Kochi: provincialising postcolonial metro-cosmopolitan spatialities

Abstract

There is much to learn about how some locales come to be deemed as more cosmopolitan than others. Mumbai is hailed as a cosmopolitan city and even a model for India. With an increasing sense of disappointment about the decline of cosmopolitanism in such metropolitan cities, there is a need to look at what other locales can offer as alternative models of cosmopolitanism. This article addresses Kochi as a locale that is nuanced with precolonial practices of cosmopolitanism. This move towards provincialising cosmopolitanism – in the sense of moving away from metropolitan locales to highlight deeper, more historical and local ways of being cosmopolitan – is informed by the growing emphasis on the need to explore subaltern or vernacular cosmopolitanism.

Provincializing Island Poetics: The Personal as the Spatial in N S Madhavan’s Litanies of Dutch Battery

“…It is an act of unlearning European habits of practising a discipline or even any mode of thinking that is rooted in a location that might be "provincial" in the sense of its relation to the mainstream or metropolitan Europe. In recent times, it has garnered some attention on the scene of cultural geography (Alias & Wadhwa, 2023;Gosetti et al, 2022) as a methodology to challenge hegemonic spatialities. The project of provincializing is relevant to the spatial reading of the novel as well as its configuration of islandness in terms of pre/colonial history given that it draws attention to an otherwise under-explored literary geography.…”