Urban Decay, Addiction, and Alienation in Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis

Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis is a dark, lyrical meditation on Bombay’s underbelly, foregrounding the intertwined themes of urban decay, addiction, and alienation. Set primarily in the city’s opium dens and marginal spaces from the 1970s onwards, the novel presents an alternative history of Bombay that resists narratives of progress, globalization, and urban glamour. This research article examines how Narcopolis constructs the city as a decaying organism, where addiction becomes both a symptom and a metaphor for social disintegration, and alienation defines the existential condition of its inhabitants. Drawing on urban studies, postmodern literary theory, and addiction discourse, the study explores how Thayil’s fragmented narrative structure, polyphonic voices, and hallucinatory prose mirror the psychological and spatial fragmentation of the modern metropolis. The article argues that Narcopolis exposes the moral and cultural erosion underlying urban modernity, revealing how marginalized individuals—drug users, queer bodies, migrants, and the dispossessed—are rendered invisible within the dominant narratives of the city. Through its poetic engagement with decay and desire, the novel challenges readers to confront the costs of urban transformation and the human toll of addiction and isolation.