Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal

Book excerpt: Extensive historical research and a detailed examination of the English poetry written by Indians in the nineteenth century in its social, historical, and political contexts, reveals the engagement of the colonized with one of the implements of colonization the English language. This study shows how the intertextuality that existed between this body of verse and concurrent Orientalist scholarship on the ancient Indian heritage resulted, ultimately in a complex appropriation, by the Indians, of British scholarship on India for nationalist, literary, social, and personal issues, such as its anticipation of the formation of the modern Indian identity. A thorough examination of the correlation between the poetry and its background uncovers certain startling differences between current perceptions of colonial relations and actual historical records. For example, the common belief that English education was imposed upon the colonized is reversed through an examination of the Indians own initiative in this field long before the missionaries or Macaulay s famous minute. Similarly, the claim that all English education in India was a vehicle for the Christianizing of natives is refuted through the personal reminiscences of David Hare, eminent educationist, who opposed it vehemently. The author examines works by Henry Derozio, Kasiprasad Ghosh, Michael Madhusudhan Dutt, the Dutt family, and, in conclusion, the poems of Toru Dutt and Rabindranath Tagore. Refuting a simple equation of the exploitation of knowledge as power between the colonizer and the colonized, the author argues for a more nuanced approach, positing that the complexities of the situation meant also an active appropriation of Orientalist scholarship by Indians for their own ends: they tended to take just that which they found good and liked best . This would grant an agency to the colonial Indian subject which has so far gone unrecognized, and place a whole body of colonial verse in the situational flux of interchange and assimilation. This work asserts that it is time now to listen to what the orient made of its interaction with the West, and to lend an ear to what the colonized said. Rosinka Chaudhuri is a scholar of literary criticism and history from Oxford, who specializes in nineteenth-century Bengal. She is a Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Her articles have appeared in several journals and anthologies.