Description
If the empire is deeply bound up with the development of a ‘Westphalian’ nation and indeed, with the West’s simultaneous encounters with rest, where then do we situate its legacies within the ‘cosmopolitan-national continuum’? This paper approaches this question through the recently opened South Asia Gallery at the Manchester Museum. Curated by a team almost entirely consisting of South Asian diaspora in Britain, the gallery was one of the museum’s new galleries opened in February 2023 after a £15 million renovation. Manchester's own history as a centre of the British empire and the presence of a large South Asian diaspora makes the museum an apt site for exploring British (South) Asian-ness. However, sceptical of idealised narratives surrounding multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, as well as the narrative(s) of a 'global' citizen, this paper attempts a critical examination through the idea of the Empire. It seeks to situate South Asia within the cosmopolitan-national continuum by asking two fundamental questions: in what ways is the story of South Asia refracted through the prism of British-ness? And secondly, how does this story then fragment and subvert the British nation (if at all)? The choice of empire and diaspora as central categories is deliberate, for both function as unsettled and unsettling forms of non-national identities that resist consolidation of a linear narrative of a British nation. Taken together they help us slice through what it means to be ‘British’ and multicultural, while rendering visible the uneven legacies of colonial encounters that continue to shape diasporic and South Asian identities.
