Interrogating Urban Spaces: Kali and the Intellectual in two Contemporary Novels

This article focuses on the complexity of the encounter between two Western male writers and the East as represented by the metropolis of Calcutta and Kali, its patron goddess. The novels under discussion are Dan Simmons’ Song of Kali and Paul Theroux’s A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta. The theoretical framework of the comparative analysis argues for the conceptual blurring of boundaries between ‘flâneur’ and ‘badaud’, elusive hypostases of the male writer protagonists in the Eastern urban context.