Subaltern Ghosts and the Spectral City: Marginalisation and Neoliberalism in Deepa Anappara’s Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line

Ishita Mehta; Smita Jha

doi:10.22452/

Authors

Ishita Mehta IIT Roorkee
Smita Jha IIT Roorkee

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22452/

Keywords:

Spectre, Nationalism, Neoliberalism, South Asian, City Fiction

Abstract

In the contemporary urban South Asian city, diffuse and shadowy operations of exploitative economic, social and political orders are always at work. The postcolonial neoliberal government plans and enacts ways to transform the cityscape, a process that renders the poor classes of the city on the city’s margins. In this article, the hostility and brutality of the developmental city are exposed through a reading of Deepa Anappara’s debut novel, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line (2020), through the lens of the spectral turn. We engage with the different kinds of spectralities that are, firstly, embodied by ghostly figures of the city’s urban precariat and, secondly, materialised through infrastructural inequalities, alienated workers, and environmental degradation within the text. The spectre’s presence-absence is read as a reference to the social justice that is absent in the nation-state, while its non-temporality and non-spatiality speak to the injustices of the past, present and future. Centering these spectres and the slum in the Indian metropolitan city enables an inclusive dialogue in which the majoritarian classes do not speak for the urban poor but, rather, with them.

Author Biographies

Ishita Mehta, IIT Roorkee

Ishita MEHTA is a doctoral candidate in Literature at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee. Her current research interests involve literature on South Asian cities, postcolonial theory, and spatial studies in literature. Her intended doctoral research concerns how select South Asian literature works as an intervention in the discourse of the global city and offers alternative modes of being that resist Western notions of development and progress.
Smita Jha, IIT Roorkee

Prof Smita Jha is currently working as Professor of English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee. She has published more than 100 papers in refereed journals of literature like Routledge, SAGE, and OUP. She has seven books to her credit, while two books are yet to be published. Her areas of specialisation include linguistics, Indian writing in English, critical theory, technical communication, and soft skills.

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