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Colonialism had very strong economic bases: the colony provided the raw material and labour for English manufacturing industries, the market for its goods, the clerks and soldiers for its administration and army. It was also founded on a clear racial binary: the advanced, progressive and modern European (‘Us’) versus the backward, primitive and non‐modern native (‘them’). This us/ them binary, according to postcolonial studies, indicates how Europe needed its non‐European Other for its own sense of identity.

Here an inclusivist worldview is not at the expense of a local commitment and, as Johansen argues using the fiction of Amitav Ghosh as an instance, a concern for the decaying democratic fabric and secular ideals of the ‘home’ country. It also entails a scrupulous evaluation of globalized projects and the local costs of such globalizing processes. cosmopolitanism (vernacular): A concept mooted by anthropologist Pnina Werbner (2006), vernacular cosmopolitanism has been defined as the coexistence of the local and the parochial alongside the transnational, Creole/creolization 39 translocal and the universalist.

It was often ambivalent and uncertain, and reveals itself as divided in its opinions and views of the colony. Forster’s ambivalence toward India, where he seems to fault the English for their arrogance (although he does caricature the Indian Godbole), is an example. Contemporary readings now detect this kind of ambivalence in English literature’s subtle and h ­ idden critiques of imperialism. 34 Commonwealth Literature Commonwealth Literature: The descriptor derives from ‘Commonwealth’, or more accurately, the British Commonwealth, which includes former ­colonies of the British Empire.