Urban Ambivalence: Work and Home at Delhi’s Margins

This chapter evaluates literary cultures of the urban South Asia to understand how individuals’ and communities’ notions of urbanity, informality, and work have responded to systemic changes occurring in cities of this region. Focusing on Delhi, a city shrouded in construction dust for nearly three decades now, the chapter reads Aman Sethi’s A Free Man (2011) and Mridula Koshy’s Bicycle Dreaming (2016) as two recent—but not rare—literary reflections on the often uncontrollably changing meanings of labor, home, and family in South Asian cities. While Sethi tracks the life and work of a homeless daily wage worker with an unfiltered honesty not usually achieved in such writing, Koshy presents a fragmented bildungsroman on the adolescent daughter of an increasingly impoverished kabadi, an itinerant waste worker. Marked as much by intense, unpredictable mobility as by a crushing lack of it, and operating at the neglected borderlands of bourgeois urbanity, these texts speak cogently of the psychosomatic footprint of Delhi’s ongoing worlding. This chapter hopes to complement discourse on the ambivalence of urbanization in South Asia with the capriciousness of its impact.