ABSTRACT
It was the rise of the Herderian triad the isomorphic grafting of language, people, and place during modernity that framed plurilingualism and cosmopolitanism as aberrant. Theoretical formulations are certainly valuable, but analyses and arguments founded on what people actually do provide the messy and nuanced illustrations needed to flesh out the problematics of cosmopolitanism and plurilingualism adequately. In this chapter, authors discuss practices of plurilingual and cosmopolitan ethos from South Asia and Southern Africa to analyse how non-Western societies viewed community and communication. They provide mostly examples from literary texts to infer how social encounters may have taken place previously because the colonial regimes imposed in oral societies have successfully obliterated most plurilingual traditions and traces of premodern societies. Similar to philosophies of self from the South Asian context, ubuntu denies the individual basis of personhood and personal rights at the core of Western philosophical and sociological traditions, including cosmopolitanism and plurilingualism.
