Reconstructing the changing urban landscape beyond spatio-temporal dimensions: Post-colonial ‘Allahabad’ in Neelum Saran Gour’s Invisible Ink

Abstract

One of the pressing concerns of our times is the rapid change of urban landscape resulting in environmental degradation. However, there are other concerns too that leads this paper to deliberate on how individual and collective experiences and identities get reshaped extensively with the change of urban landscape across temporality. Within this framework, this paper analyses Neelum Saran Gour’s novel Invisible Ink (2015) which projects Indian city ‘Allahabad’, now referred as ‘Prayagraj’ in two different time scales with a gap of forty-four years mostly through the subjective experiences of two women characters, Rekha and Amina. In the conventional discipline of Geography, landscape is often assumed to be a visual entity (Cresswell, 2015) but appropriating Leila Scannell and Robert Gifford’s “Defining Place Attachment: A Tripartite Organizing Framework” (2010), landscape (both built and natural) unfolds its meaning more through human interaction constructing cultural values leading to spatial distinctiveness which is always in flux. Thus, urbanization is not just a transformation of physical topography of the ‘city’ but ‘includes the changing façade of socio-cultural environments which unquestionably impacts on the existing values of both private and public space reshaping the experiences of its people. Therefore, this article will also examine the ways in which literature documents urban spaces.