Defamiliarizing India: Cosmopolitanism as a condition of aesthetic and political Survival

Published: April 5, 2016, 1:33 p.m.

b"Laetitia Zecchini discusses the cosmopolitanism of several post-independence Indian poets and artists. Indian poets and artists situated in specific spaces, such as Arun Kolatkar, from Bombay, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, from Allahabad or Gulammohammed Sheikh from Baroda fashion a cosmopolitanism that must be envisaged as a context of creation, as a practice of writing, reading, translating and creating, and as a project. This project is inseparable from a poetics of 'reworlding' or defamiliarization, from the experience and defense of plurality, and from the 'resilient and inventive strategies for survival' Clifford associates with the notion of discrepant cosmopolitanism."