The Bengali avant-garde filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak’s 1958 movie Ajantrik charts a monstrous continuum of dominated life in which the machinic is humanized – “ajantrik” means non-mechanical/not-machine – and human life made to seem machine-like. Bimal is a poor taxi driver operating in the Bengal–Bihar border whose life revolves around his Chevrolet jalopy, which he fondly names “Jagaddal,” or “immovable, stone-like.” His undue attachment to Jagaddal makes him a butt of ridicule and opprobrium. The local Bengali club declares him inhuman – a “jantar” or “jantra” – for cathecting with a machine; children call him “paagla,” or crazy; townspeople ask tauntingly if the car is his wife. The journeys taken by Bimal and Jagaddal capture the mythic no-time of provincial India, interchangeable and monotonously repetitive, as well as the linear progressive time of a town in the throes of rapid industrialization. At the juncture of both is the disappearing present of the subaltern, the Adivasi,¹ the autochthon Oraon tribal who is nameless and stateless, and who speaks in the film only in choral harmonies and the collective orgies of dance. In a key scene, Bimal watches an Adivasi procession in a drunken stupor. The striped flags and clothing of the tribe find an uncanny echo in stripes on his scarf: it would be exaggeration to speak of this as a fusion and intermingling, but there is no doubt that corollary distinctions of civilized and uncivilized, or culture versus nature, no longer dominate Bimal’s world.

The cyborg, according to Haraway, is “our ontology, it gives us our politics” (150).² Ghatak, through the fusing of metal and man, is showing an inter-implication of the poor, hungry, battered, and outmoded Bimal’s material and social worlds that can happen at a time of industrial modernization; he is also at pains to show Bimal as a possibility of resistance to the postindustrial modern. In his refusal of technological newness, and in his resolute denial of the fungibility of the objects of desire, Bimal refuses the redemptive frame of the Indian growth narrative. He will not swap out the old for the new, although he is not averse to recycling, as shown in the movie’s last frame, where a child plays gleefully with the car horn.

In his short book The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio Agamben, whose elaborations of the question of biopower set in train by Foucault have proved foundational for animal studies as well as posthuman theory, accepts Martin Heidegger’s perplexed but ultimately privative account of the human as the discloser of being. The “bare life” – the most basic form of life – whose exclusion, Agamben argued in Homo Sacer, “founds the city of men” (7), is here seen as the animal. It may indeed be, as Agamben argues, that the name and being of man is always in question, that Homo sapiens does not designate a biological species, but rather an “anthropological machine” for the production of the human.

The metaphysics of the human is a “state of exception,”³ a zone of indeterminacy where the outside is an artificial exclusion of the inside, and the inside, similarly, is an artificial exclusion of an outside (37). Agamben follows Heidegger in defining “man” as the being that must heroically – and, it seems, uniquely – ask itself the question of its own being. “Man” is now not only the creature that is able to grasp its own essence, but the only creature that is able to experience the anguish and boredom of its lack of essence. Agamben revises and supplements Heidegger by defining this human freedom as a function of its proximity to, rather than distance from, animal life.

In his account of the machine-like process whereby the species “man” is produced, Agamben shows how identificatory characteristics emerge once the “animal” is posited as something negative in order for the human to be determined through the negation of that negation. As Adorno had stated in Negative Dialectics, “the equating of the negation of the negation with positivity is the quintessence of identification” (161). The anthropological machine functions, Agamben states, “by excluding as not (yet) human an already human being from itself, that is, by animalizing the human” (37). The Jew, for instance, is posited as the nonhuman within the human.

To render inoperative the “anthropological machine” that governs our conception of “man,” we need not search for new, more effective or more authentic, articulations of this conception, but show instead “the central emptiness, the hiatus that – within man – separates man and animal” (Open 92). Agamben’s positive biopolitics is a call for the human being to appropriate “his own concealedness, his own animality, which neither remains hidden nor is made an object of mastery” (80). Following Walter Benjamin, Agamben proposes a mastery of the relation between human and nature which is neither a mastery of the human over nature nor that of nature over the human.

The objective of such impolitical politics is not to supplant an old anthropology with the new but, as Agamben states, to expose the emptiness – “the hiatus” – between human and animal and “risk ourselves in this emptiness” (92). The literary and cultural works I will now discuss show fidelity to this condition of bare life, where the cogs of the anthropogenic machine are stopped as it tries to master not only nature but the non-man, the isolated nonhuman in the midst of humanity: “the slave, the barbarian, and the foreigner … figures of an animal in human form” (Open 37).

The human/animal distinction in Heidegger’s thought, as it crystallized in the course he taught at the University of Freiberg in the winter semester of 1929–1930, is structured around the difference inherent in “the animal’s relation to its environment and man’s relation with his world,” the animal’s “poverty in the world” and the “world-forming” man (Agamben, Open 49–50). The animal is poor in the world, by which Heidegger means – and it is, as Agamben points out, drawing on contemporary biological and zoological studies here – captivated in its own essence. Heidegger’s example of captivation is a laboratory bee, placed in front of a cup full of honey it has started to suck. If the bee’s abdomen is cut away in the process, it will continue to suck honey even as it streams out of its open abdomen. The bee does not recognize the abnormal presence of too much honey, nor does it register the absence of its abdomen, so captivated is it by the instinctual activity. The animal “fundamentally lacks the possibility of entering into relation either with the being that is itself or with the beings other than itself,” Heidegger concludes (Agamben, Open 54). The ontological status of the animal environment is open (offen), Agamben summarizes, but not openable (offenbar). This openness without disconcealment – an openness that is intimated by anthropocentric knowledge as a lack, a poverty, or a not-having of the world – characterizes also the worldlessness of the visible but unseen, animal-in-human-form population I engage with in the literary examples below.

Figures of an Animal in Human Form

“I’ve worked with street kids, I know where they come from, and I wouldn’t refer to them as dogs even in casual parlance,” said Mira Nair, whose Salaam Bombay (1988), a (fictionalized) narrative of street children shot on location in India, won the audience award and the Caméra d’Or at Cannes, as well as an Oscar nomination.⁴ She is talking here about Danny Boyle’s movie Slumdog Millionaire, which Indian commentators were quick to slam as “an idiot’s guide to India” and “poverty porn,” but which opened to noisy popular and critical acclaim in the West in 2008.⁵ The term “slumdog” does not have a dictionary entry in the Oxford English Dictionary and seems to have gained currency after the film’s release. The literal translation the movie offers, through one of its characters (played by Irrfan Khan) is “kutta,” Hindi for dog: “slumdog,” in the movie, refers to the feral strays who prowl the slums, including children, drug dealers, hustlers, and warlords.

Based on a novel titled Q&A by a former Indian diplomat, Vikas Swarup, Slumdog Millionaire maps the trajectory of Jamal Malik from the slums, to the orderly democratic world of a British call center, to the global playground of the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The film opens with Jamal Malik in police custody, accused of cheating during his appearance on the game show, and on the receiving end of “enhanced” police interrogation, which includes generous administrations of electric shocks. The police inspector wants to know how a lowly tea boy (or chaiwallah) from the slums could possibly know enough to reach the 20-million-rupee final round. Under interrogation, Jamal articulates the fragments of a damaged life, each of which holds an answer to the questions he faces in the hot seat. What is also articulated is a sense of a life – chronology, as well as a wealth of investigative detail. The telling of the story is both retrospective and proleptic in its ordering, with the meaning of the events and images conferred retroactively.

