Published Paper Details:

The city has long served as a dynamic site of representation in Indian English fiction, embodying both the promise of modernity and the anxieties of displacement, fragmentation, and cultural negotiation. In contemporary narratives, urban spaces emerge not merely as backdrops but as active agents shaping identities, relationships, and socio-political discourses. Writers engage with the complexities of migration, globalization, class disparity, gender politics, and the contested notions of belonging in metropolitan settings such as Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, and Kolkata. The cityscape is portrayed as a hybrid space where tradition encounters modernity, local collides with global, and the material realities of aspiration and alienation coexist. This paper seeks to examine how contemporary Indian English fiction constructs, critiques, and reimagines urban experience, foregrounding the city as a metaphor for the changing contours of Indian society in the 21st century.