T he relationship between a city and literature is reciprocal. The city nourishes the imagination of writers while writers shape the cultural landscape of the city. The life, places, and spaces of a city provide writers with themes and settings for their fiction and poetry.
In turn, storytellers and poets transform the city’s cultural landscape. A city’s creative energy flows through books, literary discussions and poetry sessions. Every city possesses a unique language that speaks to its residents and visitors – a language distinct from the tongues of its citizens.
This language has no specific name, yet it communicates consistently and profoundly. The city speaks through its mansions, walls, windows, streets, alleys, highways, bazaars, chowks, carnivals, tea houses, cuisines, fashions, art galleries and bookstalls. It conveys meaning through its bustling hubs and desolate corners, through its seasons, its springs and autumns, its trees and flowers, its birds and its silences.
The city shouts. The city whispers. The city has its dreams and nightmares.
It invents grand ideas and becomes the arena for their clashes. The city is a crucible of the world’s greatest paradoxes. The city speaks in monologues.
It wages wars – both real and imagined. It harbours its own heavens and hells, its utopias and heterotopias. All these facets share a common language, a shared grammar and a unified poetics.
While people readily learn the languages spoken within a city, they rarely gr.