Setting aside the vexed question of artistic merit and specious “feel-good” effects, what one takes away from the novel and the movie is the ingenious plotting, which links what Virginia Woolf called “the lives of the obscure”⁶ to the accidental triumph of a single, dominant figure. It seems, at first, to be a classic Bildung narrative, an Oedipal movement from the semiotic chora of the slums – mazes of corrugated-tin rooftops, the feverish business of a dhobighat (open-air laundromat), the dense traffic of smoggy streets, the sea of humanity that is an Indian railway station – to the reality of metropolitan arrival. “India is at the centre of the world now, bhai, and I am at the centre of the centre,” says Jamal’s brother Salim, as they gaze out from a skyscraper under construction onto the landscape of their former slum. But Salim won’t make it after all. And 18-year-old Jamal is in the game show for love, not money, hoping that his beloved Latika, held hostage by the gangster for whom Salim works, will spot him on screen while watching her favorite show. With the poor impulse control Jamal shows with the 20-million-rupee question, it is imaginable that he will lose the money as serendipitously as he found it. To read Slumdog Millionaire as what the movie itself calls a “rags-to-Raja story,” or as peddling “a dated type of globalism in which the boom times are infinite” (Tyree 35) is short-sighted. Salim, Latika, and Jamal are presented as too brutalized by their hypertrophic past to lend credence to any overcoming of their melancholic mental states other than the miraculous recovery the movie holds out for the romantic pair. As Georgia Christinidis also argues, Boyle’s valorization of personal relationships, while potentially redemptive, “does not represent any action or any kind of community that might challenge the structural inequalities that make it so unlikely for a ‘slumdog’ to succeed” (40).

“Slumdog Millionaire is like Salaam Bombay on speed,” Mira Nair, the director of the 1988 film, said when questioned about obvious parallels between two movies on Indian street children. Salaam Bombay shares with the belated entry the portrayal of the subaltern as type, rather than figure. As Bert Cardullo points out, Nair shoots Salaam Bombay in medium and long shot, avoiding the close-up because she wants to show the protagonist Krishna in the context of his environment. In the course of the movie, Krishna loses his name and becomes a hand (chaipau, or tea delivery boy). The film is filled with high-angle shots and bars that frame faces: bars on windows, cages, or fences. In the last scene, Chaipau escapes being trampled underfoot in a crowd, but there is little hope for him. He stares blankly off to the right, crying, and holding, but not spinning, a tightly furled top. Similarly, the child Jamal is little more than a symptom of cultural pathology, the heartrendingly sweet face of a faceless mass which cannot be imagined otherwise. It is only after he escapes the slums and overthrows his Oedipal brother/father that his individuation can begin.

Like Salaam Bombay, Slumdog Millionaire highlights the great difficulty of the diagnosis of the pathology of cultural communities under the mark of race or class. As discussed earlier, Freud wrote in Civilization and its Discontents (1930) that, in an individual neurosis, the pathology of a patient needs to be demarcated and differentiated in the context of the relative normalcy of the group to which they belong – “For a group all of whose members are affected by one and the same disorder no such background could exist; it would have to be found elsewhere” (144). At first glance, it seems as if Freud, in his bid to valorize processes of sovereignty, individuation, and liberal democracy, is denying the huddled masses an unconscious as well as a collective unconscious, crammed with inherited archetypes and instincts. Rereading the passage could reveal a tone more wary than condescending. Freud is cautioning against two outcomes here: treating communal neuroses out of context, and misapplying a methodology honed for individual therapy to address a collective. As he states, “we may expect that one day someone will venture to embark upon a pathology of cultural communities” (144), but that time was yet to come.

The preferred trajectory of classical psychoanalysis is from group to self, a sovereign subject predicated on the exclusion of the group. In Dark Continents, her formidable study of the colonial genesis and elaborations of psychoanalysis, Ranjana Khanna describes the ethnographic interpretation of the birth of the modern individual. Reading Freud’s Totem and Taboo, his (failed) attempt at reconciling individual psychology with social psychology, Khanna describes Freud’s method as “the evolutionary progressivist one,” rather than that of “the collective unconscious” (77).

Psychoanalysis is both the “symptom and the mechanism” of this creation of the modern subject where the different stages of development are analogues of successive moments in civilization (68). Khanna calls it the “calm violence” of “interpellation,” through which is formed a “social contract that individualizes and individuates members of a group at the same time as it confers upon them group ‘culture’ or ‘civilization’” (68). This is again evident in the way the slumdog leaves the entropic (and also richly relational, and transpersonal) group to become a social and psychological creature: the slums become a no-place, atopic, and constitute the hauntology of the historical being, who is now, via the call center, at the “centre of the centre.”

In a blog on the “social imaginary” of the sci-fi action movie District 9, Ato Quayson draws attention to the portrayal of Nigerians even in this genre, its aberrant relation to reality taken for granted. The alien Prawns and the Nigerians, hungry slum dwellers both, are invaders and outcasts as far as the civil society and political order of Johannesburg (where the story is set) are concerned. For the discerning viewer, however, there are marked distinctions between the portrayal of the Prawns and of the Nigerians: the former, de-raced, group is relatively more human, possesses scientific rationality, and will eventually overcome adversities to return to their home planet; the latter is mercenary, cannibalistic, a stereotyped portrait of the aimlessness and autophagy of some postcolonial societies. Once again, “black life is depicted as somehow the bearer of an inherent moral deficit,” Quayson observes.⁷ In Slumdog Millionaire, a movie in which the slum and its dogs have become fused into a single, machinic entity by urban infrastructure, the dehumanization of these extraterrestrials is further troped through a callous stereotyping of slum habitats.

The location of the slum in Slumdog Millionaire is Dharavi, if the Vikas Swarup novel is to be believed, although, in the film’s greedy epistemology, different slum sensoriums are rolled into a single ontology. The Dharavi of Slumdog Millionaire, from time to time, resembles the non-registered squatter slums near the airport: the police chase the slum dwellers admonishing it is no “private ka land” (it is government-owned land, in other words). The slum scenes with which the movie begins trot out the usual phobic configurations: claustrophobic density, shit, standing water, communal riots, garbage hills, bulldozers, prostitutes and pimps, drug dealers, beggar mafia who blind kidnapped children with a spoonful of acid to improve their street cred. Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava, two of the co-founders of Urbz, an information-sharing platform based in Dharavi,⁸ call out this absurd, phantasmagoric rendition:

Echanove and Srivastava see Dharavi as a “user-generated” city, its eighty neighborhoods developed organically and incrementally by generations of residents according to the needs of housing and business. They mention their participation in demonstrations in Dharavi which angrily declaimed the film’s title: “The Indian media widely reported that the outrage was over the word ‘dog.’ But what we heard from Manju Keny, a college student living in Dharavi, was something else. She was upset at the word ‘slum.’ We could not agree more.”

