Many Modernities and Utopia: From Thomas More to South Asian Utopian Writings

Abstract

This chapter sees Utopia as at once a place of dreams, a place of the good, and a place which is nowhere to be found: paradox, ambiguity, and janus-facedness are embedded in a very modern punning coupling of the good, ‘eu’, and the nonexistent, ‘ou’, made by Thomas More in his Greek neologism ‘utopia’, title of his eponymous book, which was written in Latin (1516). Moored and yet in recent years unmoored from its Eurocentric roots, utopia has become more than a word or a culture-specific term. I argue that the word utopia was coined at a formative moment of European modernity, that the utopian mode crosses cultures, and after a consideration of More’s Utopia then discuss in comparative perspective some keyworks in the utopian mode from South Asia, especially India, written in the colonial period, in the 19th and 20th centuries. How do we recognize a utopia in a non-European context: must it have that strong element of irony that we find in More’s foundational work? Is utopia always part of a secularizing impulse, or does religious imagination deserve a major place in our understanding of it? How do we make taxonomical distinctions between pieces of prose fiction that we term utopian, and the many real-life utopian communities that have flourished globally? Is there, that is, a distinction to be made between fictional, ironic imagination in literary texts, and more grounded utopian socio-political movements? In this chapter, I analyze certain strands in utopian thought and writing from South Asia (a region comprising sovereign countries such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka), mainly India, and see how answers may be given. My emphasis is on texts both fictional and non-fictional, and I take the literary aspects of those texts as important.