Delineating Delhi: Spaces of Neoliberal Urbanism in Tarun Tejpal’s The Story Of My Assassins

Abstract

Recent Indo-Anglican literature has also seen a burgeoning of the genre of urban crime fictions set against the backdrop of India’s modernizing metropolises. While explorations of the contemporary Indian city mostly consists of non-fictional, journalistic writings, like Katherine Boo’s Pulitzer winning book Behind the Beautiful Forevers, William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns and Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, the genre also includes fictions like Altaf Tyrewala’s critically acclaimed debut novel No God in Sight, Vikram Chandra’s bestseller Sacred Games, Tarun Tejpal’s The Story of My Assassins, Hrish Sawhney’s volume of short stories Delhi Noir, Atish Tasser’s The Templegoers and others, which deal with the dark underside of the cities. Significantly, as rapid urban growth deepens existing disparities, a distinct rhetoric conflating impoverishment and criminality emerges, further justifying the exclusion of certain sections from the vision of urbanism. This paper looks at the representation of Delhi in Tarun Tejpal’s novel The Story of My Assassins, as a dystopic space riddled with contradictions of.