And a World between Them: Cosmopolitanism in Select Narratives of South Asia

Abstract

Cosmopolitanism as a philosophical concept vulnerably lies “lost in translation” between academic jargons and the difficulties of practicing it in the everydayness of life. This thesis presents an analytical study of the term “cosmopolitanism” and opens the complex dialogical relationships that is shares with the cultural philosophical and literary trajectories. The term opens rich critical and creative interpretations that overlap across academic disciplines. The first part of the thesis initiates an exhaustive study of the conceptualization of the term in the western philosophical traditions. The approach is to closely analyze cosmopolitanism connecting itself to the ideas of the individual, the polis, and the world. Our analysis starts from the Socratic school of thought with emphasis on the freedom of knowledge; continuing through Immanuel Kant’s cosmopolitanism, to the contemporary debates surrounding the ideas of thinkers like Martha Nussbaum, Arjun Appaduraj, and Walter Mignolo. Further, we attempt to challenge the stereotypes associated with western scholarship buy opening the possibilities of experiencing cosmopolitanism in lived human spaces through the thought threads of Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo and Mikhail Bakhtin. The purpose is to underscore the idea that cosmopolitanism is a pervasive concept that has mattered to thinkers across time and space. We envision cosmopolitanism as way to acknowledge the non-similar and the heterogeneous terrains of human thoughts. In the second part of thesis, we extent the theoretical idea of cosmopolitanism initiated in the first part to the praxis of the contemporary South Asia literary context. We explore cosmopolitanism in select literary representations of the South Asian cites of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The analysis is through three different matrices of; (a) transactional cosmopolitanism (b) cosmopolitanism-national, and (c) dialogical cosmopolitanism. In Suketu Metha’s Maximum city (2004), we focus on understanding cosmopolitanism through transactions in the marketplace of Bombay. Further, with a close reading of Amit Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address (1991) and Calcutta: Two Years in City (2013), we focus on the emergence of the cosmopolitanism-national as an individual who is at home with world. In chapter nine of the thesis with a focus on the cites of Karachi and Dhaka, we creatively understand “dialogical cosmopolitanism” with characters like Alice in Mohammed Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (2011) and Masud in Adib Khan’s Spiral Road (2007). These individual negotiate between the “roots” and the “routes” of emerging global narrative and continuing local histories. To conclude, cosmopolitanism in the contemporary world survives with the “aesthetics of hope” and opens a possibility of imagining “a world between them” through dialogues.