Poet of Modernity

In Henry Louis Vivien Derozio (1809-31) we have one of the originary figures of modern India, a legend since his precocious boyhood. In his five years (1826-31) as a teacher at the Hindu College he left his stamp on a band of young radicals who transmitted his influence to many more. Forced to resign by the College authorities, under pressure from irate parents, he launched a newspaper that spoke up for a beleaguered Eurasian community, but within months was snuffed out by cholera. It is as a poet, though -- the first published Indian poet in English -- that Derozio should be chiefly considered, especially now that there is a revival of interest in the earlier Indian English poets, signaled by the appearance over the past decade or so of a number of critical studies and anthologies.
Prominent among these is Rosinka Chaudhuri's Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal: Emergent Nationalism and the Orientalist Project (2002), which traces the intertextual connections of the best known of the earlier poets, from Derozio to Sarojini Naidu, with Orientalist poets and writers. It is therefore fitting that she should edit a new edition of Derozio. Serendipitously, she stumbled upon enough uncollected material in the British Library to more than double the originally envisaged length of her book. (No new manuscripts have been discovered though, which means that Derozio's highly praised critique of the philosophy of Kant, presented as a paper but never published, remains untraced and is probably lost forever). For good measure Rosinka has added an Appendix containing critical pieces and comments on Derozio. Her introduction runs to seventy pages -- a good-sized monograph -- and is supplemented by almost the same amount of pithy notes that preface the various sections and many of the individual verses and essays and combine broad comments with close reading. Derozio's prose and poetry is arranged chronologically and in conjunction with the editorial commentary offers a panorama of the writer's development as well as a vivid biographical portrait. In fact, the only book-length biography of the poet, Thomas Edwards' factually inaccurate Henry Derozio: The Eurasian Poet, Teacher and Journalist (1884), will now read like a supplement to the present volume, rather than the other way round.
Rosinka Chaudhuri exhumes Derozio's first poem, which appeared under his reversed initials when he was thirteen, and identifies "Leporello" as another one of his pseudonyms, besides the better known "Juvenis" and "An East Indian". Placing the work in its historical context, she evokes a lively cultural scene in which poems in newspapers evoked spirited responses in the "Letters" column, and even impacted on commerce. Derozio's "Don Juanics", serialized in the Indian Gazette, refers to a business house that seized upon relevant phrases for use in advertisements. More seriously, Rosinka points out that the critical discussions centering on Derozio's poetry are the earliest instances of modern, i.e. Western-style, literary discourse in the subcontinent. This has not been adequately acknowledged as, with increasingly strident claims that only indigenous tongues could be vehicles for authentic literary productions, the Anglophone contribution to our culture was downplayed, if not ignored.
As the subcontinent's first poet of modernity, Derozio introduced patriotic poetry to our culture with the sonnets "The Harp of India" and "To India, My Native Land" (the latter title was slapped on by Francis Bradley-Birt, who also tampered with the last line in his edition of Derozio's poems), plus a wide range of Romantic poetic modes: the Byronic satire, the lyric a la Thomas Moore or Shelley, the Wordsworthian or Shelleyan nature poem, and above all, the Orientalist Romantic poem, lyrical or narrative. The colonial historiography that was given shape by the Asiatic Society of Bengal infused a dash of Islamophobia into Derozio's poetry. Rosinka notes that Derozio's later poems, some of them published posthumously, evince Romantic inwardness. This can be misleading, for this quality, though perhaps more marked in the later poems, isn't missing in the earlier ones. Rosinka, laudably, tries to make a case for the value of Derozio's poetry qua poetry, the climax of her argument being the startling claim that he anticipated the haiku-like Imagist poetry of the likes of Ezra Pound by nearly a century. The evidence presented is a clutch of five poems in a sequence of eleven titled "Moods of Mind" in D. L. Richardson's Bengal Annual (1831), of which the briefest, "Beauty" is singled out for comparison with Pound's "In a Station of the Metro". But the three-line sentence of "Beauty" ("Her eyes/ Swam in the light of her own intellect, / And caught their luster from her sinless thoughts.") violates the imagist interdiction against wedding the concrete to the abstract, and in fact reflects a Shelleyan sensibility. Rosinka is well aware of this, for her commentary is self-deconstructing: in the span of a single sentence she qualifies her claim that it approximates the ideals of Imagist verse with the admission that "it is not the image that is of central importance in these poems by Derozio". Then she tries to win back some of the lost ground by claiming that "Beauty", though not "image-centric", in its form recalls Pound's poem. I think the most one can grant is that, as a reviewer pointed out, these short poems "strike us as sheer concetti". But these are Romantic conceits rather than modernist ones, though their brevity makes them formally striking, and may remind us of various forms of short poems, which one can find in Sanskrit or Latin as well as in Japanese and modern English.

