Utopia and Postcolonial South Asian Fiction

Abstract The term “utopia” was coined by Sir Thomas More in his Utopia (1516) to describe a fictional island society in the so-called New World with seemingly perfect social, political, and legal systems. The neologism derives from, and is a pun on, the Greek words “οὐ” (ou; “not”) and τόπος (topos; “place”) and has since come to signify an ideal place that is also impossible, that is, nonexistent. This central contradiction within the concept has been harnessed in literary and cultural productions as well as literary and social theory to posit both an idealized vision of society and a critique of existing social, political, and economic structures and strictures. The term “utopia” has also given rise to related words—“utopian” and “utopianism”—that have come to signal a desire that seeks to transcend the limitations of the present by envisioning alternative ways of being and living that are more just. In the humanities and social sciences, the categories of “utopia,” “utopian,” and “utopianism” have been developed by theorists as a critical framework and a mode of thinking that challenge dominant ideologies and imagine radical possibilities. Key thinkers who have elaborated on utopia include, but are not limited to, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ruth Levitas, Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams, David Harvey, and Susan Buck-Morss. These scholars have used the terms to interrogate questions of power and inequality, as well as societal ideals and human aspirations. Most influentially, the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch has posited utopianism as the “principle of hope,” an “anticipatory consciousness” that is shaped by a “Not Yet.” Ruth Levitas has spoken of utopianism as a desire for a “better way of being and living.” For theorists of utopia and utopianism, therefore, the categories are not so much about achieving perfection as it is about fostering critical consciousness and imagining possible futures for existing systems. “Utopia” and “utopianism” are particularly salient in the context of colonial and postcolonial South Asia. Colonialism was itself a utopian project for the colonizers, who envisioned, and sought to institute, a world they would politically rule, economically exploit, and ideologically control. For the colonized, utopia became a means of resistance and a reimagining of the British Indian colony as a postcolony. This process of reimagination is found in the literary works and critical writings of figures such as Rabindranath Tagore, Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and B. R. Ambedkar. Moreover, the decolonization of European empires throughout the 20th century was itself a world-historical instance of the actualization of a utopian project, in which the colonized reimagined the colonies and resignified them as nations. As Sandeep Banerjee has shown, the decolonization of the British Indian empire was an expression of the utopian impulse to instantiate a more just locus and way of being and living, which was contradictorily both a success and, not least for the internecine violence associated with it, a failure. The categories of “utopia” and “utopianism” thus serve as a key means of both critiquing the present and conveying a vision of the future. Its usefulness as a theoretical concept lies in its ability to be a tool of critical engagement and for articulating hope for the possibility of a more just and equitable world.

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