Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore

351 Pages·2011·1.69 MB·English

by  Mary Ellis Gibson

indian
angles
ENGLISH VERSE IN
COLONIAL India
FROM JONES
TO TAGORE
Mary Ellis Gibson
Indian
Angles
Sri Ra¯ga, c. 1595. From The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei.
Indian
Angles
English Verse in
Colonial India
from Jones
to Tagore
Mary Ellis Gibson
Ohio University Press
Athens
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
www.ohioswallow.com
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18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gibson, Mary Ellis, 1952–
Indian angles : English verse in colonial India from Jones to Tagore / Mary Ellis Gibson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8214-1941-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8214-4358-3 (electronic)
1. Anglo-Indian poetry—History and criticism. 2. Indic poetry (English)—History and
criticism. 3. India—In literature. 4. Colonies in literature. I. Title.
PR9490.4.G53 2011
821.009'954—dc22
2010053693
for Sanjukta Dasgupta and Elizabeth K. Helsinger

Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
A Note on Names xv
Introduction 1
Part i Languages, Tropes, and Landscape in the Beginnings
of English Language Poetry
One Contact Poetics in Eighteenth-Century Calcutta
Sir William Jones, Sir John Horsford, and Anna Maria 17
Two Bards and Sybils
Landscape, Gender, and the Culture of Dispute in the Poems
of H. L. V. Derozio and Emma Roberts 63
Part ii The Institutions of Colonial Mimesis, 1830–57
Three Books, Reading, and the Profession of Letters
David Lester Richardson and the Construction
of a British Canon in India 101
Four Sighing, or Not, for Albion
Kasiprasad Ghosh, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, and Mary Carshore 137
Part iii Nationalisms, Religion, and Aestheticism
in the Late Nineteenth Century
Five From Christian Piety to Cosmopolitan Nationalisms
The Dutt Family Album and the Poems of Mary E. Leslie
and Toru Dutt 181
Six Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Aestheticism in
Fin-de-Siècle London
Manmohan Ghose, Sarojini Naidu, and Rabindranath Tagore 227
Epilogue 268
Notes 281
Bibliography 309
Index 325
vii

Illustrations
Frontispiece: Sri Ra¯ga ii
Old Fort Playhouse and Holwell’s Monument, Calcutta 16
Ruins near the Taj Mahal 62
Southwest view of the Fakir’s Rock in the River Ganges 79
David Lester Richardson 100
Kasiprasad Ghosh 136
Michael Madhusudan Dutt, with a portrait of Milton 155
Cover of The Dutt Family Album 180
Rabindranath Tagore. Frontispiece to Gitanjali,
by William Rothenstein 226
ix