Uncanny, Nonhuman, Un-space

It will not come as a surprise that the word “slum” originates in Victorian canting speech. The convict writer J. H. Vaux in his 1819 New Vocabulary of Flash Language first used the term to mean “a room” (OED). By the 1820s, however, the word had three distinct meanings: not just a room, but one in which low goings-on took place; a street, alley, or court, inhabited by people of a low class or by the very poor; loose talk and gypsy language – slang as slum. Charles Dickens was fascinated with London’s most notorious slum – that of St. Giles, the site of Hogarth’s memorable etching “Gin Lane.” The autobiographical fragment published by Dickens’s friend John Forster testifies to this childhood fixation: “what wild prodigies of wickedness, want, and beggary, arose in my mind out of that place!” (Schlicke 360). Oliver Twist is inveigled by the Artful Dodger from Islington to Fagin’s den in Field Lane. It is a labyrinthine descent symbolizing Oliver’s fall from grace: “a dirtier or more wretched place he had never seen” (Oliver Twist 102). Our Mutual Friend describes the noxious rookeries of Millbank. In one of the crumbling Georgian houses around “blind” Smith Square lives the Doll’s dressmaker and her drunken father. The place, Dickens writes, “had a deadly kind of repose on it, more as though it had taken laudanum than fallen onto a natural rest” (Our Mutual Friend 221–222). The fictional slum in Dickens’s Bleak House, Tom-all-alone’s, is unlocated, though, as Paul Schlicke observes, “it must be close enough to Chancery Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields to allow for easy crossings between areas of prosperity to areas of dire deprivation in the novel” (361). Dickens’s nightmarish slum is not peripheral but central to the nightmarish metropolis: a dark space of “tumbling tenement,” these streets have

As the urban geographer Mike Davis claims dramatically in his popular Planet of Slums, for nineteenth-century liberals “the moral dimension was decisive, and the slum was first and above all envisioned as a place where an incorrigible and feral social residuum rots in immoral and often riotous splendour” (22).

From Victorian London to contemporary global cities, the slum poor are routinely shunned and shamed, treated as idle, vicious, and of low worth. The Chicago School’s urban theory of human ecology, which has dominated the geographic study of poverty for much of the last century, treats slums as the spatial disruption that undermines the city’s intelligibility, autonomy, and inviolability; meanwhile, a Marxist geographer like Mike Davis sees in the urban poor incidences of “informal survivalism” – paradigms of self-employment in the informal and unregulated sector of the urban economy – and violent resistance (178). Yet this moral segregation of the slum from the rest of the city is not historically justifiable. The emergence of a slum like Dharavi in Bombay, for instance, is inseparable from its emergence as a colonial city from seven islands and fishing hamlets. As readers of Salman Rushdie’s sensational history in Midnight’s Children or The Moor’s Last Sigh know, Bombay passed to the British Crown in 1661, as part of the dowry of the Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza, who married Charles II. It was transferred to the East India Company in 1668 but the most accelerated growth happened after 1858, when Bombay reverted to the British Crown and became a port city of consequence. The land between the islands began to be filled up by natural and artificial reclamation to form a long and tapering island city. The best infrastructural resources were reserved for areas where the British lived – the southern part of the island – while the native town extending north and east remained unplanned and poorly serviced. Dharavi was one of the six great koliwadas, or fishing communities, of Bombay. With the reclamation of swamps and salt-pan lands, the creek dried up, the fisher-folk left, and the marshes became home to wave after wave of migrant workers: from other parts of Maharashtra and Konkan, Gujarat, as well as Muslim tanners from Tamil Nadu, and embroidery workers from Uttar Pradesh. Entire communities of “illegals” were pushed out of South Bombay to the edge of the city. As Bombay expanded due to the influx of new industries and spilled over into the hinterland in the nineteenth century, Dharavi became more central to the city: “Ironically,” Kalpana Sharma observes, “this heart-shaped settlement is now located literally in the heart of Mumbai” (19). Needless to say, the uneven development of this colonial port town continued after independence, which did little “to alter the exclusionary geography of the Raj” (Davis 97). Now the value of the land in Dharavi is estimated to be $3.5 billion, and land grab for this property – masked as environmental or social concerns – gains momentum every day. Financial powers, backed by the state, push for forcible slum clearance. As David Harvey observes in Rebel Cities, though the Indian Constitution mandates that the state must guarantee rights to livelihood, housing, and shelter, the slum dwellers, many of whom are illegal occupants and cannot definitively prove their long-term residence on the land, have no right to compensation (18).

In what follows, I set out to propose a correction to the siting and sighting of the slum, an uncanny infrastructure that is both present and absent in the field of vision. Here, I use the Freudian concept of the “uncanny” in relation to the psychogeography of postcolonial Mumbai. In this definition, the uncanny is a psychological avoidance mechanism that has its dark double in the way visibility is negotiated and manipulated by the colonial infrastructure dominant in global cities. The porosities of the term “slum” – “an informal space outside of, but tightly intertwined with, formal governance institutions and property markets” (Weinstein 45) – lend themselves to the definitional anxiety constitutive of the uncanny: interstice, under-city, leftover space, urban township, tenements, shantytowns, tent cities, shit-holes. The “descriptive vocabulary,” haunted still by a Dickensian aggregate of lurid fascination and dread, “loses sight,” as Swati Chattopadhyay puts it, “of the political conditions that produce these slums in the present century, revealing a theoretical lag” (Unlearning the City xiv). However, this theoretical lag has been generative for new work on the changing urban landscape, drawing in insights from psychoanalysis in particular. Drawing into conversation the work of urban theorists, historians, and geographers, the founding premise of this chapter on slum literature is the representation of the Mumbai slum as an ambiguous site of the unconscious, imperfectly structured, and experienced only through fantasy. Reading Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing, I examine the ways in which these genres of non-, anti-, and aberrational fiction defy the naturalistic and neo-realist documentary style generally associated with humanitarian narratives of urban poverty. These offer embodied and embedded reading practices instead, dismantling the visual culture which sees slums as urban disease.

As Sigmund Freud wrote to his friend, the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, his big idea of “the uncanny” languished in a drawer for some years before he dug out the old paper in 1919 and started to rewrite it. The paper was published in the autumn of 1919, and no one knows when it was originally written or how much it was changed in the intervening period, although a footnote in Totem and Taboo shows that the subject was on his mind as early as 1913 (86). Freud scholars like to believe that the passages dealing with the “compulsion to repeat” formed part of the revision. Yet what these passages also repeat are the theories of Beyond the Pleasure Principle published a year later, but which Freud speaks of in the “Uncanny” essay as “already completed.” Beyond the Pleasure Principle is Freud’s radical postulation of the death instinct, and its overt and covert redoubling in the “Uncanny” essay darkens and solemnizes the latter. “For my old age,” Freud wrote to Lou Andreas-Salome in August 1919, “I have chosen the theme of death” (cited in Hertz 149). He was in fact only 63 and still had some twenty years to go.

The essay “The ‘Uncanny’” (1919) begins with professed unease, with Freud not quite at home in this aesthetic territory yet compelled to enter it: “It is only rarely that a psycho-analyst feels impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics, even when aesthetics is understood to mean not merely the theory of beauty but the theory of the qualities of feeling” (217). The reason he undertakes the project, Freud suggests, has something to do with the freedom of the literary writer, with fiction’s prerogative to evoke and inhabit the emotions and phantasms of the reader, and the power to lift or impose censorship. Freud would also write a theory, or even a literary myth, of this power, and he would do so by entering the scene as analyst as well as the neurotic subject of analysis.