One has to admit, though, that the five short poems highlighted by Rosinka are among the poet's finest. The verse glides along, unfolding a conceit with an epigrammatic economy that might remind one of some of Shelley's posthumously published fragments. A poem of a different sort that seems especially significant to me is "The Sister-in-Law", addressed to the speaker's sister, who clearly has been very vocal in expressing her wish to see her brother married:

A sister-in-law, my sister dear,
A sister-in-law for thee?
I'll bring thee a star from where angels are
Thy sister-in-law to be.
For thou art as pure as the lights that burn
In the palace of bliss eternally,
And thy sister-in-law must be therefore an urn
Containing the essence of purity.
The sentimental aura around the fanciful badinage makes complete sense only in the context of the family ties and attitudes to marriage characteristic of the subcontinent, and hence provides intimate evidence of the poet's Indianness.
Readers have been familiar with some of the prose included, like the correspondence over Derozio's resignation, but a substantial body has been collected for the first time. Pride of place among them must go to "On Drunkenness", an amusing vindication of tippling that acquires added piquancy in the light of the shocked reaction of the guardians of Hindu society to Young Bengal's partiality to alcohol. There is serious debate in an exchange between Derozio's teacher David Drummond, editor of the Weekly Examiner, and a correspondent of the Calcutta Courier, over the imputation of atheism to Derozio. The most significant outcome of this is that Drummond, who was present at the latter's deathbed, gives the lie to a widely publicized rumour of a last minute conversion. The available evidence suggests that Derozio lived and died an agnostic. The serious and the piquant come together in an exchange between Derozio and a certain Captain McNaghten, who wrote for the ultra-conservative John Bull under the pen name of "Tit for Tat". Incensed by a comment in an article by Derozio, McNaghten had walked into his home and assaulted him -- "brutally", claimed Derozio, though he also described the assault as two light "taps" on one arm.
The intellectual core of Rosinka's introduction is the account of Derozio in relation to Indian modernity. It makes engaging reading but the complexity of the theme demands a little more. Rosinka makes an interesting distinction between the "early modern" and the "high cultural" mode of modernity of which Derozio was the exemplar; how these two can be related to the rather different Western distinction between the "early modern" and the "modern" is not explained. The Early Modern age in the West produced such figures as Thomas More, Erasmus, Sir Francis Bacon and Shakespeare; where are their Indian counterparts? Rosinka labels as "early modern" the relatively promiscuous cultural intercourse that characterizes the world of Anthony Firinghee, a Portuguese who had gone native and become a famous kabial or traditional Bengali poet-agonist, or Dalrymple's White Moghuls for that matter, whereas the elitist, high-minded, more Westernized followers of Derozio and later figures like Bankimchandra Chatterjee are "modern" pure and simple. Politically, if I understand Rosinka's argument correctly, the shift was from a more internationalist anti-monarchism to a more conservative nationalism, which became increasingly conspicuous as the century wore on. Still, in the absence of a more detailed and in-depth historical analysis the distinction remains notional.
Derozio, Poet of India deserves to be read by the common reader and not only the literary specialist. It is handsomely produced, with a few Company paintings reproduced to lend useful visual correlatives to the text; the pictures might also have been a source of inspiration for the poet.
Kaiser Haq is Professor of English, Dhaka University. His Collected Poems is available in Dhaka bookstores.