Looking Laterally: Cosmopolitanism and the South Asian Postcolonial Novel
Freitas, Vivek.
2017
-
Abstract: This dissertation investigates the idea of "cosmopolitanism" in four
South Asian postcolonial novels. In particular, the dissertation traces an arc of the
importance of the term from the beginning of the twentieth century to the twenty-first
through these selected, key texts. Cosmopolitanism, I argue, has allowed us to "look
laterally"—that is, look "beyond" prescribed differences, ... read morecharacterized variously as
geography, gender, globally disenfranchised populations, animals, the plurality of human
races, nationalities, and literary and cultural traditions. However, such an emphasis on
looking "beyond" differences has meant that being "cosmopolitan" has come to be seen as the
opposite of having recognizable political affiliations. The rise and celebration of
cosmopolitanism has thus come at the expense of a shared sense of community with the
capacity for social and political action. Focusing on four novels—Rabindranath Tagore's The
Home and the World (1916), V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River (1979), Kiran Desai's The
Inheritance of Loss (2006), and Indra Sinha's Animal's People (2007), this dissertation
analyzes the intersections of political and cultural economy in texts explicitly concerned
with articulating a cosmopolitan outlook. In each case, I argue that as the term
"cosmopolitanism" gains purchase, the ability to develop a shared language of commitment
declines. My first chapter on Rabindranath Tagore's The Home and the World investigates an
early engagement with the possibilities of cosmopolitanism. The novel, as I argue, is
Tagore's attempt at "reaching beyond" the confines of home and entering the possibilities
of "the world"—a procedure that, in the dissertation, I call "looking laterally." For
Tagore, neither what he called the "colorless vagueness" of cosmopolitanism, nor "the
fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship," could be the "goal of human history" (Nationalism
34). In this didactic novel, set up as a debate among the principal characters, Tagore
attempts to discover a more "natural" connection to "worldliness" or "being in the world."
I argue that the novel's fixation on the ideal of "true cosmopolitanism" leads its
aristocratic characters to ignore the very (disenfranchised) people on whose behalf they
claim to speak and act. Such an analysis of cosmopolitanism as an act of avoidance comes to
structure my analysis of the novels in each subsequent chapter. My second and third
chapters—on Naipaul's A Bend in the River and Desai's The Inheritance of Loss—argue that in
each novel "cosmopolitanism" is posited over and against political commitments and
functions as an avoidance of the "messiness" of postcolonial politics. Describing Naipaul's
protagonist, Salim, as a "vagrant cosmopolitan" I show how London becomes the epicenter of
an immigrant cosmopolitanism that longs for "the security" of colonial empires (Literary
170). In Desai's novel, I show how the current generation of South Asian cosmopolitan
writers, in tune with academic postcolonial and cultural theories, participate in what I
call a "narrative cosmopolitanism." Here, the "worldly" and cultured reader— not the
characters— is hailed as cosmopolitan through the act of reading and decoding a narrative
of "loss" in the former colonies. I end with Indra Sinha' Animal's People as a more
positive and ethical view of cosmopolitanism. Unlike Tagore's novel, which, too, had
attempted to take an ethical position, Sinha's is a "cosmopolitanism from below," organized
through the vantage point of the global poor. The novel reminds us that, "All things pass,
but the poor remain" (366). Sinha's novel is adamant about the liberatory potential of
political and social action in a world faced with global environmental degradation. Such
environmental degradation is planetary, even if the instance of the novel is particular:
the Bhopal Gas Disaster of 1984. I end the dissertation with this novel, because, as I
argue, it posits a worldly solidarity, a "true" cosmopolitanism in the face of
environmental harm.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2017.
Submitted to the Dept. of English.
Advisor: Modhumita Roy.
Committee: Elizabeth Ammons, Christina Sharpe, and David Suchoff.
Keyword: English literature.read less - ID:
- 2514nx60c
- Component ID:
- tufts:22402
- To Cite:
- TARC Citation Guide EndNote
