Re-imagining Delhi as an Ordinary City: Siddharth Chowdhury’s Quiet Revolution

At odds with the dystopic representation of globalizing Indian cities, Siddharth Chowdhury’s fiction re-invents Delhi as an ordinary city. Based on Homi Bhabha’s understanding of “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” this article argues that Chowdhury’s conversational prose, the small lens through which he looks at the globalizing capital of India, and his comic appropriation of hardboiled fiction and coming-of-age novel codes, construct a transcultural aesthetic of the urban everyday and a singular counterpoint both to the monstrous as well as the triumphalist imagination of the Indian city