Following the introductory remarks in “The ‘Uncanny’” is a lexical and etymological analysis of the words heimlich (canny) and unheimlich (uncanny) and the now well-established assertion that the words are not simply opposites and that the concept of heimlich itself is ambivalent and unstable. It signifies the familiar and domestic on the one hand, and the concealed and the hidden on the other. The uncanny, Freud concludes, is not something entirely unknown or unfamiliar: “Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich” (“The ‘Uncanny’” 226). In Hélène Cixous’s reading of the “Uncanny” essay, the words heimlich and unheimlich themselves come to life as an androgyne. They form a strange disidentity, joining together, joining themselves, homo- and hetero-, canny and uncanny. It is worth noting that Karl Marx’s Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) is occasionally read alongside Freud’s “Uncanny” essay for its delineation of capitalist society as a locus suspectus, an uncanny space. Marx posits the proletariat as the interior point of what was perceived as all exteriority, the hidden core of a seemingly visible and interpretable phenomenon – like the slum heart of Mumbai, the proletariat is the contradictory center of bourgeois society. The manifesto could be said to work like an uncanny aesthetic, bringing to light what ought to have remained secret and hidden. In Specters of Marx, Derrida uses Marx as a figure of uncanny haunting: “No disavowal has managed to rid itself of all of Marx’s ghosts … Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony” (37). Read in this light, the uncanny is more a hauntology than a unified ontology – a bulwark, as Martin Jay observes, “against the dangerous temptations of conjuring away plural specters in the name of the redeemed whole” (24).

For Freud, the source of the uncanny is tied to the idea of being robbed of one’s eyes. Here Freud turns to the clinical experience of the psychoanalyst: in dreams, myths, and neurotic fantasies, the fear of the loss of eyes seems to hide another, that of castration. In E. T. A. Hoffman’s short story, “The Sandman,” Freud observes, Coppelius, the “bad” father, interferes with all love relationships. He is the powerful, castrating father who supplants (kills) the good father who first protects Nathaniel’s “eyes.” By means of this father figure, castration is fixed and made visible, representable: all other repetitions, doublings, and splittings in the narrative are related to the self-same meaning of this composite father figure. In this literary case study, it is the castration complex as part of our infantile sexuality (genital phase) that is re-invoked by the fear of loss of the eyes. But what do those of us spared from castration anxiety make of this theory? According to Cixous, the meaning of the uncanny is “No-meaning,” rather than the fear of castration:

The uncanny is the instantiation of ontological nothingness, an agitation, a repercussion, and a movement from fear to fear without telos. “Castration complex” is the provisional term that explains the formation of identity in the field of vision: what we see, or don’t see, strange unveilings and revelations. The apparatus of television, telescope, and spyglass deployed in “The Sandman” signals the activation of a predominantly optical imaginary.

In a powerful variation of Cixous’s argument, Anneleen Masschelein states that:

As a concept that at the same time signifies its opposite, “the uncanny” asks the reader both to pare away associations to reach a burning core of meaning and to “expand in a horizontal, rhizomatic network of sidetracks and creative new applications of the concept … in which associative patterns proliferate” (Masschelein 14).

The displacement of meaning associated with the uncanny’s operations has had purchase for urban geography and contemporary architecture. Anthony Vidler, for instance, sees in the uncanny “a significant psychoanalytical and aesthetic response to the real shock of the modern”:

Vidler readily concedes that, faced with real homelessness, “any reflection on the ‘transcendental’ or psychological unhomely risks trivializing or, worse, patronizing political or social action” (13). The uncanny, however, is an unsettling concept that undermines the distinction between the metaphorical and the real, he argues. Postindustrial, post-teleological modernity, from the late nineteenth century to the present, throws up many correlates of the political uncanny for Vidler: postwar aesthetics; deserted spaces attached to bankrupt businesses; the heterogeneous crowds of a Baudelairean city; the internal limit of the Western nation posited by the arrival of the migrant and the exile. The architectural uncanny he invokes in this work is a composite of historical, psychoanalytic, and cultural analyses: “If actual buildings and spaces are interpreted through this lens, it is not because they themselves possess uncanny properties, but rather because they act, historically or culturally, as representations of estrangement” (12).

Swati Chattopadhyay draws on Vidler’s discussion of the uncanny as a psychological phenomenon whereby an “original authenticity, a first burial” (Representing Calcutta 27) is made more potent by virtue of a return of the repressed that is out of time and out of place. She proposes that we treat the sense of the uncanny “not as an aesthetic strategy, but as an unexpected outcome of the process of representation” that informs the gamut of colonial publications from paintings in the Picturesque style to health maps (33). She offers as an example the Calcutta diaries of the Englishwoman Elizabeth Campbell, who traveled to the city with her husband from England in 1827 and felt a shudder of morbidity on seeing the effect of the rains on the buildings:

A reflection initiated by the strangeness of the environment in Kolkata turns fearful not through the alienness of the image, but through the atavistic instinct it evinces. The shock of seeing Venetian windows or neoclassical architecture in the swamps of Calcutta or stumbling upon abandoned English gravestones while admiring picturesque Indian ruins, generates feelings of the uncanny in Campbell. Chattopadhyay correctly identifies “a barely concealed tropical anxiety” (33) in the use of the aesthetic modality of the picturesque in descriptions of colonial Calcutta (and India, in general). The uncanny sensation arises in the gap between the idea of India and the embodied experience of it, between the imperative need for representational mastery and the incommensurate representational apparatus at hand.

If the colonial uncanny is associated with traumatic realizations about the sinister or out-of-place nature of the colonial enterprise, the postcolonial uncanny is also about repeated failures to secure a vantage point from which to articulate cogently what Chattopadhyay calls “a landscape of difference” in her 2012 work, Unlearning the City (32). This anxiety manifests itself powerfully in the bird’s-eye view or the master shot conferring visual and cognitive control on the chaotic conditions of slum life, whether it is a critically acclaimed National Geographic photograph of Dharavi, or the aerial images of melded corrugated rooftops of slums in populist “world cinema” such as Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. Chattopadhyay explains further:

The mastery, in other words, lies in making an illusory whole out of misappropriated, decontextualized synecdoches. The violence of slum infrastructure is adumbrated again in the planner’s and global consumer’s bird’s-eye view of the slums, testifying to the collusion of colonial, neocolonial, and neoliberal forces in the creation of vulnerable habitations. But is there a way of looking, reading, and representing otherwise: a horizontal paratactic, rather than the vertical telescopic view? And, by what other name could we call the slum?

What Is “Beautiful”?

The value of literature, for Martha Nussbaum, lies in its possibility of a civic or “compassionate imagination” (Cultivating Humanity 92), enabling a transcendence of social boundaries and ethnic nationalism through the cultivation of sympathetic understanding. A recent crop of narrative nonfiction works on urban India, all three with “beautiful” in the title, testifies to this through different strategies: Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012), Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned (2011), and Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing (2011). If, as Gavin Jones observes, “poverty is always intertwined with conventional literary categories such as naturalism, documentary realism, and autobiography” (xiv), each of these texts pushes against the limits of these categories in the way it plays with proximity and intimacy with the objects of inquiry. Exposing the multiple speeds and temporalities of global megacities like Mumbai and Delhi, these docu-novels examine the destitute as what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls “the figure of difference that governmentality … all over the world has to subjugate and civilize” (56), and the figure of the nonhuman “open.” I now turn to Boo and Faleiro in some detail to show how these nonfiction narratives, written in the decade following Slumdog Millionaire, also question the social purpose of the novel form, with its generic commitment to class mobility, the redistribution of wealth and justice, and its historical fidelity to equivocal forms of national belonging.

