Kochi: provincialising postcolonial metro-cosmopolitan spatialities

On cosmopolitan-metropolitan equation

The spatial turn in critical thought ought to be termed metropolitan thought. Foregrounded by an association with ‘mental life’ ³ and philosophised in terms of portraits of various great cities, ⁴ the metropolis has dominated spatial explorations in terms of geography, philosophy and literary theory, among other things. The idea of assertion of space as ‘postmodern geographies’ is also premised on the model of the metropolis. ⁵ The focus on ‘great or big cities’ ⁶ in various ways such as in terms of the practice of flanerie ⁷ or rebellion ⁸ in spatial or geographical scholarship reveals a preoccupation with metropolitan areas of the world.

This metropolitan model used to be at work when producing the discourse about the colony because the colony was thought of in relation to the metropolis. However, it also continues to be used to describe the postcolonial world as power relations continue to be conceptualised in coloniser-colonised relationships. ⁹ The expression ‘metropolis’ refers to the seat of culture and of world power ¹⁰ and has also been critiqued for it in various ways, two of which need to highlighted here:. The metropolis or the metropolitan thinking symbolises the centre from which the coloniser would rule a colony ¹¹ and is also used as the de facto site for urbanity. ¹² However, the critique of the metropolitan stance of power has not been substantially brought to bear on the way postcolonial cities are designated and theorised: a lot of this scholarship reinstates the idea of ‘new’ ¹³ metropolis rather than contest it. The idea of ‘postcolonial spatialities’ ¹⁴ gets addressed in terms of ‘the postcolonial city’ that includes London, Nairobi and Bombay, ¹⁵ and through the new metropolises of the postcolonial nations: Sekondi, ¹⁶ Durban, ¹⁷ Mumbai ¹⁸ or Delhi ¹⁹ to name a few.

Most of these cities, in other words, are celebrated in the vein of the metropolises that postcolonialism could have envisioned to deuniversalise. Postcolonialism’s inability to do so calls to mind critiques around its methods and critiques that also throw light on its geographical and spatial stance. For instance, back in 1992, Ella Shohat wrote, ‘Despite its dizzying multiplicity of positionalities, post-colonial theory has curiously not addressed the politics of location of the very term post-colonial’, which needs to be interrogated by ‘raising questions about its ahistorical and universalizing deployments, and its potentially depoliticizing implications’. ²⁰ Indeed, one way to address the concern around its tendency to reinforce universalism could be to conceive non-metropolitan positions to generate a praxis of politics as well as spatiality. In other words, postcolonialism needs to do more than uphold the idea of great cities or metropolises as seats of postcolonial cultures. It needs to do something other than look for a ‘new’ metropolis to think beyond the metropolis! This is the spatial challenge that postcolonialism must face.

Postcolonialism has another spatial challenge to address as well. Concomitant with the designation of metropolitan is the idea of the cosmopolitan. Most of the ‘great’ metropolises – Western or postcolonial – are also hailed as spaces of cosmopolitanism. In this article, we refer to cosmopolitanism as the discourse around harmonious coexistence. A closer, spatial examination of this notion indicates that it tends to be associated with major Western city centres displaying ethnic diversity of population, a commitment to universalism and a greater wealth of opportunities in terms of financial success, diverse industries, technological advancement and entertainment. It is another dimension of metropolitan’ism’ that considers major Western city centres as focus of study. ²¹ This begs the question: are there no non-western, precolonial expressions of cosmopolitanism? Are cultural geographies associated with cosmopolitanism available only in the form of Western metropolises?

