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

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.