The February 2012 New York Times review of Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers describes it as a “true version of Slumdog Millionaire without the happy ending.”¹⁰ The title of the piece, “An Outsider Gives Voice to Slumdogs,” seems to suggest “slumdog” was now common parlance, a curious move since it also acknowledges Boo’s scathing critique of the Danny Boyle movie in an article which can be treated as the ur-text of Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Boo was a staff writer at the New Yorker when she wrote “Opening Night: The Scene from the Airport Slums,” alluding to the Mumbai première of the blockbuster. In it, she describes the familiar landscape of class apartheid in India, here manifested in the insurmountable divide between Gautam Nagar, one of the thirty or so Mumbai slums squatting on land owned by the Airport Authority of India, and the international terminal, ringed by five-star hotels.

The airborne connection stands for the intangible relations between adjacent yet antagonistic worlds: old, new, suspended, and cancelled Indias; high-net-worth and negative-net-worth individuals; the global (American) economy and a street urchin playing Metal Slug 3 at Anna’s¹² game parlor for 1 rupee a go. Sunil – one of the two Sunils Boo will dedicate the 2012 book to – is a 13-year-old boy with no academic prospects. His mother’s premature death had qualified him for a private school for poor and orphaned children run by a Catholic charity, but he “played too much … or studied too little,” dropping out soon after. The missed opportunity rankles in his mind even as he calls the nun “Sister Paulette-Toilet” under his breath when he sees her in her chauffeured van, on the lookout for more promising slum children than he. Like others in his vicinity, he had been registered for classes at the local government school, but like most of the other boys and girls he had sold his school supplies for money, returning to work. “They needed rupees more than the pencil boxes,” Boo quietly observes. Like the mini scavengers of Slumdog Millionaire, Sunil is a garbage collector, which means he forages through waste to find items of value to sell to those in the recycling trade. The downturn in the American economy had forced him into becoming a metal thief at the international airport.

In Pen of Iron, Robert Alter comments on Hemingway’s use of parataxis for conveying a “disillusioned and unsentimental” sense of the harsh world.

Boo is a master of the “paratactic rendering of introspection” that Alter examines in relation to postwar American authors such as Hemingway or, more recently, Marilynne Robinson (169). Her language is sparse and terse, while narrative details abound, reminiscent of the “large gaps of motive, feeling, intention, and meaning” Alter detects in paratactic style (159). Morbidity, which contaminates everything in a slum named after the 8-year-old son of a scavenger who died of pneumonia after a routine slum demolition, moves freely in this space and in familiar guises: domestic violence, suicide, unsanitary density, malnutrition, addiction, epidemics. While neither this article nor Behind the Beautiful Forevers is about mental illness as such, Boo challenges the health paradigms that disaggregate common mental disorders (CMDs) from common unhappiness.¹³ Sunil’s favorite qualifier, when he wants to brag about work to other game-parlor boys, is “daily”: his milieu is daily acts of theft and larceny; daily “being high” on Erase-X, the Indian version of Wite-Out; regular suicide attempts; run-of-the-mill instances of parents trying to sell a pretty daughter into prostitution.

We learn little about the Tamil woman who tried to kill herself except that her husband had sold the family hut in the course of a four-day binge. “She was fine” after someone cut her down just in time.

Later in the piece, Sunil stands by Abdul, a 20-year-old Muslim scrap dealer, overhearing his musings to a friend:

There is dissociation here as well as identification: “I wonder what kind of life is that” and “it is a life.” Abdul says his mother warned him not to think of “such terrible lives” when he shared this philosophical reflection with her halfway through a beating. The children cope with catastrophes through willed acts of forgetting. Boo writes about the death of a boy called Deepak, a death Sunil’s reconnoitering for German silver (meaning aluminum, nickel, and other metals) was instrumental in causing. Deepak had been ordered by Sunil to “Go in, get that” from a compound and had been arrested: daring though he was, he was not as fast as Sunil or as alert, his mind foggy with Erase-X in this instance. The security guards gouged out his eyes and ripped a smile in his asshole with a sickle before flinging the body over the wall. This is filed away as an unspeakable thing, like dead mothers and lost children: “no one mentioned Deepak after dark. Invoking the name of any dead person after sunset increased the likelihood that his ghost would come back and haunt you.”

Boo’s austere self-negation as witness to these unfurling scenes functions not just to present Sunil with maximum visceral and psychological immediacy. She is not simply trying to heighten empathy and compassion in middle-class readers but straining to show us what might still be beautiful in a blighted life, or how sanity may be clung on to by those fated to endure the terrible unreason of Indian poverty. In a scene describing Sunil’s visit to a construction site for strips of aluminum, we see the boy feeling momentarily free and acting his (excitable, young) age on the rooftop. He revels at the gift of height (four storys) and open space, “a rarity in his city of something like sixteen million people.”

Arguably, Boo is using artistic license to imagine the workings of Sunil’s mind, flush with a little loot and unimpeded by a Nepali watchman, in this serendipitous moment on the roof. The vantage point is not the “bird’s eye view of slums” Chattopadhyay talks about earlier, the proprietary gaze of the planner and global consumer. He is telescopically connecting to his estranged social superiors in a way not allowable in life and on the ground: “There, if he stared, they would see him staring.”

These beautiful moments are contrasted in “Opening Night” with the “beautified” people gathering for the theatrical launch of Slumdog Millionaire. The glittering center of the city, Boo observes, not breaking character yet, is also the site of the “cat-infested t.b. sanatorium where his [Sunil’s] mother and neighbors had been treated before they died.” Later, she ponders the reasons why the British film might not be “universally admired” in India, as evidenced in lawsuits and effigy burnings to protest against the comparison of human beings with dogs. Educated, affluent Indians disliked the film too, Boo notes, because they thought it slighted “the increasing affluence and prominence” of their booming economy. The West does tend to fetishize the Indian poor, Boo concedes, even when the poverty rate had fallen from 36 to 27 percent in a decade. However, it wasn’t simply national pride that made prosperous India skeptical of Slumdog-type representations of the squalid postcolony: the jitters, Boo reckons, came from a deepening alienation with the very city the gated properties had sought to segregate and protect themselves from. What if a denizen of this unseen outlying city realized, one fateful day, that “a shot of rare Scotch consumed in ten minutes at the Sheraton’s ITC Maratha cost exactly as much as he earned in seven hundred fourteen-hour days picking up aluminum cans and used tampon applicators” (“Opening Night”)?

Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a correction of the illusion, perpetuated by movies such as Slumdog Millionaire, that a child’s perilous trajectory through slum life could provide the very tools for its overcoming. While Sunil, had he seen the movie “that ends with an airport-slum boy finding money, love, and fame,” would have probably agreed with the movie’s conceit that deprivation gives one street smarts, the other conceit “was the lie” (“Opening Night”). This is not to say Behind the Beautiful Forevers is defeated or defeatist. In fact, as its concluding Author’s Note claims, Behind the Beautiful Forevers attacks the image of slum dwellers as “mythic,” “passive,” and “pathetic” (249). Boo, a Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist, who spent four years in the Annawadi slum of Mumbai, says she wanted to “honour their experience and their complexity” so that “readers could make a connection that was more blooded and sophisticated than that of pity” (“Q&A with Katherine”). Instead of viewing Annawadi, a squatter slum located between the Mumbai International Airport and the five-star airport hotels, as negative space, she shows how it is the liminal, interstitial quality of this endangered space that allows it to thrive. From the “smogged-out, prosperity driven obstacle course up there in the over-city … wads of possibility tumbled down to the slums” (xii). If the subjugated race, as Albert Memmi argues, usually bears “the mark of the plural,” forever condemned to an “anonymous collectivity” (129), here we have singular lives: Abdul, Fatima, Zehrunisa, Sunil, Kalu, Meena, Manju, Asha. If “Opening Night” revolved around a Hindu boy, Sunil, here a Muslim youth of indeterminate age called Abdul is the life to be documented: the two friends are not interchangeable ciphers, and Boo tenaciously engages with the subcultures of religion and community that define and differentiate each. Annawadi is shown to be a reclaimed space, solid land summoned from a bog – “a snake-filled brushland across the street from the urban terminal” (Beautiful Forevers 3) – by migrant Tamil workers. And, despite their habitat being used as a waste bin by the upper city, the inhabitants find ways to turn bog into land and 8,000 tons of garbage into “vendible excess” (xii). If the colonial maps of Bombay showed slums as dark patches marked by “ZP” (jhopadpatti, or slums), Boo’s narrative eloquently follows the “broken-toothed, profit-minded Santas [who] darted after crumpled cigarette packs tossed from cars with tinted windows [and] dredged sewers and raided dumpsters” (xii).¹⁴