Given the ‘long history of arrogance’ ²² of Western cosmopolitanism, various calls for explorations of non-Western cosmopolitanisms have been put forth. ²³ These are calls for ‘actually existing practices’, ²⁴ ‘everyday cosmopolitanisms’, ²⁵ and ‘a plurality of cosmopolitanisms and ways of engaging with the social world’. ²⁶ Responding to these calls would involve dissociating cosmopolitanism from the western global city. Further, As Rizvi and Choo suggest, such a project would involve studying ‘epistemic and metaphysical assumptions of particular cultural traditions’. ²⁷ A pursuit of such particular traditions considered from the point of view of non-metropolitan spaces deserves to be discussed here. Among the existing contributions to alternative cosmopolitanisms is the idea of vernacular cosmopolitanism. Pnina Werbner explains it as a philosophy and a practice:

As a concept that joins contradictory notions of local specificity and universal enlightenment, vernacular cosmopolitanism can be located at the crux of current debates on cosmopolitanism. These pose the question whether the local, parochial, rooted, culturally specific and demotic may coexist with the translocal, transnational, transcendent, elitist, enlightened, universalist and modernist – whether boundary-crossing demotic cultures and migrations may be compared to the sophisticated cultures of globetrotting travellers or the moral worldview of deracinated intellectuals. Indeed, the question is often reversed to ask whether there can even be an enlightened normative cosmopolitanism which is not rooted, in the final analysis, in patriotic and culturally committed loyalties and understandings. ²⁸

To look for vernacular cosmopolitanism is to look for rooted practices outside the metropolis. For all its claims to transcendence or universality, a metropolitan bias to cosmopolitanism stops one from entering into the local, deeming it parochial.

Given this theorisation about location of cosmopolitanism in the metropolitan space (which we identify as metro-cosmopolitanism), the authors of this article suggest that it is with the turn to provincialising that postcolonialism can identify indigenous resources to situate cosmopolitanism as a varied practice present outside the postcolonial metropolis. We suggest that these resources can be found, historicised and upheld as precolonial models of cosmopolitanism as a way of furthering the decolonising project. We first engage with talk about the nature and limits of Mumbai’s metro-cosmopolitanism and then discuss provincialising as a way of contesting metro-cosmopolitanism. Following Dipesh Chakravarty’s idea of provincialising Europe, we build on the act of provincialising in terms of spatiality. We then point towards Kochi, a non-metropolitan city in Kerala, a South Indian province in India to discuss its ways of provinciality as an alternative to metro-cosmopolitanism.

Mumbai: the limits of metro-cosmopolitanism

Some intervention to take non-Western locations into consideration in discussions of non-Western cosmopolitanism involves examining cities such as Dubai and Singapore, ²⁹ Cairo, ³⁰ or Baku, ³¹ and Accra. ³² However, these cities again come to be described as ‘great’ or ‘largest’ or ‘metropolitan’ cities. Thus, there is a need to locate the Indian cosmopolitanism outside the Western definitions of metropolitanism.

Mumbai has especially received a lot of attention as a quintessential cosmopolitan city and setting for fiction in which it is represented as home to a very diverse population living in what is perceived as harmony with each other. This discourse around Mumbai is quite vast but a few examples should suffice to understand the breadth of the argument of cosmopolitan Mumbai. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie writes, ‘In Bombay all Indias met and merged’ ³³ This Mumbai/India contiguity makes it a city with ‘specific qualities that has made it particularly compelling for anglophone novelists exploring questions of nation and Indianness’. ³⁴ This sensibility is not present in fiction but is also present in non-fiction accounts of the city as well. For instance, Gyan Prakash notes that Mumbai

is the ur-modern metropolis in India. Kolkata (Calcutta), Chennai (Madras), and Delhi are also major Indian cities, but unlike them Mumbai flaunts its image as a cosmopolitan metropolis by transcending its regional geography . . . the city’s position as the hub of manufacturing, finance, trade, advertising, media, and the film industry, people from all over India have washed up on the island. ³⁵

