Geography is History

"The East is a career." This quote from Benjamin Disraeli's 19th century novel Tancred, reappeared as an epigram in Edward Said's celebrated critique of the culture of empire in Orientalism. 


Today in an era of globalization, the East is not only fertile ground for a "career", but also as a geographical place for the post-career, post-work-life retirees of the West to rest their weary bones in.

No, the retired British elderly in Deborah Moggach's novel These Foolish Things, later renamed, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, don't invest in the East as potential burial grounds, but they relocate to Bangalore, India, as a group because they are in an economically distressed state, having variously lost their retirement funds for reasons both global-economic and familial (an elderly couple have lost their retirement savings in their daughter's failed startup).

The British elderly suffer from the millennial fears and anxieties that the elderly in many Western (and now "Eastern") societies suffer from: the closing down of care homes, dwindling pensions and rising life-expectancy.

In the words of the author:

[The novel] came about because I’d been thinking a lot about growing older, about what is going to happen to us all. The population is ageing – for the first time the over 50s outnumber the rest of us – and it’s getting older. Where are we all going to live? [...] Then I had a brainwave. We live in a global age – the internet, cheap travel, satellite TV…when it comes to goods and services it hardly matters where we live. “Geography is history.” Our healthcare is sourced from the developing countries; how about turning the tables and outsourcing the elderly? How about setting up retirement homes in developing countries where it’s sunny and labour is cheap? So I created an Indian whizz-kid called Sonny who sets up a retirement home in Bangalore and fills it with Brits.

The thought underlying "geography is history" acquires new meaning in this context. 

The movie version of the novel has just got released in theatres across the U.S. The locale has been shifted to Jaipur from Bangalore. In the movie, Tim Wilkinson plays the role of a retired High Court Judge, who returns to Jaipur to find one of his gay male lovers, who had been disgraced into an outcast after the love affair was exposed.