The spatial diffusion and extensiveness of global markets and media give rise to a sense of belonging to a borderless, shared world, when the reality is that such developments lead instead to greater polarization and division of nations and regions. The slum Boo writes about is, once again, located near Mumbai’s international airport. Unlike the Gautam Nagar of “Opening Night” (which turns out to be a particular section of Annawadi), the phenomenological border in this space is not between the slumdogs and the lucky 1 percent in the five-star hotels that loom over Annawadi, but within Annawadi itself, a slum community comprised mostly of migrants fleeing a crisis-ridden agricultural sector only to find themselves as the surplus of cheap labor in Mumbai. “For every two people in Annawadi inching up, there was one in a catastrophic plunge” (24). True to Mike Davis’s characterization of the divisions between “the more advantaged poor,” the poor, and the “poorest of the poor” (43), the struggle unto death in Annawadi is between the poorer and the poorest. Abdul Husain, a key character in the narrative, gains his sense of upward mobility by contrasting his lot with that of less fortunate neighbors, those miserable souls “who trapped rats and frogs and fried them for dinner,” or “ate the scrub grass at the sewage lake’s edge” (6). It is the construction of a solid wall between two hovels by Abdul’s family that precipitates the calamity that destroys both families. One-legged Fatima, Abdul’s belligerent neighbor, spitefully sets herself on fire. The protest comes to nothing and does not better the life of Fatima by falsely implicating her neighbors in criminal activity, as she had intended. A small crowd gathers but does nothing. “The adults drifted back to their dinners, while a few boys waited to see if Fatima’s face would come off” (70). Trying to take Fatima to the hospital, her husband finds himself rebuffed by autorickshaw drivers, worried about the potential damage to seat covers. The poor, Boo writes, “blame one another for the choices of governments and markets” (254), and she documents, with unsentimental intimacy, how the poor compete with and undermine one another whilst the remainder of one of the world’s most unequal cities soldiers on in relative peace.

The “beautiful” of the book’s title refers to a hoarding over a concrete wall that repetitively uses the words “beautiful” and “forever” to advertise Italianate tiles, and that conceals the sprawl of the shantytown from view of the international traffic shuttling up and down the airport road. As usual, the slum poor are peripheral to the existence of the city, the surplus population utterly deprived of social goods or services despite providing the labor critical to the functioning of the service sector in advanced and growing economies. Boo’s third-person fictional narrative forgoes the first-person perspective, as before, to privilege historical figures with no voice or agency in their own life dramas. This technique informs Boo’s portrayal of Abdul, who sells the trash of Mumbai’s rich to recycling plants for profit. “People have learned to respond in creative ways to the indifference of the state – including having to set up a highly functional recycling industry that serves the whole city,” Echanove and Srivastava argue in “Taking the Slum out of ‘Slumdog.’” However, despite the fact that it was “a fine time to be a Mumbai garbage trader” (6), Abdul wants to escape an identity indistinguishable from the trash he sells – “some called him garbage, and left him at that” (6) – and dreams of not only survival but full civic participation. “He wanted to be better than what he was made of. In Mumbai’s dirty water, he wanted to be ice” (218).

Behind the Beautiful Forevers captures a moment in Annawadi’s history when its inhabitants dared to dream of a better life, “as if fortune were a cousin arriving on Sunday, as if the future would look nothing like the past” (11). Despite only 6 of the 3,000 people living in the slum having permanent jobs, this was a time of economic liberalization, and the informal, unorganized economy of Annawadi was not only managing to stay alive, but wanted more. Abdul’s brother dreamed of working in uniform at a luxury hotel; Asha wanted to be a slumlord; Meena wanted freedom, not the drudgery of an arranged marriage; Sunil (yes, the main character of “Opening Night”) wanted to eat enough to start growing; One Leg, a.k.a. Fatima, wanted to be seen and desired despite her crippled body. Zehrunisa, Abdul’s mother, dreamed of a hygienic home, a shelf on which to cook “without rat intrusions,” a small window to vent the cooking smoke “that caused the little ones to cough like their father,” and ceramic tiles on the floor “like the ones advertised on the Beautiful Forever wall” (62). The advertisement is a fitting façade of what Ashis Nandy calls the doctrine of “secular salvation” (Intimate Enemy x), the visual bait to a good life legitimizing the greed and violence of urbanization. Zehrunisa wanted “tiles that could be scrubbed clean, instead of the broken concrete which harbored filth in each striation” (82). Abdul himself, a Muslim of “garbage-related provenance” (22), wanted to leave the slum for a home in Vasai, outside Mumbai, where Muslim recyclers had a sizable community, and for which he had paid an installment. “If life and global markets kept going their way, they would soon be landowners, not squatters, in a place where Abdul was pretty sure no one would call him garbage” (23). Their dreams turn to dust in the wasteland behind the wall. Abdul and his family are falsely incriminated by Fatima. Even if she hadn’t done so, he would inevitably be raided by the local police officers, who would extort money for his thriving unlicensed business, a bribe which would not ensure any protection. The devastating truth was that “to be poor in Annawadi, or in any Mumbai slum, was to be guilty of one thing or another” (12).

Boo does not extrapolate from the short-lived insouciance of characters like Abdul, Zehrunisa, or Fatima a polemic about the moral resources of the most resource-poor. Her task here is to make the unintelligible life recognizable, if not intelligible.¹⁵ An unforgettable section of the book is where Fatima – irrepressible, impossible One Leg, cuckolding wife, and bad mother who looked gender and disability prejudices in the eye, and who had set herself on fire as a stupid stunt – loses her unique voice.

There is no healing in store for Fatima, we know, and ignominious life ends in ignominious death in a public hospital. The duty doctor reuses her soiled bandages, (free) medicine is out of stock at Cooper Hospital, and the nurses avoid touching patients to apply soothing burn cream. She is asked to hydrate but her husband can no longer afford bottles of mineral water after spending borrowed money to buy the ointment. A thumbprint coerced from the dying woman by Poornima Paikrao, Special Executive Officer of the government of Maharashtra, validates a drastically revised victim statement. In the absence of incriminating evidence against the Husains, the statement now reads like a suicide note, allowing the police authorities to extract money from the Husains, named in the document, for incitement to suicide.

