Timeless England will remain hanging in the air

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-1-2006

Abstract

This essay explores the two types of cosmopolitanism encountered in Nirad Chandra Chaudhuri's travelogue A Passage to England (1959): "metropolitan cosmopolitanism" and "cosmopolitan cosmopolitanism." I argue that Chaudhuri's acknowledgment of England as the center of the world has contributed to a notion of cosmopolitanism - citizen of the imperial metropolis as citizen of the world - now considered politically retrograde. However, the travelogue is also characterized, at the same time, by knowledge of "timeless England" as fantasy, a finely wrought plurality of alliances as well as a puckish sense of irony that foregrounds the more democratic form of cosmopolitanism incipient in Chaudhuri's writing. It is this dialectic inter-play of "discrepant cosmopolitanisms" that allows a nuanced reading of A Passage to England to emerge. © 2006 Taylor & Francis.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

Prose Studies

First Page

318

Last Page

336

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