Cosmopolitan Thought Zones

This volume represents a major contribution to the new field of South Asian intellectual history from a global perspective. It critically examines forms of South Asian cosmopolitanism in the era of anti-colonial agitation. Starting from the assertion that the history of political ideas in South Asia can neither be pictured as the contestation between well-defined 'local' and 'global' epistemes, nor as the battle between 'patriotic' and 'internationalist' perspectives, these essays throw unprecedented light on the intermediate spaces of intellectual encounter and interchange that linked South Asian thinkers to counterparts and conversations worldwide from the late nineteenth century through to independence. By discarding presuppositions about hermetically-sealed local traditions endangered by 'Westernizing' forces, and also by undoing the stubborn tether that ties the study of colonial South Asian thought to the British metropolis alone, the travels of intellectuals that spanned the Indian and Pacific Oceans, from Johannesburg to Tokyo, or the distance from Calcutta to New York, or Bombay to Rome, emerge as significant trajectories for the study of South Asian history within a global horizon. Lateral interactions between colonized groups worldwide, and with other Europes outside Britain and minority Americas constitute a largely unexplored archive for the study of South Asian history.