Deep Cosmopolitanism

Recognized as India's first UNESCO intangible cultural heritage of humanity, Kutiyattam Sanskrit theater is the world's oldest continuously performed theater with its first performances dating back to the tenth century CE. Deep Cosmopolitanism explores the extraordinary past and present of this centuries-old theater. Deep Cosmopolitanism illustrates how the Kutiyattam Sanskrit theater has encountered multiple forms of cosmopolitanism over the course of its thousand-year history. Exploring how Kutiyattam artists create meaning out of their deep past through everyday narratives and reflections, author Leah Lowthorp traces the art's cosmopolitan encounters over time, from the ancient Sanskrit cosmopolis to Muslim sultans, British colonialists, Communist politics, and UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. In so doing, Lowthorp fundamentally rethinks the notion of cosmopolitanism from a non-Western perspective with premodern roots and offers a critique of the colonialist undertones of how international heritage organizations like UNESCO conceptualize peoples and traditions around the world. Diving into an ethnographic exploration that considers Kutiyattam's multiple cosmopolitanisms over a period of 1,000 years, Deep Cosmopolitanism offers a model for decolonizing modernity and challenges us to rethink what it means to be cosmopolitan, traditional, and modern in the world today.