This is an extraordinary passage in an overwhelmingly extraordinary work. The red string speaks to the banal red-tape-ism and bureaucracy which carry out violent genocides. The overlapping bird calls, the stacks of unread folders on the floor, the unclaimed lives of the bodies in the morgue in Boo’s paratactic style add up to the tonal flatness of post-grief states. Nothing new is expounded here, followed by explanatory clauses. As we have come to expect, the state exculpates itself every day through rewriting the deaths of its poorest wards. When Fatima dies of an infection, the doctor changes the record to avoid culpability: 95 percent burns instead of the 35 percent that covered her body upon admission. When Kalu is found murdered outside Air India’s red-and-white gates, his eyes gouged out and a sickle up his ass, the inspector in charge, in collusion with Cooper Hospital pathologists, declares it a death from TB as photos of the corpse vanish from the files at Sahar station. The body of a well-known scavenger is declared “unidentified” by police and sold off as cadaver to B. M. Patil Medical College in Bijapur. Sanjay Shetty’s desperate suicide, which follows the terror of his witnessing Kalu’s murder, is registered as a heroin death.

If the narrative mode of “Opening Night” was free indirect discourse, Behind the Beautiful Forevers combines it with immersive reportage. To optimally convey the plot twists of these obscure lives, to bear testimony to subjects who work silently, sorting trash, for most of their lives, Boo attempts the impossible task of representation as presentation. As she has said in interviews, she resists metaphorical appropriation or the allegorizing impulse when it comes to representing the poor.

Boo captures this complexity by means of an almost mechanical transcription of the voice, or the unscripted voice consciousness, of subaltern figures like Abdul. This difficult feat is achieved by cross-checking the paraphernalia of written notes, audio tapes, video recordings, photographs, and hundreds of interviews with thousands of public records, and a team of translators.

With overworked people, especially boys like Abdul or Sunil who spent the bulk of their days working silently with waste, “everyday language tended to be transactional,” Boo states (250). Besides imagining interior monologues to personalize her case studies, Boo chronicles symptoms of the insidious trauma suffered by the Annawadians. In a brilliant “Freud in the slums” scene, Manju, daughter of the slumlord Asha, and pipped to be the first female college graduate to emerge from the slum, copes with her life by “by-hearting [learning by rote] her psychology notes,” and practising the textbook denial they teach. “Young men have mostly ambitious wishes. Young women have mostly erotic ones. The ordinary person feels ashamed of his fantasies and hides them” (179). She blocks out painful subjects like her corrupt, ruthless mother, and a failed love affair. Boo prides herself on being present on the scene at the time of events, or reporting them soon afterward, for slum dwellers could change their testimony under pressure from the police. She notes also how “Annawadians rearranged narratives for psychological solace: giving themselves, in retrospect, more control over an experience than they had had at the time” (252). Their relationship is impersonal yet mutually trusting: the populace warms to her, Boo thinks, because of her concern about the distribution of opportunity in twenty-first-century India. And, “When I wasn’t dredging up bad memories, they liked me fine” (253).

Sonia Faleiro’s “notebook-pencil” approach to reporting is different from Boo’s obsessive audio and video recordings, but she too treats her three years shadowing her subject as “research.” In circumstances involving risky social interactions where she was not able to take notes, “I wrote an obsessive amount when I returned home.”¹⁷ The journalist Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing (2011) traces the entangled lives of bar dancers, bar owners, sex workers, transvestites and transsexuals (also known as hijra), pimps, gangsters, and the police. Faleiro befriended a young bar dancer for intimate access to the netherworld of Bombay’s dance bars. “Only she could teach me what I wanted to know,” says Faleiro of Leela, the native informant seven years younger than she: “the truth about a world that fascinated me, intimidated me, and as I came to know it better, left me feeling frustrated and hopeless” (6). A sassy, devil-may-care bar dancer at the Night Lovers club, Leela is a picaro-figure who has escaped conditions of grinding poverty, domestic violence, and sexual exploitation in her hometown. The narrative charts her financial ruination and descent into dangerous sex-trading, traversing the run-down but middle-class neighborhood of Mumbai’s Mira Road through to the dangerous slum settlement of Cheetah Camp in Trombay, waving off Leela as she embarks on the perilous journey across the Arabian Sea to the Dubai underworld.

Beautiful Thing, in the writing of which Faleiro conducted “hundreds of interviews across Bombay” (224), is about two nations, the Bombay rich and the Bombay poor. While Faleiro hails from South Bombay, with its heady mix of old money and new money, regal colonial relics and aspirational cafés that bake thirty kinds of fudge brownies, her new friend lives where “there were no domes, no pillars, no sushi restaurants” (7). Leela and her co-workers, who bring in hundreds – sometimes thousands – of rupees every night, cannot be classified as the Bombay poor or the Indian poor, but their livelihoods are hazardous and their lives perishable. While the bar dancer is higher in the street hierarchy than, say, the street prostitute or the waiters of “silent bars” (where drinks come with hand-jobs), the income of even the highest-paid worker in Night Lovers amounts to very little. Once the bar owner, landlord, police, pimp, drug peddler and folks back home – in Leela’s case, the parents who had sold her virginity to the local police to punish her for refusing to make pornographic movies – have taken their cuts, there is hardly anything left for the bar dancers. Bar workers are, therefore, frequently forced to sell sex to supplement income, a choice often accompanied by the forlorn hope of finding a rescuer in the sea of punters, someone who will whisk them away to the suburbs or Dubai, as in the Hindi movies.¹⁸ Faleiro also sheds light on the plight of the transgender sex workers, who are plagued by the high mortality rates of shoddy castrations, paid less than half their cis female counterparts (200 rupees for every 500 rupees a cis female sex worker would demand for a “shot” or a sexual service), and twice as likely to be violently beaten or raped. “Bijniss” (business) is neither safe nor steady, and turns downright dangerous after the Bombay Police Act of 2005 banned performances in all establishments rated three stars or less. Needless to say, dancing continued in high-end luxury hotels even after the Police Act. Additionally, there is the ever-present threat of sexually transmitted diseases, HIV in particular.

Faleiro’s testimony enjoins us to rethink the lexicon and temporality of trauma and its cure. “The limited experiences of the line [profession] and the extreme nature of these experiences – adult, violent, sexual, and highly stressful – created a lonely and lasting trauma that made bar dancers feel constantly vulnerable” (118), she writes. The psychic malady that Beautiful Thing anatomizes is not post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but continuous traumatic stress (CTS), marked by a daily exposure to violence and trauma and an absence of safe places to escape from danger or threat. CTS was first proposed by anti-apartheid mental health activists in the context of the political violence and state oppression of 1980s South Africa, and revived in the scholarship of South African clinical psychologists, especially Gillian Eagle and Debra Kaminer. Trauma exposure in the dancers of Mira Road or sex workers of Kamathipura cannot be decisively located in the past, although each of the characters has had a traumatized childhood: trauma is concurrent and to be anticipated for the near future. Clinical or social interventions into these modalities of traumatic stress are often very difficult to achieve, giving another meaning – that of an interminable process – to the descriptor “continuous.”

Faleiro carefully notes the symptoms of traumatic states without trying to frame diagnostically these with the label of “disorder”: Priya, Leela’s best friend and fellow bar dancer, is literate but refuses to read; Leela tries to expunge images of dead babies in trash cans, abandoned by hapless young mothers, which had she convinced herself at the time were hallucinations. The girls talk about gang rape as if it were a professional hazard, feigning deafness to Faleiro’s well-meaning suggestion of a rape counselor. Leela exhibits conditions of pathological bondage to persecutory figures like the married bar owner (and her lover) Shetty, stimulated no doubt by her forced interaction with, and dependence upon, such a person. With CTS, the temporal focus of therapy shifts from the past (and after-effects of past trauma) to the present, and the ongoing effects of traumatization. The task in these cases, as Eagle and Kaminer would argue, “is to prepare for future traumatization and to develop the ability to discriminate between stimuli that might pose a real, immediate, or substantial threat from other everyday stimuli” (91).

Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing is a realistic appraisal of the prolonged and ongoing psychic violence faced by the precariat of the metropolitan sex industry. Refusing the lure of an accusatory narrative that pits victims against perpetrators, Faleiro exposes the infrastructure of economic exploitation and the perpetuation of a permanent underclass instead. Her self-positioning is not unlike that of an analyst perfecting her tactics of listening: “Although I was shaken by their stories, I tried never to be discouraging. Sometimes it felt that simply by listening I was helping out” (104). Faleiro has spoken in a New York Times interview about her father entering national politics when she was very young: “I saw up close how people with power are treated in India. That early experience of privilege is pretty much why I write about the poor. If I can make their voices heard, I will.” If there’s one misconception she tries to dismantle, it’s that the poor are defined by their poverty. Strongly echoing Boo’s view on the subject, she comments that “people seem to believe the poor are one-dimensional”:

Faleiro admires from afar the affinities that bind together the mixed and multicultural community of bar dancers and sex workers, and works hard to gain its confidences. At a birthday party in Bombay’s most notorious red-light district, she lets the hijras sit close to her, stroke her hair, peek into her blouse: “That night, the pinching and prodding by Maya (one of the eunuchs) and her friends made me feel on the in” (103). The girls treat her like a paparazzo, asking her to take snapshots of special moments when they are not taunting her for what they see as her unrelenting will to know: “Come, come. Have your fun. Take foto” (98). These moments act as the text’s traumatic core, lying outside the sharable codes of the official text, comprised of the investigative journalist’s notes and interviews: there are no photographs in either the book or the webpage devoted to Beautiful Thing. In sharp contrast to Boo’s willed absenting of herself from the diegetic plot, the critical or analytical distance between Faleiro and her objects of inquiry is slowly obliterated in the course of the project. The author weeps, frets, scolds, curses, and finally mourns. Cognition in Beautiful Thing becomes increasingly non-verbal and embodied, the affective charge lending a mythic intensity to Faleiro’s realistic representation of banal and brutal events.

Affects, Fredric Jameson reminds us in The Antinomies of Realism, are bodily feelings, different from the category of “emotions” in that they are not conscious states or sensory perceptions that can be captured in language. Emotions have objects and can therefore be named, while affect is a bodily argot. By positing emotion as the binary opposite of affect per se, Jameson says he is insisting on “the resistance of affect to language, and thereby on the new representational tasks it poses poets and novelists in the effort somehow to seize its fleeting essence and to force its recognition” (31). Evocatively, third and first persons merge confusedly in the final section of Beautiful Thing. Leela, the bar dancer, is flying to the Middle East in search of a better life, and Faleiro is her unlikely chauffeur to the airport. Their voices merge indistinguishably as the narrative rages, outside quotation marks, against the pimp, “Sharma,” who has facilitated this trip to Dubai’s sex industry: “He was a khabru, a cunt, a failed crossing away from being a chamar chor” (Faleiro 222). Faleiro’s depiction of this charged scene reveals both her momentary identification with and irrevocable estrangement from Leela’s life, displaying what Jameson calls the “antinomies” of the realist mode, wherein affect militates against and sometimes defeats the seductions of narrative. Beautiful Thing perfectly captures the social worker’s or investigative journalist’s sense of immobilized terror when faced with victims subject to situations of prolonged and ongoing danger. The narrative succumbs to Faleiro’s melancholic sense of the futility of preventive and curative measures in the situations of endemic poverty and sexual violence she details.

Boo’s “beautiful account” (to quote Amartya Sen’s endorsement on the book’s cover) of the precarious and the powerless in urban India is similarly chastened by her stark realization of the easy disposability of such lives and dreams. The delusion Annawadians tended to succumb to was that “a difficult-to-raze house increased the odds that a family’s tenure on airport land would be acknowledged by the relocation authorities” (Boo, Beautiful Forevers 89). In reality, the upward-mobility narrative of these slum dwellers promises no social or economic betterment: more often than not, it is a bleak, pathetic account of how they invest their meager capital and threadbare resources in building up what would be systematically razed to the ground. Despite the tragic undertone of these works, however, the ways of seeing promulgated by Faleiro and Boo demonstrate a questioning of the processes of repression by which the familiar and well-established have become unfamiliar, uncanny, and enemy. If the upshot of the “Uncanny” essay is that space is a projection of the psychical apparatus, which confounds inside and outside, or self and other, the authors discussed here rescue vulnerable habitations and subaltern spaces from being subsumed by this characteristically modern nostalgia. Instead of co-opting the topos of the uncanny to cultivate paranoia and anxiety for the metropolitan subject, the authorial, artistic, or archaeological persona, in each case, undergoes a salutary unhoming. In Vidler’s words, the subjectivity is rendered “heterogenous, nomadic, and self-critical in vagabond environments that refuse the commonplaces of hearth and home in favour of the uncertainties of no-man’s-land” (xiii). Freud had identified the “uncanny” as an aesthetic, adding the qualifier that aesthetics was “not merely the theory of beauty” but an anatomy of the qualities of feeling (“The ‘Uncanny’” 217). Not narrowly limited to “what is beautiful, attractive, and sublime,” the capacious aesthetic mode of the uncanny also represents “the opposite feelings of repulsion and distress” (217). Through the prism of the unheimlich, the violent infrastructural impacts of Mumbai’s stark inequalities and divisions are at once exposed in plain sight and yet hidden. The singular contribution of the humanitarian fictions discussed above lies in their unflagging commitment toward making what Boo calls “invisible individuals” (Beautiful Forevers 254) visible, and the uncanny a perplexity of the beautiful.

The favorite motif of the uncanny, Vidler reminds us, is that of besieged domesticity – its seemingly hermetic entity breached by alien presence – and its psychological corollary, where the other seems to be a replica of the self, “all the more fearsome because apparently the same” (3). It is “the quintessential bourgeois kind of fear: one carefully bounded by the limits of real material security and the pleasure principle afforded by a terror that was, artistically at least, kept well under control” (4). Faleiro and Boo are frank to the point of self-deprecating in declaring their staggeringly different backgrounds and formations from the slum dwellers or sex workers they briefly rub shoulders with. “To Annawadians, I was a reliably ridiculous spectacle,” Boo writes in the “Author’s Note” with which the narrative ends (Beautiful Forevers 251). She concedes, however, that she sees herself in the people she writes about – in Fatima’s fury at being defined by a differently abled body, or Asha’s self-justifying, or Abdul’s fear of losing the little he possesses. There is no safe distance, no safe haven in this writing where the terror of the unhomely can be sublated to and contained as a thrilling reading effect. “What would I do, under these circumstances, if I were Asha or Sunil or Meena? That’s what I’m always asking myself.”²⁰ If the labyrinthine twists of Leela’s life do not provoke uncanny feelings, it is also because nowhere does she return as a replica of the author’s self, an unheimlich double, even when the first- and second-person voices become jumbled in the intensely non-semantic sections of the book, implicating the absorbed reader as well. When asked about her favorite part of Beautiful Thing, Sonia Faleiro’s response suggests she doesn’t think she has invented all of it: “Any part in which Leela speaks.”²¹