Focusing on nineteenth-century Calcutta as the literal and imagined literary space where the urban and suburban imaginaries collide, I hold Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Monihara’ [‘The Lost Jewels’, 1898] to be the first, concerted effort in pushing the urban Gothic well beyond the limits of the city. The cinematic adaptation of the same directed by Satyajit Ray [1961] will also fall within its purview. Delineating a space that is both material and metaphysical, the urban Gothic’s beating heart is often seen to reside in abandoned dwellings, calling forth an inspection into the private chambers and economies of vacant spaces, the birth of the modern subject, and the vagaries of capital.

Read Homebound: City and the Spectre of Accumulation in Tagore’s ‘Monihara’