Apart from celebrations of Mumbai as India, scholarly and theoretical discussions about the city talk about Mumbai as a model for India. Ashcroft goes a step further and remarks that Mumbai is a sine qua non of the postcolonial city. ³⁶ Just as Mumbai was seen as standing for India in an optimistic sense in the passage from Moor cited above, it has also been a model, as it were, for the decline of cosmopolitanism in India. Sujata Patel and Thorner point out that in the decline of cosmopolitan order as well, Mumbai is a ‘metaphor for India’, ³⁷ its rechristening from Bombay to Mumbai in the 1990s as formalising a transformation that unfolded slowly over a period of time. ³⁸ Similar arguments about the decline of cosmopolitanism in Mumbai ³⁹ reveal the attention and burden Mumbai has had to bear as a city representative of India. Indian metropolises, in general, have lost their cosmopolitan credentials: while Suryakant Waghmore writes about the rise of ‘Hindu cosmopolitanism’ ⁴⁰ in Mumbai that closes its doors to alterity, Janaki Nair points out, most Indian cities have become battlegrounds where ‘sons of the soil’ fight those perceived as outsiders (with the example of Bengaluru as a case in point). ⁴¹ Similarly, Aju James argues that underneath the making of what comes across as a ‘global city’ in Mumbai is a site for the making of a national identity. ⁴² Metropolitan spaces with claims to legacies that are beyond national have increasingly come to be noted for the parochial mindsets that they had initially been positioned against.

It is in this context that turning to alternative sites and models within postcoloniality makes sense. While rural cosmopolitanism has also been discussed as a way to understand South Asian modernities, such initiatives into exploring alternatives to urban cosmopolitan identities are very limited. ⁴³ It would only enrich postcolonial spatiality and cosmopolitanism if similar alternative locales of cosmopolitanism are discovered. The discovery involves looking at smaller cities: their nature, the choices they make and the experiences they foster. Perhaps where metropolitan vision has disappointed Indian society, these smaller, ‘provincial’ alternatives that better resonate with the majority of regional identities within India can help define different ways of expressing or performing cosmopolitanism. What is this provincialising and how can it contribute as an alternative to metro-cosmopolitanism? These are the questions we turn to next.

Provinciality in the spatial sense: stepping into smaller cities

In her overview of postcolonialism and cultural geography, Catherine Nash points out:

Critics argue that postcolonialism is overgeneralizing and insensitive to the specificities of temporal and spatial contexts, that colonial discourse analysis legitimizes a renewed interest in the texts of the west rather than their displacement; that postcolonialism locates all the world in the traumatic but ultimately progressive trajectory of western development . . . . The imaginative geographies of colonialism both persist and are reworked in the name of globalization. ⁴⁴

We suggest that postcolonial metro-cosmopolitanism is one of the ways in which the ‘imaginative geographies of colonialism’ come to inform the postcolony’s understanding of itself. To imagine new geographies, postcolonial identities could leave the metropolis aside and turn to that which is provincial. ‘Provincialising’ is seen as an important strategy of postcolonialism in its project of locating new loci to contest the exercise of colonising.

‘Provincial’ stands for the spatialities, and thereby mindsets, outside the metropolis. While the metropolis stands for plurality, diversity, risk taking, widening of opportunities and openness to other cultures, the provincial seems to stand for stances opposed to these. ‘Great’ cosmopolitanism almost always seems to be located in the former. Together, the metro-cosmopolitanism constructed around major cities creates a barrier around exploring alternative spatialities. What chance do towns stand in this narrative of greatness associated with cities? In this discursivity, towns and thereby the ontology of provinciality stands alone. Even the countryside has received an in-depth treatment in different ways – of which Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City stands out. ⁴⁵ What do we make of a provincial space in the sense of a ‘townhood’, or what chance does it stand in terms of being adopted as a lens to rethink spatiality as existing beyond ‘ur-modern’ metropolises?

One way to incorporate such spatialities in the process of balancing metropolitan sensibilities in spatial theory is to ‘provincialise’ space itself. In Provincialising Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues for a need to decentre ‘an imaginary figure that remains deeply embedded in cliched and shorthand forms in some everyday habits of thought that invariably subtend attempts in the social sciences to address questions of political modernity in South Asia’ (italics original). ⁴⁶ In the context of the metro-cosmopolitanism spatiality discussed above, one of these habits is the practice of creating a metropolitan imaginary within the postcolony as visible in the creation of the Bombay model of cosmopolitanism. The commitment of postcolonial scholarship to ‘engage the universals’ ⁴⁷ in the project of provincialising Europe is unpacked by Chakrabarty in the questions of the historical and the political – questions that are unique to postcolonial context, especially that of India. However, this historical and political provincialising is incomplete without factoring in the spatial question. In an absence of locations outside the metropolises, postcolonialism is in danger of ‘universalis[ing] itself’. ⁴⁸ While Europe is being imagined in terms outside that of the metropolis – consider Janet Wolff’s ‘Manchester, capital of the nineteenth century’ – similar explorations need to be carried out to de-universalise metro-cosmopolitan postcolonialism. ⁴⁹ This does not mean that provincialising needs to be only oppositional. We venture into an exploration of a rethinking of provinciality as an alternative to metro-cosmopolitanism. And while acknowledging that cosmopolitanism cannot be isolated from its European roots, we suggest that the solution is not to let go of it but to provincialise it in the spatial sense by looking at the lopsided map of discussions of cosmopolitanisms and by exploring its practice in geographical locations outside the metropolis which can be defined as metro-cosmopolitanism. The move towards the lateral and the micro in the form of locating the non-metropolitan, we suggest, is a way of engaging with non-metropolitan landscapes and avoiding the tendency to attempt the planetary, which once again sounds like a universalising gesture.

