From the sthala purana to the novel: Sethu’s The Saga of Muziris as a narrative geography of the ancient Indian port city of Muziris

Abstract

The narrative approach to city writing in the postcolonial world gravitates towards metropolitan spaces. The discourse around how these cities are imagined and theorized uses reference points from modernity. With the emergence of the spatial turn in literary theory and criticism, this discourse borrows from Western, postmodern sensibilities to define cities and their narrative possibilities. In contrast to these sensibilities, regional variations of practising narrative geography that are non-Western and pre-modern reveal a heightened sense of territorial consciousness and a claim towards mythological origins posing as history. One of these genres is that of the pre-modern genre of the sthala purana from India. This article seeks to foreground it as a geographical narrative of individual locales within India. We argue that it is a genre that opens up fascinating possibilities for the exploration of cities outside postcolonial metropolises so that such spaces can be understood on their own terms rather than being compared to the big city as if it were a paradigm. We focus on one Kochi (a city in Kerala) novel by Sethu, The Saga of Muziris to explicate the knowledge-making about cities at work in such narrative geography in the way it invokes Kochi’s ancestor of the ancient port city of Muziris.