Reconstructing Urban Spaces in Sushmita Banerjee's Kabuliwalar Bangali Bou

Abstract

This chapter explores Sushmita Banerjee's memoir titled Kabuliwalar Bangali Bou (1997) that portrays the horrors of displacement and city life in the South Asian context. The memoir poignantly chronicles the experiences of an urban Bengali woman who marries an Afghan businessman for love and migrates to Afghanistan during the rule of the Taliban. The objectives of the study are four-fold: 1) to establish the relationship between the vitality of urban space and the nature of social conventions that migrants are expected to follow; 2) to observe how such social and urban conventions and geopolitics affect migration, migrants, and diasporic communities; 3) to examine the reconstruction of urban spaces by women within the Taliban-governed nation of Afghanistan; and 4) to examine their narratives of urban space in the light of Foucault's dichotomy between private and public space as well as Heterotopia, Soja's notion of the third space, and Lefebvre's maxim about social space.