Similarly, as argued by Krishnamachari and Komu, ‘. . . decolonisation led to the rise of a new international, and national order. This new order constantly challenges the supposed insufficiency of the pre-dated concepts of modernity, culture, art and politics by reconfiguring these concepts and ideas within the larger framework of cosmopolitanism’. ⁵⁰ The need to identify resources for cosmopolitics in non-Western cosmopolitan traditions ⁵¹ requires that we explore alternative sites and update our understanding of lived cosmopolitanisms outside the metropolises. One model to articulate these alternative sites is the idea of ‘smaller’ (as opposed to ‘small’) cities. ⁵² This idea of smaller cities takes ‘a relational and relative understanding of smallness’. ⁵³ Indeed, smaller cities have generated some interest by re-branding themselves, ⁵⁴ by refashioning themselves as ‘temp-towns’, ⁵⁵ by inventing different ways to attempt ‘cultural regeneration’, ⁵⁶ and through various cultural activities. ⁵⁷ These attempts at understanding ‘subaltern urbanization’ ⁵⁸ suggest that not all urbanisation is characterised by capitalist modernity. ⁵⁹ Some attention to the uniqueness of small cities exists in the context of Western cities ⁶⁰ but Indian cities have yielded fascinating insights as well. ⁶¹

The vernacular, the subaltern and for our purposes, the provincial do speak. However, they demand ‘newer ways of hearing’. ⁶² We argue that Kochi is one such space that demands newer ways of theorising and practising cosmopolitanism. It is not glamorous like Mumbai which is known for far wider economic opportunities, and hailed as ‘maximum city’ ⁶³ or the city that never sleeps or the resilient city. It is not ‘sired by colonial power’. It is not a 19th century product of modernity that came into being after the Industrial Revolution. The mobilities, cohabitation, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism and other expressions of exchange and proximity are not consequences of ‘modernity at large’ in the form of globalisation. Unlike Mumbai, Kochi is not a space informed by recent pasts. It is ‘provincial’ in that its model is not a model of success of all kinds – financial and cultural – luring Indians from other states here.

To approach Kochi without the tags of these successes is to make space for many such ‘provincialities’ that are closer to smaller, regional identities but have great histories. It is imperative to see what factors have shaped cosmopolitanism here and to see how it has experienced modernity (and its accompanying metro-cosmopolitanism) before modernity with the arrival of traders in/since ancient times and of multiple communities that settled down here. This is a cosmopolitanism that is not foregrounded after the industrial revolution and is not informed by the industrial revolution or the steam engine. It is animated by maritime trade. Such a cosmopolitan framing helps us understand Kochi in interesting ways. It speaks volumes about how to approach other small cities in India and elsewhere. That is, one need not turn to metropolises as benchmarks to fashion a lens to understand what these small cities are like. The very idea of metropolis is a colonial/postcolonial one. In the larger project of engaging with postcolonial amnesia that this article began with, such a framing helps recall what postcolonial societies can regain in defining themselves. Some ways to conceptualise such a lens include looking for histories of geographies, examining histories of the harmony these spaces have demonstrated and looking for ways in which geography may have enabled communal harmony here. We first look at its precolonial history through the narratives by Europeans to discuss the cosmopolitan fabric of society they highlight about Kochi. We then turn to the contextual harmony found here as commented upon by various scholars. We finally look at the traces of Kochi’s cosmopolitan tradition found in cultural practices today.

