This article reads the city of Mumbai as a locus of terrorist disasters and impending/imminent terrorist threats. It primarily draws upon readings of three Hindi films released in 2008-Mumbai Meri Jaan, A Wednesday and Aamir-to decode the narratives of anxiety, fear, retribution and unrest constructed around real or imagined or expected terrorist threats to the cityscape. The article will argue that these films construct such narratives on several levels: a narrative that posits the various elements of the physical urban landscape with possibilities of danger or vulnerability to terror strikes, thus creating a 'disaster-scape' accentuated by its constant surveillance by the state as well as vigilante figures; a narrative of shared anxiety and paranoia that characters from all the three films share; a narrative that justifies vigilante action in the face of continued inaction on the part of the law and order system; and a narrative that demands symbolic atonement from the perceived 'aggressor'. These narratives, in the final analysis, collapse into an overarching narrative of shared anxiety and paranoia that crystallises an imagined cityscape, an 'essential' Mumbai, which camouflages the innumerable differences and conflicts that the urban landscape is witness to.

Bengaluru/Bangalore, the capital city of the Indian state of Karnataka, has played a vital role in the advancement of communication and technology across the globe. Following the progressivist logic of neoliberal urbanism, the city evolved from the quiet, placid ‘Pensioners’ Paradise’ into the bustling ‘Silicon Valley of India’ at an accelerated pace. Bangalore’s sudden growth into a global cyberpolis has motivated its recent entry into the realm of crime fiction in English. The current paper draws on this connection and proposes to offer a spatial critique of the crime novels in Anita Nair’s Inspector Gowda series, Cut like Wound (2012) and Chain of Custody (2016), set in Bangalore. To map the transitions in the spatial structures and social relations of this rapidly changing city, it uses interdisciplinary approaches of geocriticism and the postmodern social theories of space. Also, by analysing the representations of residential segregation in Nair’s novels, the paper intends to foreground how social inequalities, gentrification, and ghettoization have contributed to the raging scenario of crime and violence in Bangalore.

This article brings together critical perspectives on a broad range of issues that emerge from a reading of the National Policy on Education 2016. The issues vary from accountability to transdisciplinarity and from the marginalization of transgender people to value education. Such a complex task of critiquing this policy document cannot be accomplished by an individual alone. This task must be borne by a team of scholars with training in diverse fields. Working in a team however generates divergences as well as convergences. Yet no attempt has been made to iron out the creases emanating from differences in opinions, nor persist with the search for an underlying singularity, nor enforce a consensus. Such is the uncertain nature of the task of reforming higher education.

Food studies, a new addition to the family of humanities, has experienced a rapid rise in the last twenty years and a number of scholars have devoted their time and energy in studying food culture as well as the patterns of eating (Albala, 2013). Food writing has slowly spread its branches into all literary genres including into crime fiction. In more recent crime mysteries, the main plot is supplemented by authentic recipes and descriptions of food and cooking and “gumshoes not only track killers” but also “grill sherry-flavoured tuna” or “bake” chocolate cookies (Carvajal, 1997). The sub-genre of crime fiction that brings together food and crime, has been termed as ‘culinary mystery’ and with the more recent academic interest in food in literature, it has received the critical attention it deserves. The present paper will analyze the role of food in the Reema Ray mysteries of Madhumita Bhattacharyya, The Masala Murder (2012) and Dead in a Mumbai Minute (2014) and the Lalli mysteries of Kalpana Swaminathan, The Secret Gardener (2013) and Page 3 Murders (2006). While for Lalli and her niece Sita, food becomes a luxury, an indulgenceafter a hard day’s grim investigative work; for Reema, baking is her sleuthing tool and stands for her intelligence and autonomy. This paper will thus argue how these novels, with female sleuths who use food/cooking as tools of detection, pose a challenge to the patriarchal roles assigned to women as caregivers and providers of nutrition, and attempt to show how “food mysteries are ultimately about female independence and sustaining the self” (Kalikoff, 2006, p. 75). In doing this, it will alsofocus on how women bridge the gap between the public and private spheres.

Following the American discovery of the high concentration of skilled IT professionals in Bengaluru, the Karnataka Government announced its IT policies in the late 1990s which changed the city from a placid ‘pensioners’ paradise’ to the bustling ‘Silicon Valley of India’. With almost an explosion of disruptive changes, the topography and the demography of the city both saw a dramatic transformation. The ‘Mr Majestic Trilogy’ (2012–2017) by Zac O’Yeah is a crime-detection series set in post-millennial Bengaluru. The current paper argues that it is possible to read this crime novel series as a social critique of the changing (social) spaces and interactions in the city, albeit these are represented with humour and light-heartedness in his novels. The paper seeks to read the novels as representing the specificities of the urban experience in this global South Asian city, and as bringing to the fore the dialectics of space and spatiality, especially as it embraces a neoliberal wave of globalisation. It looks at the narratives’ engagement with various aspects of urban experience, including crime and migration, and also investigates the network of relationships that the novels explore in their depiction of the urban/hinterlands duality. For its purposes, the paper borrows insights from theorists of space and urbanity.