Spectrality and secularism in Bombay fiction: Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games.

Secularism; Postcolonialism; Cities & towns; Hindutva; Financial liberalization; Globalization; Rushdie, Salman, 1947-

This article examines how fictions of Bombay figure the global city as haunted by spectral subjectivities, offering narratives of visibility and invisibility that engage with the intertwined impacts of global capitalism and Hindu nationalism. Focusing on Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) and Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games (2006), I explore how Bombay fictions mobilise narratives of spectrality and embodiment to urge us to read for communities rendered invisible by overlapping discourses of ethnic and economic exclusivity, by the violent transition of the city from ‘Bombay’ to ‘Mumbai’. I argue that narratives of urban spectrality enable critical interventions into ongoing debates about India's secular pasts and futures, situating the emergence of the Hindu Right and the decline of secularism within the context of India's economic liberalisation in the 1990s. I argue that, by foregrounding the city's spectral subjects, and by affiliating culturally and economically marginalised citizen-subjects, Rushdie and Chandra offer strategies of reading for and from the perspective of minoritised populations that can be aligned with Aamir Mufti's notion of ‘critical secularism’. My examination of spectrality extends Mufti's critical practice into one attentive to processes of socioeconomic marginalisation in the city-space, to bodies rendered homeless by Hindu majoritarianism and global capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]