[Reader-list] Writing on the city

[Monica Narula]

Street Signs.

A city is a provocation for words, a map waiting for a reader. 
Crowded with experiences, people, memories and histories, city spaces 
demand interpretation, and inscription. Streets ask for 
signs.Crossroads, intersections, overbridges, cul de sacs, and grids 
wait to be written on to imagined topographies.

We are forever reaching destinations inside the city, and in our own 
lives, that address each of us as long-term inhabitants, transients, 
strangers, and hostages. We may be hostages to the city but we also 
hold the keys to our own freedom within it. Some of these keys are 
words, and the things that can be made from fragments of words.

Sarai: The New Media Initiative, invites writers to reflect on urban 
space on its website www.sarai.net, as part of its ongoing creative 
engagement with urban culture. While Sarai, being located in Delhi, 
India, is especially interested in writing on Delhi itself, it is 
also open to reflections on cities elsewhere, and on the city as a 
generic global form of cohabitation.

The urbane pitch of classical Sanskrit drama in Kalidas's Ujjain and 
the pithy aphorisms of Kabir that sprang from the streets of medieval 
Benaras are earlier instances of what happens when cities find their 
unique voices in literature. In the eighteenth and nineteenth 
centuries the city of  Delhi gave rise to its own special 
genre/flavour/style of writing - the 'Shaher- E- Ashob' - the 
literature of the despair of the ravaged city. A few centuries ahead, 
can we in the early years of the twenty first century in the 
megalopolis of Delhi, lay claim to our own register for speaking once 
again about the specificity of the urban experience?  Sarai hopes to 
be a space where a speculation such as this could find room for play.

We are looking for subjective encounters with the city that also 
happen to transcend and transgress genres. So we are also looking for 
poets to do reportage, essayists to turn interviewers, and for social 
theorists to write fiction. We are particularly keen to provide a 
space for experimental and hypertextual forms of writing, that 
utilise the unique non-linear narrative possibilities and 
opportunities of dispersed or collaborative authorship that are 
opened out by the Internet.

Submissions are invited in English and Hindi and may include both 
original work as well as translations from third languages into 
English and/or Hindi. All texts accepted for publication on the Sarai 
website will lie in the Public Domain. Some of this material may also 
be published in future Sarai Readers, with the consent of the authors.

This focus on 'writing the city' will work in tandem with a series of 
explorations of experimental writing activities that will be hosted 
soon at Sarai through workshops and collaborative/online writing 
projects. We hope that these activities can mature into a regular 
electronic discussion list on "Writers, Writing and the City".

For details contact :
Monica Narula (monica at sarai.net)
Sarai:The New Media Initiative
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29 Rajpur Road
Delhi 110 054

Tarun Saint <tarunsaint3 at rediffmail.com>
Department of English
Hindu College
Delhi University
-- 
Monica Narula
Sarai:The New Media Initiative
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
www.sarai.net