Abstract
Blake’s lines on London brilliantly encapsulate the dynamic between freedom and unfreedom that is at play in the multiple, distinct spaces of the city; this dynamic forms the subject of this chapter. Even as the poem is a pessimistic document of the increasingly soul- deadening and ‘manacled’ reality of late eighteenth- century London in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, the presence of the verbs ‘wander’ and ‘flow’ simultaneously imparts to the speaker a degree of movement (albeit aimless), fluidity and freedom across the city-space. Further, the use of the word ‘chartered’ only accentuates the contradiction. In an earlier draft of the poem, Blake had used the noun ‘dirty’ in place of ‘chartered’.
I wander through each chartered street Near where the chartered Thames does flow And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe In every cry of every man In every infant’s cry of fear In every voice, in every ban The mind-forged manacles I hear […]1
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Notes
William Blake, ‘London’, The Poems of William Blake, ed. W.H. Stevenson (London: Longman, 1971) 213.
Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London: Virago, 1992) 29–30.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (1961; London: Penguin, 2001) 29–30.
Setha M. Low, ‘The Edge and the Center: Gated Communities and the Discourse of Urban Fear’, The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture, eds, Setha M. Low and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga (London: Blackwell, 2003) 391.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Of Garbage, Modernity, and the Citizen’s Gaze’, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002) 72–4.
Tony Bennett, Culture: A Reformer’s Science (London: Sage Publications, 1998) 108–9
As Unwins puts it,’ scarcely a day passes that I do not visit the Gallery myself, and I have observed a great many things that show that many persons who come, do not come really to see the pictures [...] a man and a woman had got their child, teaching it its first steps; they were making it run from one place to another [...] it seemed to be just the place that was sought for such an amusement’. Qtd. in Bennett, Culture, 110. In another context, Richard Pierce discusses his experience of a Chagall exhibit, a cubist painting called ‘The Garden of Eden’, displayed in the Philadelphia Art Museum. A group of children swarmed around it, and when asked by their teacher what they saw in the painting, they responded ‘Everything’. Then the teacher asked who could find Adam and Eve. In Pierce’s words, ‘the painting changed before my eyes. Suddenly, the figures of Adam and Eve were dominant, their heads on top, the allegorical motifs all in place. [...] The children not only turned the museum into a carnival by their playfulness, noise, and covert rebellion; they insisted on the heteroglossia of Chagall’s paintings. But the teachers and parents had the power to authorize one among the many voices in the painting, silence others, and turn the carnival back into a museum’. Richard Pierce, ‘Voices, Stories, (W)holes: The Politics of Narration’, New Alliances in Joyce Studies: ‘When it’s Aped to Foul a Delfian’, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988) 81.
Bakhtin makes particular mention of the importance of orifices — parts of the body that facilitate interaction between the inside and the outside, thereby destroying the illusion of the self-sufficient purity of the self — in the grotesque, carnivalesque imagination. To quote Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, the ‘carnival body’ is ‘an image of impure corporeal bulk with its orifices (mouth, flared nostrils, anus) yawning wide and its lower regions (belly, legs, feet, buttocks and genitals) given priority over its upper regions (head, “spirit”, reason)’. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986) 9.
Philip Hubbard, Sex and the City: Geographies of Prostitution in the Urban West (Hants: Ashgate, 1999) 62.
Steve Pile, The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 1996) 180.
Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989) 2.
Indra Sinha, The Death of Mr. Love (London: Scribner, 2002) 511–2.
It is worth noting that bourgeois social practices like the ‘adda’, ‘the practice of friends getting together for long, informal, and unrigorous conversations’ that was seen to be an intrinsic part of the fashioning of a modern urban Bengali identity in the early twentieth century, do not figure anywhere in Rushdie’s writing. The closest we get to an ‘adda’ is the brief but animated debate about the violent political upheavals in Assam among Zeeny and her friends, to which Saladin is a detached, uncomfortable party. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Adda: A History of Sociality’, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) 181
The Prime Minister’s Grant Project (PMGP) housing was one of the first concerted governmental attempts to redevelop parts of Dharavi. See Kalpana Sharma, Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia’s Largest Slum (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000) xxi.
Paromita Vohra, ‘The One Billion Rupee Home’, Bombay Meri Jaan: Writings on Mumbai, eds, Jerry Pinto and Naresh Fernandes (New Delhi: Penguin, 2003) 40
Geeta Kapur, ‘subTerrain: Artists Dig the Contemporary’, Body.City: Siting Contemporary Culture in India, eds, Indira Chandrasekhar and Peter C. Seel (Berlin and Delhi: House of World Cultures and Tulika, 2003) 76.
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Khanna, S. (2013). Divided Cities. In: The Contemporary Novel and the City. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137336255_5
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