Globalisation, ancient cosmopolitanism, and the Western Bollywood

This chapter explores the roots of cosmopolitanism far beyond its traditional Western ontologies, which are limiting its appearance to the Western-imagined “Greek, Roman, and Enlightenment” historical contexts (Meskell 2009, 2). Instead, it reconstructs a thick layer of protocosmopolitanism related to the wider historical, political, and cultural transformations in ancient Afro-Eurasia. It locates the roots of this development in the intensifying globalization processes of the first millennium bc, strongly empowered by the widely extending, consistent, and ever transforming
imperial system.
The author hypothesises that the climactic point of this ancient globalisation, occurring in the last three centuries of the first millennium bc, and closely connected to the decentralisation of the universal imperial model, created a shared “cultural (and political) horizon” that can be categorised as “cosmopolitan oikumene”.
The chapter focuses on the Hellenistic-period decentralisation of the global system of rule as a key element for the empowerment of local and regional elites, as well as an important driver of their economic, political, and symbolic exchanges.
Most importantly, the author is reconstructing through these processes the creation of a universal system of mutual legitimisation of local, regional, and global elites. A system that was constantly reimagining the shared oikumene through syncretisation, glocalisation, and globalisation of numerous local religious, social, and political traditions, narratives, and symbols.