Negotiating Mobility: Urban Liminality and Communitas in Mamang Dai’s Stupid Cupid

Esther Hebzibah Sherin M

Senior Research Fellow of English, (Reg. No.: 21214014012046),

Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Abishekapatti, Tirunelveli – 627012. ORCID No. 0009-0006-7163-1450.

Dr. R. Vasuhi

Assistant Professor of English, Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Abishekapatti, Tirunelveli – 627012. ORCID No. 0009-0007-9030-8979.

Email: rvasuhi@gmail.com

(This study is supported by the fund received from the University Grants Commission as Junior Research Fellowship)

Abstract
Mamang Dai’s Stupid Cupid has attracted scholarly attention for its representations of multiculturalism, internal diaspora, psychogeography, ecology, and urban modernity. While these approaches have significantly enriched critical understanding of the novel, they have largely treated Delhi as the setting within which migration and identity are negotiated rather than examining how urban space itself actively produces liminal modes of belonging. Addressing this critical gap, this article argues that Dai reconceptualizes liminality beyond its anthropological origins by relocating it from ritual transition to the everyday realities of metropolitan life. The article primarily draws upon Victor Turner’s concepts of liminality, liminal personae, and communitas. It proposes the concept of everyday urban liminality to explain how migration generates an enduring condition of spatial, cultural, and emotional in-betweenness. Further, the article analyzes in detail how liminality is functioning in the macro spatial site, metropolitan Delhi as well as the micro spatial site, the Four Seasons. The theme of liminality is asserted in relation to mobility that takes place among the characters of the plot. Mobility tends to transform the characters and inculcate in them new values, behavioural change, a fluid identity and acculturation. To comprehend, this paper brings out the negotiation of mobility and urban liminality in Dai’s novel Stupid Cupid by placing it under Victor Turner’s critique of liminality and communitas.

Keywords: Urban liminality, Communitas, Literary anthropology, Migration and Northeast literature.