Silhouetting the Self and Society: An Interview with Neelum Saran Gour

The emergence of humanistic geographers like Tim Cresswell, Edward Relph, and Yi-Fu Tuan from the 1970s onwards redefined the meaning of ‘place’, through extensive emphasis on human experience within and beyond the physical landscape. Since then ‘place’ has stretched its domain and traversed the terrains of various disciplines, including literary study and production. Discussing ‘place’ in relation to how the acclaimed Indian writer Neelum Saran Gour represents Allahabad shows how she reframes the ‘cultural geography’ of the city. While decoding her literary spaces, this interview focusses on the multidimensional concept of ‘place’ from geographical and social–cultural perspectives and how Allahabad, or any other place like Allahabad for that matter, becomes an extension of the writer’s ‘self’ and its inhabitants. This interview also explicates how Gour conceives the invisibilities of multicultural North Indian society in terms of its various linguistic and gendered identities. In turn, Gour’s work moves from regional singularity to represent ‘Indianness’ more broadly.