Rewriting Histories and Geographies: Cosmopolitan Moments in Contemporary Indian Writing in English Dissertation submitted at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Bern, Switzerland, to obtain the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Annie Cottier March 2014 Accepted by Prof. Dr. Gabriele Rippl (first supervisor) and Prof. Dr. Thomas Claviez (second supervisor) on behalf of the Faculty of Humanities Original document saved on the web server of the University Library of Bern This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No derivative works 2.5 Switzerland licence. To see the licence go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc-nd/2.5/ch/ or write to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California 94105, USA. 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The detailed license agreement can be found at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ch/legalcode.de This dissertation was written as part of a research project on “The Poetics and Politics of Cosmopolitanism in English Literatures of South Asian Background” (2010-2013), funded by the Swiss National Foundation and supervised by Prof. Dr. Gabriele Rippl and Prof. Dr. Virgina Richter, University of Bern, Switzerland *** To my parents and to Matthias, Sophie and Emilie with love and gratitude *** Table of Contents 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 1 1.1 Indian Writing in English: Developments from Local to Global Orientations .......... 12 1.2 Critical Approaches to Cosmopolitanism and Indian Writing in English ................... 18 2. Cosmopolitan Moments in Contemporary Indian Writing in English .................. 22 2.1 Expressing Cosmopolitan Ethics, Practice and Aesthetics in Cosmopolitan Moments .................................................................................................................................................... 25 2.1.1 Cosmopolitan Ethics ................................................................................................................................. 30 2.1.2 Cosmopolitan Practice ............................................................................................................................. 36 2.1.3 The Aesthetics of Cosmopolitan Moments ................................................................................... 38 2.2 Rewriting Histories and Geographies ...................................................................................... 42 2.3 Methodology: Reading Cosmopolitan Moments .................................................................. 47 3. Cosmopolitan Passages in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies ....................................... 50 3.1 Girmitiyas and Lascars: Cosmopolitan Practices ................................................................... 57 3.2 The Ibis: Vision and Cosmopolitan Community .................................................................. 63 3.3 Masks and Disguises: The Ibis’s Cosmopolitan Passengers ............................................. 68 3.4 Foreigner, Friend: Transformation and Cosmopolitan Responsibility .......................... 77 3.5 Summary and Intermediate Conclusion .................................................................................. 86 4. Cosmopolitan Moments in Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke .................................... 87 4.1 Storms and Winds of Change: Cosmopolitan Transformations ...................................... 92 4.2 Canton’s Fanqui-town: A Cosmopolitan Community? ....................................................... 96 4.3 Bahram, Opium and the Ghost: Failed Cosmopolitan Responsibility ........................ 106 4.4 Summary and Intermediate Conclusion ................................................................................ 115 5. Cosmopolitan Moments in a Magical World: Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence ............................................................................................................. 116 5.1 Cosmopolitan Mirroring: From Fatehpur Sikri to Samarkand, to Florence and Beyond to the New World – and Back ........................................................................................... 120 5.1.1 Pre-colonial India and England: Mirroring Akbar and Elizabeth I ............................... 123 5.1.2 Florence and Fatehpur Sikri: Mirroring Cities ......................................................................... 126 I 5.1.3 Writing ‘Beautiful’ Worlds ................................................................................................................. 129 5.1.4 East, West? .................................................................................................................................................. 132 5.2 Cosmopolitan Moments: Art and History ............................................................................. 138 5.2.1 Art in The Enchantress of Florence ..................................................................................................... 138 5.2.1 The Tale of Qara Köz: Remembering the Other ...................................................................... 142 5.3 Cosmopolitan Passages: Qara Köz and Mogor .................................................................... 150 5.3.1 Mogor: The Conjurer of Magic and Tales ................................................................................... 151 5.3.2 Qara Köz: The Ghostly Wanderer .................................................................................................. 154 5.4 Summary and Intermediate Conclusion ................................................................................ 158 6. Cosmopolitan Travellers and their Tales in M.G. Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song ................................................................................................................................................. 159 6.1 Interweaving Legends and Histories Across Time: Karsan and Nur Fazal ................ 164 6.2 The Aesthetics of Arrival and Community in The Assassin’s Song and The Enchantress of Florence ....................................................................................................................... 170 6.3 Coming Home: Assuming Cosmopolitan Responsibility ................................................ 177 6.4 Songs, Poetry, Legends: The Aesthetics of Literary Cosmopolitanism ....................... 181 6.5 Summary and Intermediate Conclusion ................................................................................ 186 7. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 187 8. Works Cited ............................................................................................................................. 194 8.1 Primary Sources .............................................................................................................................. 194 8.2 Secondary Sources ......................................................................................................................... 197 8.3 Illustration Sources ....................................................................................................................... 211 II Table of Illustrations Illustration 1: Canton’s Fanqui-town ................................................................................. 98 Illustration 2: the book cover of the first hardback edition of The Enchantress of Florence, published in 2007 by Jonathan Cape. ................................................................ 139 III Chapter 1: Introduction 1. Introduction Over the past fifteen years, cosmopolitanism, understood to be a concept that encompasses the negotiation of the ethics and practice of migration, community, responsibility, difference and sameness, has become the subject of an international literary debate. In many ways, the critical output that accompanies this debate has acknowledged the relevance of cosmopolitan thought in contemporary literatures of a global, transnational literary imaginary.1 Yet the critical literature concerned with cosmopolitanism has, with a few exceptions, mainly used it as a descriptive rather than as an interpretative term, focusing on the politics of the texts rather than on their aesthetics or in this case, to be more precise, their literary features.2 Surprisingly, this has been the case particularly with the interpretation of contemporary Indian writing in English, which is in most cases still labelled as postcolonial, a description that is not necessarily redundant, but that cannot do justice to the scope of this body of literature. Intervening in a field that takes into account