Mumbai’s religious topography is a primary reference matter of its modern and contemporary metropolitan literature.

This is on the one side true for the type of progressivist literature with its focus on social realism written in the decades before and after independence in different languages, and also the literature written under the paradigm of the so-called “magic realism” initiated by Salman Rushdie in the late 1970s.

The research project will include literature written in English, Marathi, and Hindi. It will also analyze religion and cultural identity politics in Dalit Buddhist literature written in and related to the topographical Mumbai and theoretical questions on the imaginary of Mumbai for example in the work of diaspora literature as in the case of Rohinton Mistry.

Project by Heinz Werner Wessler, Uppsala University