Fictional narratives on Chennai, after its official conversion from Madras in 1996, offer an intriguing register for exploring ways of belonging. Using a postcolonial framework, the paper closely scrutinizes T. S. Tirumurti’s Clive Avenue and Chennaivaasi (and some other authors invested in Chennai’s contemporary culture) and subjects them to critique as sites of meaning making. An effort is made to explore how these narratives respond to the new reality of Chennai, to what extent they see the city producing a standardized experience, and how the fictional characters corroborate or contest institutional change. In the process, the texts are brought to converse with the postcolonial desire for cultural autonomy, its mediation by a nativist agenda, as well as the ambivalence and contradictions inherent in such a desire. The texts betray the inadequacies of the new name as a stable container of cultural meanings and propose an idea of the city that is internally incoherent and multi-experiential.

关于金奈的虚构叙事在1996年由马德拉斯（Madras）正式改版后，为探索归属方式提供了一个有趣的记录。本文使用后殖民的框架，仔细研究了TS Tirumurti的Clive Avenue和Chennaivaasi（以及其他一些作家对钦奈的当代文化进行了投资），并将其作为意义产生的场所进行了批判。我们努力探索这些叙事如何回应金奈的新现实，他们在多大程度上看到该城市产生了标准化的体验，以及虚构人物如何佐证或挑战制度变迁。在此过程中，这些文本与后殖民对文化自治的渴望，自然主义议程的调解以及这种渴望所固有的矛盾和矛盾性进行了交流。这些文字背叛了新名称作为文化含义的稳定容器的不足之处，并提出了关于城市内部不连贯和多经验的想法。