Indianizing England: Cosmopolitanism in colonial and post-colonial narratives of travel

This dissertation uses the tropes of travel and cosmopolitanism to study the synergistic encounter between Indians traveling to Victorian and post-Imperial England on the one hand and Metropolitan English society on the other. I am particularly interested in exploring the hegemonic imperatives of Empire, its legacy in our postcolonial lives and times, and its possible subversion by narratives of local resistance. For centuries, Indians have been traveling to England and remaking its cultural landscape in their own image. I call this process of Indianizing England “cosmopolitanism.” Foregrounding the important work of anthropologist James Clifford, post-colonial theorists Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall, and diaspora theorists Avtar Brah and Emmanuel S. Nelson, I define cosmopolitanism as a mode of representation, expression, and being that is characterized by an explicitly multicultural investment in plurality, egalitarianism, and a generous inclusivity.; Chapters One and Two examine the narratives of Anglophone Indians—like Behramji Malabari, R. C. Dutt, Cornelia Sorabji, and Olive Christian Malvery—who lived and worked in Victorian England. In this section, I particularly concentrate on the ways in which colonial subjects insert themselves into the representational economy of metropolitan culture. Through a close reading of wide-ranging archival sources from the nineteenth century, I hope to rehabilitate some of these narratives previously consigned to the margins of history and to explore their impact on the metropolitan psyche.; Chapters Three and Four move forward in time and situate the tropes of travel and cosmopolitanism within the genre of post-colonial writing. I look at a variety of “travel-oriented” literatures, like memoirs and travelogues by V. S Naipaul and Nirad C. Chaudhuri and diasporic novels by Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, and Meera Syal. Each chapter theorizes the different types of cosmopolitanism that are occasioned by the specific material and historical conditions within which travel is engendered. The dissertation as a whole focuses on how the forgotten narratives of a handful of Indians passing through the nineteenth-century Imperial Metropolis set in motion the process of Indianizing England as well as provide the foundation for the literatures of a numerically vast South Asian diaspora settled in, rather than sojourning through, post-Imperial England.