“Not to Abandon the Whole”: Cosmopolitanism and Management in The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan (1810)

Abstract

ABSTRACTTo read works like The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan (1810), a travel memoir by the Indian Persian scholar Abu Talib Khan, means to be exposed not only to a reversal of perspectives that recovers voices of the counterflow of Indians who entered Britain, but also to the socio-cultural critique of the cosmopolitan stranger. With its wide geographical breadth and cosmopolitan ethos of the world-wide dissemination of knowledge, this travel memoir favors a paradigm of “connected histories” rather than one of Eastern-Western juxtapositions. Xenophilic though this paradigm is, as it traverses ethnic, religious, and national frontiers, it is not devoid of management in the form of censure. A closer look at moments of conviviality in Abu Talib’s account refutes two influential assumptions about cosmopolitanism: that cosmopolitanism is a uniquely Western construct that the West seeks to impose on the rest of the world, and that it is alien to management. This essay shows that, by revising these assumptions, Abu Talib’s memoir redraws the boundaries of the Enlightenment and formulates a cosmopolitan critique in terms of what according to Walter Benjamin can be a “saving critique” that resorts to censure in order to prevent worldwide conviviality from succumbing to multicultural isolationism.