Sunday, April 4, 2010

REVIEW: Trickster City

REVIEW
Trickster City: Writings From The Belly Of The Metropolis
Translated from the Hindi by Shveta Sarda
Penguin
Rs499
Pp 326
ISBN: 9780670083329
Hardback

Blurb
Trickster City is an extraordinary composite of writings on Delhi by a group of young people who have, over several years, sustained among themselves and with others around them, a relationship of conversing about the city.

This collection chronicles the loss of home and livelihood through urban eviction; encounters with the agencies of the state; love stories gone awry; the fragility of relationships; and the sustained effort to build life in anticipation of beauty and pleasure. The writers draw from experiences, events and biographies, part fictive, part documentary, to inscribe an image of the city that is rarely available. There is a yearning in their writings for the expression of the poetic and allegorical alongside the harshness of everyday existence.

Trickster is an aphoristic and playful meander in search of a new language that expresses the profound uncertainties and delicately realised joys of urban life.

Reviews
Unknown, overlooked corners of the city DNA
Trickster City, a remarkable collection of sketches, vignettes, short stories, and testimonies, evokes an urban landscape not familiar to most “people like us” urbanites. It deserves to be read widely not only because it introduces us to hidden, unknown, or deliberately overlooked corners of our city, but also because the writers grapple with significant questions about identity, belonging, and community with restraint, compassion, optimism, and humour. In talking of urban redevelopment, city beautification, land reclamation, gentrification and rezoning —whether in Mumbai or Delhi, Cairo or Beijing — we forget (or choose to ignore) the cost in human terms. Trickster City reminds us that the underbelly of a city is also home to people of considerable energy, talent, and passion, determined to find their place in the sun.

The contributors to this anthology are young people in their twenties who live in neighbourhoods across the city that few English-speaking, upper-class Delhi residents have heard about, much less visited — LNJP colony in Central Delhi, Dakshinpuri in South Delhi, and Sawda-Ghevra, a new resettlement colony to the north of the city. The writers have been associated for different durations with the various Cybermohalla labs set up by Ankur Society and Sarai-CSDS (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies). Shveta Sarda, who has worked with Sarai-CSDS since 2001, has translated, with sensitivity and skill, the stories from the Hindi original, Bahurupiya Shehr (Trickster or Shape-Shifting City), published in 2006.

Melodies Of Unheard Voices Businessworld
A paean to the city of hearts by unconventional narrators serenading Delhi’s underbelly
Here is a gift to the city of hearts – Delhi – by the people who really live here, have been repeatedly abandoned by the metropolis, but their affection for the city endures. Trickster City is a collection of short pieces on Delhi in translation that evolved from the writing workshops conducted by the Cybermohalla labs by Ankur Society and Sarai-CSDS. The writers belong to the underbelly of the metropolis. They are teachers, delivery boys, shop assistants, school dropouts, and those pursuing graduation through regular classes or correspondence. The fascinating part about many of them is how they maintain blogs, work on manuscripts and drafts for future books.

The problems of urban resettlement or unsettlement, demolitions, census and police encounters are not new to us. Yet we who have voter identity cards and read English newspapers largely ignore this world. What is new in this collection is our learning of the responses of the the actual people who undergo these hardships and have to do these activities. The collection is full of heart wrenching descriptions of real situations: slaughterhouses, losing a diary, STD booths, train rides and so on. Yet it never delves into melodrama. Shveta Sarda, the translator, has brought to us the real stories of people who live in the underbelly of the city.

The book has eight sections but do look up the translator’s note and the short descriptions on the writers. The translator has retained the poetic expression alongside the harshness of the language.

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