, the city has served as a critical site for the negotiation of postcolonial citizenship. As Gyan Prakash has noted, literary and cinematic representations of urban spaces have captured both the promise and the failures of this process (199). In this study, I seek to examine the extent to which the postcolonial neoliberal city in India has delivered on its promise of citizenship for the urban poor, and how literature from the region responds to this issue. To explore these questions, I turn to Aman Sethi’s A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi and Trickster City: Writings from the Belly of the Metropolis which features the works of multiple authors. Both texts offer first-hand accounts of individuals in Delhi who have experienced the effects of neoliberal transformation. These works depict a paradoxical situation: as the city strives to become a world-class metropolis, it simultaneously dispossesses its most vulnerable citizens, who are often the ones contributing their labour to its construction and maintenance. To make sense of this dialectic of construction and destruction, I argue that we must examine the complex interplay between the market, the state, and spatial restructuring. Drawing on the concept of ‘precarity’, as developed by Irene Pang, David Harvey, Kalyan Sanyal, Giorgio Agamben, Amita Baviskar, D. Asher Ghertner, Henri Lefebvre, and Edward Soja, I analyse the mechanisms that contribute to the precariousness experienced by the urban poor in India.

Keywords: Postcolonial city, precarity, neoliberalism, metropolis, dispossession