Walking Through (Hi)stories : city and Temporarity in Vandana Singh's "Delhi"

Abstract

The article constitutes an attempt at an in-depth analysis of the way in which Vandana Singh, in her short story “Delhi,” engages in a discussion concerning the relationship between the urban space, hegemonic colonial narrative, and the subjectivity of the historical account, reframing it in terms of speculative fiction. This practice, framed as a counter-discursive attempt at rewriting the history of the Other, allows the author to comment upon the ways in which that history has been created and shaped. Adopting the postcolonial discourse as well as theory of science fiction as the primary methodological background, the article aims to explore the themes of collective memory and postcolonial reclaiming practices, framed in terms of a spatial-temporal journey through the urban space of Delhi, with the view of substantiating the thesis that the act of walking through the city in both the spatial and the temporal sense constitutes a counter-discursive attempt at reclaiming the colonial narrative and challenging the status quo.