Kochi: history of a geography

Neither a city nor a village, Kochi (also known as Cochin, the Anglicised name) is arguably the strongest candidate for provincialising metro-cosmopolitanism in India. What follows is putting together different elements that together highlight the unique cultural landscape of Kochi in the spirit of ‘sociological impressionism’ put forth by David Frisby ⁶⁴ and exemplified by Janet Wolff. ⁶⁵

Kochi is a major port city in the southern ‘state’ (equivalent of a county or province) of Kerala in India. But it is also not a city: it is a region that shape-shifts as kingdom, region, city, island and backwaters depending on the context. It has a fascinating geography and rich history of transnational connections and trade. E P Unny, one of India’s famous cartoonists writes, ‘There is singular consensus on the port town’s origin, perhaps because it’s attributed to geography, not history’. ⁶⁶

Indeed, Kochi came into existence and/or rose to prominence around 1341 CE when floods buried the famed ancient port Muziris as referred to in ancient Greek and Roman sources. This new port of Kochi, as it emerged in the 14th century, was a natural port with deeper ship channels. ⁶⁷ In his book Cochin Saga Robert Bristow, a 20th century British engineer who worked on developing Cochin port in the newly independent India writes about Cochin as a glorious place since antiquity: ‘Muziris had shifted itself some 18 miles to Cochin and all was as it was before Rome came on the scene. The old merchants at Muziris, especially Jews and Christians read the signs of the times and shifted to Cochin as soon as the new outlet became more or less stable’. ⁶⁸ The identity of Kochi is thus forever tied to the Muziris (Cranganore) known to the ancient Romans, also confirmed by recent excavations nearby. ⁶⁹

Rev. Thomas Whitehouse, a 19th century British priest, also notes the history of Kochi’s geography as a continuation of Muziris or Cranganore:

Cranganore is the Portuguese style of spelling of the Malayalim name Kodungalur, which was one of the ports frequented by the first traders from Europe who found their way to the Malabar Coast via the Cape of Good Hope. for many centuries before this, in due succession, settlements of Jews, Christians, Manicheans and Mahometans were formed in this town or its suburbs. ⁷⁰

Even though Ashis Nandy – whose study of Cochin’s cosmopolitan is perhaps a very comprehensive one and more on which below – rejects history ‘as a guide to the ‘living past’ of Cochin, what he notes before getting into an anthropological discussion of the inhabitants of Cochin highlights the role of geography in the history of Cochin:

. . . to many Cochinis, the city is only apparently located in one corner of India in a small state. To them, it is at the centre of the Indian Ocean, presiding over the memories of these sea routes and a once-flourishing spice trade. To these Cochinis, West Asia, parts of East Africa and Southeast Asia often seem, defying their own nationalist sentiments, psychologically closer than Delhi. ⁷¹

Cochin’s cosmopolitanism has a distinct geographical dimension (as opposed to only a socio-cultural one): it is a ‘locally rooted cosmopolitanism that is enriched by other places’. ⁷² This being enriched by other places is a new expression of cosmopolitanism. It is not predicated on a metropolitan definition of cosmopolitanism.

Writing in the 16th century, the Portuguese writer Duarte Barbosa gives an account of a busy Cochin inhabited by merchants and people from different communities. Cochin grew to become a very cosmopolitan space where different communities like Jews, Anglo-Indians, Latin Christians, Jacobites, Muslims and Hindus live together. Regarding the cultural landscape of Cochin, Bristow remarks, ‘A small Roman Catholic Church could be found every mile or two . . . together with Jacobite and other branches. And of course there are Hindu temples, the Roman and Anglican churches, and in Cochin itself one Jewish synagogue for those white Jews’. ⁷³

