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Abstract

Sociologists and Historians have defined City as a space that enhances and privileges unanticipated encounters, as Janaki Nair says “it calls on its citizens to be able to respond humanely to those who are not linked to us [the city residents] in a familial, ethnic, and nationalist or caste affiliations.”ii  Perhaps the task of defining City is arduous because of the flux it remains in, that strings from its aspect of accommodating people from different areas, say hinterland or across the seas or may be from the very adjacent town that is actually not so different culturally, historically, and economically but seems to be different when encountered. But how does a City qualify as being a cosmopolitan and to what definition(s) of Cosmopolitanism does it adhere to?  This paper would be an attempt to find answers to these questions by plotting Anita Desai’s novel Voices in the City (1965) within the trajectory of exploring the ‘Calcuttaness’ of Calcutta and its Cosmopolitanism (with an aim to find out if it is a cosmopolitan).

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