Postcolonial repetitions: Distant time in the imaginary of India’s smart cities

Abstract

This commentary uses contemporary Hindi cinema to suggest that the strange cosmologies of building files in India and the repetitions and re-narrations of past events that structure the letters and petitions that compose those files are steeped in a wider (post)colonial literary–cinematic imaginary. The technics of time richly explored in Ayona Datta's essay are hence shaped by and shape cultural forms, such as films and state development narratives. The promises of the future smart city cannot be understood outside of the repetitions and deferrals of the past city or the affectively saturated notions of temporality prominent in such cultural forms. Perhaps the fantasy of planning the smart city is as speculative and surreal, as nostalgic of colonial pasts, and as saturated in phantasmic affects, as Bollywood heroism.