At home in the city, at home in the world: cosmopolitanism and urban belonging in Kolkata

Abstract

This article considers the politics of urban belonging for a religious minority, Brahmos, in Kolkata, India, through the contradictory notions of cultural particularism and cosmopolitanism. In his concept of ‘Cosmopolitan Patriotism’, Kwame Appiah argues attachment to a home, ‘with its own cultural particularities’, can co-exist with ‘taking pleasure from the presence of other different places that are home to other different people’. By building on Appiah's situated cosmopolitanism I analyse Brahmo attachments to the city of Kolkata, through the particularism of the middle-class Bengali city and its conceptual other, the cosmopolitan, classless, fraternal city. But rather than representing these local and global affiliations as disjunctive, I explore how such belongings can co-exist and destabilise.