Casa e vicinato a Bombay: la città degli immigranti

Mumbai is a new kind of world place, not only the capital of modernizing India but the very embodiment of its contradictory, neo-liberal advance; a transnational and trans-local contact zone which condenses all the contradictions and the cultural varieties of contemporary global megalopolises. This paper seeks to articulate a description of the city viewed through the lens of its migrant flows, on the one hand, and its narrative renditions, on the other. With the intention to draw a map of its multicultural, problematic identity, the analysis will concentrate upon home and neighbourhood seen as key topics to investigate the connections within and between the different communities. Examples will be drawn from the field of the Anglophone contemporary Bombay novel, namely: Ravan and Eddie (1995) by K. Nagarkar; Sacred Games (2006) by V. Chandra; Last Man in Tower (2011) by A. Adiga.