The Making of Indian English Literature

Subhendu Mund

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000434231
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Asiatische Literarische Sammlungen

The Making of Indian English Literature brings together seventeen well-researched essays of Subhendu Mund with a long introduction by the author historicising the development of the Indian writing in English while exploring its identity among the many appellations tagged to it. The volume demonstrates, contrary to popular perceptions, that before the official introduction of English education in India, Indians had already tried their hands in nearly all forms of literature: poetry, fiction, drama, essay, bio­graphy, autobiography, book review, literary criticism and travel writing. Besides translation activities, Indians had also started editing and publish­ing periodicals in English before 1835.

Through archival research the author brings to discussion a number of unknown and less discussed texts which contributed to the development of the genre. The work includes exclusive essays on such early poets and writers as Kylas Chunder Dutt, Shoshee Chunder Dutt, Toru Dutt, Mirza Moorad Alee Beg, Krupabai Satthianadhan, Swami Vivekananda, H. Dutt, and Sita Chatterjee; and historiographical studies on the various aspects of the genre. The author also examines the strategies used by the early writers to indianise the western language and the form of the novel. The present volume also demonstrates how from the very beginning Indian writing in English had a subtle nationalist agenda and created a space for protest literature.

The Making of Indian English Literature will prove an invaluable addition to the studies in Indian writing in English as a source of reference and motivation for further research.

Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

CHAPTER 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003203902-1

Indian English Literature is the youngest among the literatures of India but the most vibrant one which has the ability to be a part of the Indian experience while reaching out to a larger English reading constituency all over the world. It is generally believed that Indians began writing in English after English education was introduced in India in 1835, but this is only partly true. The earliest specimen of Indian writing in English was written much before India became a colony in actuality. Dean Mahomet’s (1759-1851) The Travels of Dean Mahomet, a Native of Patna in Bengal, Through Several Parts of India, while in the Service of the Honourable the East India Company, Written by Himself, in a Series of Letters to a Friend was published in 1794. The ‘discovery’ of this ‘autobiographical travel narrative’ has practically taken the commencement of Indian writing in English to the late eighteenth century. Designed as ‘a series of letters to a friend’, The Travels of Dean Mahomet was written by a subaltern-turned-entrepreneur who migrated from India to Ireland and England in 1784 when he was only twenty-five. Alamgir Hashmi (b. 1951), the well-known Pakistani poet and scholar in English is said to have chanced upon the title of the book in the catalogues of the British Library in the 1970s. He presented a paper on the book entitled ‘Prolegomena to the Study of Pakistani English and Pakistani Literature in English’ at the International Conference on English in South Asia (University Grants Commission), held at Islamabad in January 1989 (Ahmad ‘Sake Dean Mahomet’). Needless to say, as Dean Mahomet belonged to the undivided India [the book’s title itself says that he was A Native of Patna in Bengal] he is claimed by the Pakistani scholars as well.

Michael H. Fisher republished the text of The Travels of Dean Mahomet with necessary biographical details and critical observations in The First Indian Author in English: Dean Mahomet (1759-1851) in India, Ireland, and England (1996) and later as The Travels of Dean Mahomet: An Eighteenth-Century Journey Through India (1997). This book, indisputably the first [available] work of Indian English literature, and the earliest document of an Indian’s encounter with the colonizer’s world is now being read from various perspectives. Besides The Travels, Dean Mahomet also wrote at least one more book: Shampooing: The Benefits Resulting from the Use of the Indian Medicated Vapour Bath (1823).

Between the publications of Mahomet’s two books, several other books were published by Indians in English and more even before the official implementation of English education in 1835. It is only after the promulgation of the Charter Act of 1813 that the colonial government showed some interest in education in India. In 1835, during the tenure of Governor-General Lord William Bentinck, Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, the Legal Member of the Council of India was appointed as the Chairman of the General Committee of Public Instruction and his report, famously known as the ‘Minute on Indian Education’ (2 February 1835) was promulgated as ‘The English Education Act 1835’. About twenty years after that, Sir Charles Wood, the President of the Board of Control of the East India Company sent a despatch, known as ‘Wood’s Despatch’ (1854) to Lord Dalhousie, the then Governor-General of India, in which he expressed his dissatisfaction over the performance of the administration in the development of education in the colony and strongly suggested that remedial steps be undertaken expeditiously.