This diversity extends to today’s Kochi, and in several ways, talking about its present invariably invokes its past. As Krishnamachari and Komu, the first directors of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale argue, it is a city known for ‘the confluence of heterogeneity, a city where more than 30 non-Malayali communities have, over the centuries, come to find refuge, trade, proselytise and much else, only to develop roots and integrate into the local society’. ⁷⁴ Though its cultural landscape seems to have been overshadowed by Bombay in spite of being a predecessor to Bombay, Kochi suggests the great possibility that its older, deep rooted ways of being could be upheld as examples of cosmopolitan ethos as evident in the testimony that Barbosa, Whitehouse and Bristow give to Kochi’s premodern, precolonial identity. Their accounts help develop an alternative to engage with non-European ways of cohabitation. Because Kochi’s ethos predates European enunciation of cosmopolitanism, it becomes a starting point to begin mapping non-metro-cosmopolitan spaces in geography as well as in history. It indicates that people have not merely been coexisting because they do (or did) not have any other option. Rather, they have consciously chosen to carry this legacy of harmony forward in multiple ways.

Thus, mobility and prosperity – which are usually associated with Bombay’s enigma – are embedded in Kochi (unlike Bombay, where it was manufactured or co-created by the colonial power). Similarly, the model of cosmopolitanism at work in Kochi suggests a cosmopolitan ethos in another vein that helps transcend modern, postcolonial models of cosmopolitanism. As Krishnamachari and Komu argue: ‘Kochi’s cosmopolitanism is one that has been worn by generations in Kerala as a badge of honour even as it has led to a series of struggles, time and again, generating a curiosity about current realities, a complex one’. ⁷⁵ Turning to Kochi through the framing of cosmopolitanism also makes space for understanding cities outside the rhetoric of development. Since it is called the financial capital of Kerala, it is likely to be subsumed into that rhetoric of development. Its cosmopolitanism helps situate its identity in alternative ways of heritage.

Kochi: the case of contextual harmony

While Bombay expresses economy-based harmony (in that it brings people close to each other amidst the ‘hustle’ that has come to be associated with the city), Kochi has more contextual harmony. Refugees, immigrants and traders had a more syncretic lifestyle in Kochi in comparison to Bombay. These contexts are gradually emerging in ethnographic and creative writing contexts.

Ashis Nandy’s study of the practice of cosmopolitanism in the city, till date the only comprehensive study, is a case for the need to look at ‘precolonial traditions of cultural pluralism’ in Cochin in a ‘search for alternative cosmopolitanism’ (italics original). ⁷⁶ Pointing out that Cochin is largely forgotten by the larger world, Nandy notes that ‘it has recently become accessible to non-Indians, particularly if they happen to be from one of the countries with which India’s relationship is tense’. ⁷⁷ Nandy goes on to discuss the ethic of hospitality and pluralism that its citizens value it for while being aware of its over 600 years of history. The awareness uncannily gets translated into living peacefully in the present while also being aware of the struggles front the past:

Cochin has seen adventurers, invaders, and pirates. It has seen people seeking refuge from oppression and discrimination in other parts of the world. It has also seen occasional communal skirmishes among different communities, but for centuries it has not seen any bloodbath, not even a proper riot. This does not mean that there is no hostility among communities. Nor does it mean that communities do not have their own distinctive written and unwritten memories of past injustices and violence against them . . . . Virtually every community has its ‘history’ of struggle and believes it to be the best, if not in the world, certainly in Cochin. Every community also has its own hierarchy of communities, in which it places the others, according to a remembered or mythic past. Each community sees some communities as good and others as bad. There are also, in many cases, apparently historicized memories of how other communities and one’s own have fought in the past. Even these memories do not lead to impassioned hatred. ⁷⁸

Kochi’s credentials, as delineated by Nandy, have a striking similarity to the cosmopolitan ethic of harmonious living with the other. He is joined by several voices talking about the Kochi variety of cosmopolitanism. Unny observes, ‘Just about everything except the fishermen on little canoes fitted with rusty Yamaha outboard engines, are a couple of centuries old, or so are you assured’. . . . Kochi ‘had changed hands far too many times to tell tragedy from farce. What stayed through a succession of masters was a flow of commerce that brought in its wake a range of ethnic groups and languages. And a unique culture of coexistence'. ⁷⁹ For instance, Jews who settled here were not interested in colonising or evangelising; they only wanted to belong ⁸⁰ by creating a niche between Jewish and Kochi’s value systems. ⁸¹

Apart from ethnographic studies, fiction has emerged in the recent times as a way to express the roots of cosmopolitanism in Kochi. The Kochi novel, as this fiction has come to be termed, ⁸² has sought to make up for the largely missing historical documentation and supplementing whatever little there is to visualise what it has been like to live in Kochi ever since its birth in 1341 CE. These works build on the travellers’ accounts discussed in the previous section to trace an imagination of cosmopolitanism that is organic rather than forced.

