Sensory infrastructures of 21st century Delhi: Urban vistas, digital memories and aesthetic imaginaries of a postcolonial media-city

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the recent decades of post-globalization India, a digital explosion in media platforms and technologies has created a new cartography of the city. This ‘informational’ vocabulary addresses the city not merely through built urban architecture but also through a mobile infrastructure of screens. MMS clips, surveillance footage, television news, home videos, memes, and so on are all symptomatic of this new digital archive of the city. This essay attempts to reflect on how Delhi’s urban imaginary is given a graphic volatile form through the viral circulations of its digital profile. As a new generation of Delhi-born directors emerge in the landscape of Bombay cinema, some of these filmmakers mobilize the recent televisual archive of crime in Delhi to respond to the city. At the same time, it is also interesting how a more generalized relation between the space of the night and urban violence is given a specific concrete iconography in these fictionalized accounts. Located within an intersection of Delhi’s urban imaginary, its expanding media infrastructure, and an aesthetic mobilization of the night, this essay examines Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex Aur Dhokha (2010), Anurag Kashyap’s Dev.D (2009), and Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Delhi-6 (2009) to argue that the violence in these films as much material as it is technological. It is not only the anxiety related to murder itself, but the viral circulation of death and a television aesthetic of replayed and sensationalized crime that haunts the contemporary metropolitan experience.