“Cosmopolitanism Within”: The case of R.K. Narayan’s fictional Malgudi

Abstract

Postcolonial criticism challenges the normative conceptions of cosmopolitanism rooted in metropolitan cultures by inviting locally-bred, subaltern and third world experiences as forces of intervention and interruption in shaping universal(ist) ethics for a shared humanity. Nevertheless, these approaches remain more speculative than substantive, and they lack the empirical currency required for grounding local cosmopolitanism(s) outside of diasporic, transnational, exilic contexts. Through a close reading of R.K. Narayan’s fictional town of Malgudi, this paper explores its metonymical implications for a local cosmopolitanism (“locopolitan”): its unique rural and urban constellations; and an ethno-humanist narrative drawn along the “locopolitan” lines as opposed to the metropolitan (pre)conditioning of cosmopolitan experience. Such a reading aims at opening up an empirical basis for local cosmopolitanism within the postcolonial framework.

Keywords:

• Malgudi
• metropolis and colony
• postcolonialism
• local cosmopolitanisms

Notes

1. Lungi is a distinctly Tamil costume, though Narayan’s reference to Singapore is a deliberate invocation of the diasporic context of the Tamil settlers outside of India. I would like to thank Birte Heidemann, Ines Detmers, Dieter Riemenschneider and Lucienne Loh for commenting on earlier drafts of this essay.

2. The parenthetical prefix “proto” is adopted from Spivak’s reading of Marx as a “proto-deconstructionist”, one who is not unaware of the representational failures of “class consciousness” among the French peasants (qtd in Morton 109). By the same token, Narayan’s Malgudi Man is not unaware of the “world” outside of Malgudi.

3. See Gikandi (22–35) and Spencer (36–47) for a recent of summary of the relevant debates in postcolonial studies.

4. There are, however, a few notable exceptions: Shompa Lahiri’s depiction of Brahmo Cosmopolitanism based on Tagore’s writing; Julie Mullaney’s analysis of transnational feminism in Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things. Nonetheless, there is a general lack in registering the postcolonial “local” as a site for producing the cosmopolitan imagination outside of the “transnational” and “diasporic” enclaves; see Black (45–65) and Knowles (1–11).

5. This is analogous to Bill Ashcroft’s notion of ‘transnation’ as a site of diasporic encounters within the cultural spheres of a nation-state (72–85). See also Bill Ashcroft’s essay in this special issue.

6. I am aware of the fact that Harvey is not a postcolonial theorist per se, but his writings have a considerable impact on the emergence of “postcolonial geography” in the late 1990s; see Popke (517) and Pavan Kumar (653).

7. The infusion of drawings in fictional texts is known as “intermediality” or “intermedial fictions”; see Cecile Sandten’s essay in this special issue.

8. Though I am wary of the “Hindu-centrist” or “anti-secular” undertones of this approach to Narayan’s work, there is enough defence for Narayan’s well-intended, anti-essentialist, anti-casteist reception of Hinduism: see Riemenschneider (164–228).