Kochi: geography as culture as cosmopolitanism

Kochi’s cosmopolitan life was not always based on trade. It was also a necessity – based on geography. For example, the easiest and most reliable connection to the Laccadives Sea and consequently to the Lakshadweep Island was Kochi. More importantly, it was not just a physical geographical connection (which it still continues to be in various capacities, for example, bird watching) ⁸³ but cultural as well. Kochi was the connection between mainland India and the Laccadives Islands for none of the other ports were as open in terms of cultural exchange as Kochi. Kochi has been open towards new people, new culture and even new geography.

This geography created a unique culture here which compels Krishnamachari and Komu to hail this port of call as ‘a biennale before the Biennale’. ⁸⁴ Biennales come to be organised around cities that meet specific criteria around aesthetics and site-specificity. While the question of aesthetics can be very abstract and/or general, the choice of a location made on the basis of site-specificity can be quite telling about the intellectual and cultural currency that some spaces enjoy in a nation. In the discussion around which site would be best suited to host a biennale in India, Kochi was chosen as the site that would go on to host the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the first edition of which was organised by Krishnamachari and Bose in 2012 with renowned artist Jitish Kallat as the curator. On the occasion of the Biennale, Shashi Tharoor, author and Member of Parliament from Thiruvananthapuram (south of Kochi), writes, ‘The present-day vibrancy of Kochi linked with the mythical glories of the ancient port of Muziris, both centres of commerce, of a cosmopolitan world-view that is not merely based on the exchange of goods and services but above all else of ideas’. ⁸⁵

The influence of Kochi’s geography has penetrated cultural narratives. Many regions and geographies in India integrate ancient Indian mythology with local history. For instance, most locales claim that they are connected to or have been referred to the Ramayana or the Mahabharata. However, in Kochi, the connections go beyond Hindu mythology and have percolated into the local culture while drawing from Christianity, Arab culture and Chinese culture as a consequence of the process of integrating the traders and the ‘strangers’ (in the Simmelian sense) into local culture. ⁸⁶

Some of this influence is visible in architecture. The landscape of Kochi is dotted by some really old places of worship: St. Francis Church, the first European church in India built by the Portuguese; Cochin Club established by the Dutch; and three very old mosques with Harbour Juma Masjid or Puthirikkad Masjid as the second mosque in India (after Cheraman Masjid in Kodungallur nearby). Another evidence of such visibility of the other cultures on Kochi is the story Cochinis about the name Cochin which is said to have been bestowed upon the region by a Chinese emperor. The ancient Chinese fishing nets – which are not found anywhere outside China – are still found in use in Cochin.

Then there is the practice of burning Pappanji, an effigy with similarities to the Santa Claus, at the Cochin Carnival:

Burning Pappanji is a combination of Jewish and Indian cultures. While Pappanji’s apparel - suit and hat - is foreign, the act of burning is distinctly India. During the Hanukkah festival, the Jews in Kochi used to burn the effigy of the Syrian-Greek emperor Antiochus as a marker of protest against the seizure of the Temple in Jerusalem in 168 BCE and then the decision to make observance of Judaism an offense punishable by death. Though the ritual is no more [sic] practised in Kochi, the ritual of burning of Pappanji could be influenced by it. ⁸⁷

