Half-Baked Cities for Half-Baked Men

The Urban Other in the White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Abstract

The urban space is exploited by the capitalist as a commodity to propagate the interests of capital accumulation. By controlling the means of production of space, capital generates a new urban class; the urban other, that can be displaced and dispossessed when capital paves its path for further development and accumulation. The capitalist driven visions of urban development and the seemingly tenacious resistance translate urban space as violent space whereby through temporal solutions the urban other is silenced and displaced from the centre to the alternative peripheries. This eventually produces allegories of otherness and dispossessions. The current research study focuses on the power relations in Indian urban space that instigates socio-spatial injustices and imbalances. This research aims to inspect the creation of a critical spatial consciousness to claim their right to the city by instigating struggles against their dispossessions from cityspace and come up with new more egalitarian organizations of space through their lived daily experiences. David Harvey’s theory of accumulation by dispossession and Lefebvre’s framework of the right to the city are adopted as the framework of the study in order to define the making and remaking of urban infrastructure and lives of its inhabitants. The selected fiction provides an insight to the urban space of India that dislocates the urban other by depriving them from their right to the city. This research study mainly focuses on the representation of Indian dystopian urban space in the novel The White Tiger (2008) by Aravind Adiga that provides new perspectives on intricate lives of Indian individuals with relation to spatial affinity.