The City as Crisis: Urban Decay and Resilience in Postcolonial Fiction

Abstract

This paper examines the postcolonial city as a constitutive site of crisis in select works of postcolonial fiction, arguing that urban decay and subaltern resilience constitute a contrapuntal relationship, each giving shape and meaning to the other within the crisis-ridden postcolonial cityscape. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the social production of space, David Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession, and Homi Bhabha’ s notion of the ‘Third Space’, this study reads the postcolonial metropolis as an archive of inherited colonial spatial violence, ongoing structural inequality, and emergent counter-narratives of survival. Through close readings of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008), Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995), Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games (2006), Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012), and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), the paper traces how postcolonial fiction maps systemic crises class exploitation, institutional failure, communal violence, and forced migration onto urban space and the bodies of marginalised inhabitants. These texts reveal cities not as neutral settings but as active agents of dispossession that simultaneously produce conditions for subaltern resilience. The paper further contends that postcolonial urban fiction functions as a developmental intervention: by rendering visible the lives that official urban discourse erases, literature generates what this study terms a ‘counter-cartography of crisis’, challenging dominant narratives of urban progress and economic growth. In doing so, it opens a space for reimagining the postcolonial city not merely as a site of catastrophe but as a contested terrain of transformative possibility.