Similarly, from the Jewish synagogue and its Chinese blue and white tiles, to the Dutch Palace, traces of culture can be seen everywhere. It is a landscape that has absorbed ‘foreign’ or ‘stranger’ presence very deeply into its fabric. Jeychandran refers to the shrines to the Kappiri in Kochi as symbols of alternative history. These shrines to African deities or spirits, rather abstract and formless, ⁸⁸ are found on roadsides and forests and are maintained by the people of the locality. Similarly, Kochi’s theatre form, Chavittu Nadakam, is a ‘Portuguese hybrid’. ⁸⁹ It is a dance drama that came into existence during the Portuguese rule over the region. It is akin to the Western opera but its content is the praise of Roman Emperors such as Charlemagne and is performed wearing European costumes. Chavittu Nadakam is written in pidgin Latin and Senthamil. It is more European than Kathakali, the dance form associated with Kerala. ⁹⁰

Further, the prevalence of culture in Kochi’s geography is not just inward-flowing – from distant lands to Kochi. It is also a presence that goes outwards. Unny puts it quite eloquently: ‘To the Portuguese Kochi became ‘Little Lisbon’, to the Dutch ‘homely Holland’ and to the English ‘Mini England’. In his day, the European master must have felt quite at home here’. ⁹¹ All these instances point towards the richness of Kochi as a locale outside the metro-cosmopolitan model available when it comes to engaging with geography and spatiality. Such examples of co-created cultural memories indicate that Kochi’s cosmopolitanism is not a reluctant or tolerated coexistence. It has witnessed an internalisation of cosmopolitanism as consciousness in the form of concrete cultural markers.

Conclusion

The metropolis is not just a location. As Basaldua-Sun observes, the metropolis gets identified as the model for urbanity. The metropolis has become a framework to gauge geographies and define locations and as centers of power and attention. Thus, the metropolis is also an idea, and more so, in the postcolonial context. As evidenced in the way the postcolonial project of decentering the (European) metropolis, postcoloniality ends up creating further metropolises of its own. Because of this focus on the metropolis, cities such as Mumbai receive attention for being cosmopolitan. In our project of provincialising metro-cosmopolitanism, we pay heed to Devy’s call to address the larger issue of postcolonial amnesia by recovering precolonial narratives and knowledges of history, geography and coexistence.

Taking cue from the work of Werbner, P. Cheah and B. Robbins and Rizvi and Choo regarding finding alternatives to Western cosmopolitanism, we have sought to provincialise European metro-cosmopolitanism by turning to ‘small(er)’ – to borrow Cook’s idiom – postcolonial cities such as Kochi. By integrating the work of commentators on Kochi’s history and present – Nandy, Unny, Krishnamachari and Komu, Bristow, Whitehouse, Barbosa, Jeychandran, Ninan, Raphy, Puthussery and Tharoor – we present a narrative of Kochi as a site that demonstrates older, precolonial instances of harmonious coexistence. As Dilip Menon adds to what Nandy has identified as an alternative, precolonial tradition of cosmopolitanism, the cosmopolitanism found in Kochi through a provincialised lens is ‘a locally rooted cosmopolitanism that is enriched by other places’.

These interlocutors from different domains – art, history, cosmopolitanism, ethnography and memoir – have helped us move away from the concept’s European orientation. It is a very creative move – that of shifting attention laterally and engaging with the geographical dimensions of the task of provincialising. Specifically, because spatiality emerged as a challenge to the bias of temporality in culture and critical theory, it should not allow itself to be restricted to a metropolitan bias within its vision of engaging with geography in newer, local ways. It is in this context that the domination of the metropolis (with Mumbai as a case in point) on the postcolonial scene deserves better scrutiny. We have presented Kochi as an example to suggest alternatives to metro-cosmopolitanism of the postcolonial imagination. Due to its island situation, it receives visitors while also keeping itself immune to any homogenising influences from the mainland. This harmonious coexistence has left concrete markers on the cultural geography of Kochi – in its architecture and in the art forms such as the Chavittu Nadakam. These are elements that are located outside the rhetoric of development or capitalist modernity and draw attention towards other idioms of understanding cities and locations. Bringing these to discussion helps in identifying the diverse local, rooted expressions of cosmopolitan heritage occluded by Eurocentric metro-cosmopolitanism.

Looking for similar possibilities would allow cultural geographers and postcolonial scholars to turn to other locations and their heritage of ‘greatness’ or ‘smallness’.