Cities from Above in Literature: Moscow, Kolkata1

By focusing primarily on Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and Nabarun Bhattacharya's Kangal Malshat, this paper tries to offer an understanding of the multi-layered implications of the “view from above” in fiction. Distinguishing the literary representations as having a separate set of concerns and problems, as opposed to similar views in visual cultures, the paper focuses on three aspects mainly. The first section deals with the moral connotations of flight and its function in fiction; the second deals with the power/knowledge equation and high-altitude perspectives in literature; and the final sections deal with ideas of history and the high-altitude perspective, along with elements of the carnivalesque in such transgressive texts