The rise (in the fall) of Cochin: Provincializing metropolitan spatiality in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh

ABSTRACT

Indian fiction and critical engagements with it have a metropolitan bias. The preference for representations of big cities such as Mumbai in fiction means that non-metropolitan (“provincial”) spaces in India face neglect, literary and otherwise. This article argues for provincializing Indian fiction by exploring non-metropolitan locations as imagined in works of fiction to unpack alternative spatialities. The example offered is Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. In most readings of the novel, Bombay (along with Moorish Spain) is highlighted as a metropolitan model for India. Cochin does not figure in these readings, passed over as if just a random background or setting for the characters to be launched into Mumbai. This article addresses Cochin’s marginalization through investigating the way the island city offers a provincial, alternative, non-metropolitan theorization of spatialities in Indian fiction. The larger objective is to make space for similarly marginalized non-European locales in the discourse of cosmopolitanism.

KEYWORDS:

• Provincializing
• Salman Rushdie
• The Moor’s Last Sigh
• spatiality
• Indian fiction
• Cochin

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jintu Alias

Jintu Alias is an institute fellow (PhD) in the Department of Literature and Languages at SRM University, Andhra Pradesh, India. Her research revolves around the representation of Kochi and its cosmopolitanism in fiction. Some of her work has been published in cultural geographies and Modern Jewish Studies.

Soni Wadhwa

Soni Wadhwa is assistant professor in the Department of Literature and Languages at SRM University, Andhra Pradesh, India. Her research interests include spatiality, Sindhi studies, Buddhist fiction, and digital archiving. Her work has been published in Interventions, Feminist Theology, Modern Jewish Studies, and cultural geographies. Her digital archive PG Sindhi Library is dedicated to post-Partition Sindhi writing published in India.