S. N. Kiran

Urban Legends and Mythology in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) and Salman Rushdie’s Victory City (2023)

Many of the literary narratives are the narratives of imagined cities and cities imagined. The narratives of cities contribute to the making of the urban legends and myths. Indian novels in English portray the emergence of urban spaces and their decline. Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) is a narrative of an Indian village in the pattern of a grand mother’s narrative technique.  The novel portrays the chronicles of a ‘Pura’, offering the qualities of the ‘Purana’ to the narrative that revolves around the lives of certain ‘Purushas’. The novelist reiterates the allegorical elements in the narrative of the village that has just begun to attain the qualities of urbanity. Further, contextualizing the historical and the mythological elements of the city of Vijayanagara described as the city of Bisnaga in Salman Rushdie’s Victory City (2023), the story of the birth, emergence, glory and the fall of the city are narrated through an imaginative epic poem Jayaparajaya in the novel. The epic poem in the novel illuminates the death of the city and upholds the immortality of the narrative of the city. Enriching the tradition of storytelling, the plots and the milieus are woven in the form of urban legends.  The paper aims to examine the inherent relationship between legends and myths with urbanity in terms of the conception of Pura, Purana, Nagara, Nagarika and Nagarikatha in these Indian narratives. It is hoped that such a study would illuminate the contemporary understanding of urbanity in the conception of Indian stories and the acts of storytelling that would contribute to field of Literary Urban Studies.  These and other related issues are the focus of the proposed paper.