Cosmopolitan Nationalism
The multilingualism and cross-cultural sensibilities that shape texts by authors such as Achebe, Rushdie, and others, also underpins a distinctive cosmopolitanism which is the product of modern empires.
Schwarz stresses that imperial literary legacies in the case of Brazil mean that oppositions between the original and the imitative, the foreign and the national, are unhelpful; they obscure “the share of the foreign in the nationally specific, of the imitative in the original and the original in the imitative.”[872] Borges makes a similar point about “The Argentine Writer,” arguing that the idea that Argentinian poetry must abound in Argentine differential traits and in “local color” is a recent European “import.” He points out that it would be absurd to say that Shakespeare was not an English writer because he did not stick to English subjects; just as the use of Italian subjects belongs to the tradition of English literature, so also the Argentinian literary tradition, he argues, is the “whole of Western culture.”[873]Borges's position points to the complex relationships between cosmopolitan expansiveness and the nation's uniqueness in anti-imperial and “national” literature. Gandhi's Hind Swaraj (1909) exemplifies such complexities as a cosmopolitan nationalist text because it crosses both linguistic and geographical boundaries. It was published in Gujarati in 1909 and in an English translation by Gandhi in 1910; the text was therefore a multilingual event, working with and through the multilingual environment of the British Empire in India and South Africa. Its publication in South Africa by Gandhi's own press points to the enabling role of the diasporic experience in defining Gandhi's key anti-imperial ideas. The manuscript was written by Gandhi while on board a ship, sailing between England and South Africa, so its inception is testimony to the importance of the experiences and ideas of travel to the political consciousness of Indian nationalist writers.[874] Gandhi's book was a response to the debate among Indians outside India on the justifiability of violence against imperial rule.
It participated in a global exchange in which Indian revolutionaries in North America, such as Taraknath Das (1884— 1958), the Russian novelist Tolstoy, and Gandhi were interlocutors. The text uses European history for its own purposes, and one of its chapters draws on Italian unification for inspiration. The appendix lists works by Plato, Mazzini, Tolstoy, and Ruskin, bringing together authors in a globalized intertextuality which crosses linguistic, cultural, and regional boundaries. Given the importance of dialogue as a philosophical method in both Sanskrit and in European philosophy, the text's reworking of this form as a dialogue between an editor and reader also has cross- cultural resonances.European imperial expansion and the global circulation of ideas gave colonized intellectuals like Gandhi opportunities to dissect Western ideologies and to construct hybrid species of ideas that appealed to both local audiences and the wider world.[875] Cosmopolitan thought zones were a crucial dimension to the aspirational cosmopolitanism of anti-imperial thinkers and writers from the Indian subcontinent. The circulation of people, concepts, knowledge, texts, and fashions galvanized nationalist politics and inspired artistic and literary production.[876] The web-like character of the British Empire with horizontal linkages between colonies also facilitated inter-colonial exchanges and the flow of texts, bodies of knowledge, and concepts.[877] The interleaving of personal identity, a transregional India, and world politics is effected in the formal techniques and writing styles of Jawaharlal Nehru's autobiographies, whose distinctive cosmopolitanism is worked into the text in a myriad of ways to define a secular India.[878] This cosmopolitanism is also indicative of Nehru's intertwined careers as a nationalist politician and an activist participating in a number of transnational solidarity movements.[879] In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries nationalists sometimes worked in conjunction and sometimes at odds with these movements, shifting between identifying with the territorial concept of the nation and expressing notions of solidarity across space with only loose associations with state institutions. By the 1930s a variety of international political movements had come into being, with inter-empire connections
conditioning the development of movements such as pan-Africanism, negritude, and communism.[880]