These facts are quite well known to all of us, but what I am striving to point out is until the mid-1850s there had hardly been any ‘universal education’ in British India. There were of course a few schools and a couple of colleges established by Christian missionaries by the early nineteenth century but these were almost nothing in view of the size and population of the vast country.

Coming back to the point I have been trying to make, by 1835 we have had quite an impressive output of works in English written by the Indians. In fact, creative writing in English by the so-called Anglo-Indian writers had begun much earlier, and among those there were quite a few who influenced the early Indian writing in English. In fact, after the late 1830s, Indian English literature took a distinct turn. What Dunn observes in the context of the Anglo-Indian poets is partly true in the case of Indian English literature also:

The work of these authors falls within the period preceding Macaulay’s arrival in India. The year 1835, the date of the latter’s famous minute on education which prompted Lord William Bentinck’s decision to introduce English in Indian schools and colleges, may be said to close the first period of English verse production in India. (‘Introduction’ Poets of John Company, p. xv)

It is significant to note that by the late 1930s, Indian English writers had already tried their hands in nearly all forms of literature. The second known piece of writing is a translation of sorts by Cavelly [Venkata] Boriah (1776-1803). His ‘Account of the Jains’ was written in 1803, and published in the volume IX of the Asiatic Researches or Transactions of the Society Instituted in Bengal for Inquiring into the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia (London, 1809). According to the author, the content of the work was ‘collected from a priest of his sect at Mudgeri’ and ‘translated by Cavelly Boriah, Brahmen, for Major C. Mackenzie’ (p. 244).

Raja Rammohun Roy (1772-1833), the great thinker, social reformer and intellectual of the early nineteenth century was a prolific writer who wrote in English besides Bengali and Persian. He also translated his own Bengali and Persian works as well as religious texts in English. The writings of Roy demonstrate the efficacy of an Indian in negotiating with a foreign language for creative and discursive articulations. Interestingly, Roy was perhaps the first Indian to write an autobiographical sketch in English. His ‘Autobiographical Sketch’ is in the form of a letter to a ‘friend’ who had perhaps requested him for it. Mary Carpenter (1807-77), the renowned educationist and social reformer of the nineteenth-century England informs that the letter had first been published in the Athenaeum, and then in the Literary Gazette after which it was reproduced in several other books and periodicals. Carpenter had included this autobiography in her The Last Days in England of the Rajah Rammohun Roy (pp. 249-52) published in 1866. Kasiprasad Ghosh (1809-73), one of our early poets (The Shair and Other Poems, 1830) also wrote ‘The Autobiographical Letter’ in 1834 (Hand-book of Bengal Missions, ed. Rev. James Long, London: John Farquhar Shaw, 1848, pp. 506-10).

Roy was not exactly a literary critic but some of his works reveal his learned views on our scriptures. However, Ghosh may be given the credit for writing the earliest piece of critical writing: ‘Critical Remarks on the First Four Chapters of Mill’s History of British India’ (1828). This history of James Mill (1817-18) has been a much talked about text of imperial mega narrative and Ghosh shows commendable intellectual courage by interrogating the claims of the book. A student of Hindu College of Calcutta, Ghosh was a protégé of David Lester Richardson (1801-65), his English Professor and Principal of Hindu College. A revised version of the review article was published in the Asiatic Journal (1930). Ghosh’s other two essays in criticism, ‘On Bengali Poetry’ (1830) and ‘On Bengali Works and Writers’ (1830), also published in the Calcutta Literary Gazette, show the young Indian scholar’s inclination towards India and mother tongue related studies and this naturally became a trendsetter for the future scholars. Henry Vivian Louis Derozio (1809-31) also wrote a number of articles and essays, many of which could be categorized under literary criticism. Unfortunately, these prose writings are not easily available now. Pallab Sengupta in his essay ‘Thoughts on Various Subjects’ has furnished details of the poet’s prose writings (Derozio, pp. 48-53).

It will not be out of place here to remember two individuals, David Lester Richardson and Henry Vivian Louis Derozio, who exercised immense influence on the newly-educated Bengali young men. Both were teachers and poets and nurtured and patronized their students to an extent that their protégés became the harbingers of change in the early colonial India. Their pupils included Kasiprasad Ghosh, Kylas Chunder Dutt (1817-59), Shoshee Chunder Dutt (1824-85), Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824-73), Krishna Mohan Banerjee (1813-85), the author of The Perse- cuted (1831); Gooroo Churn Dutt, the author of School Hours or Poems: Composed at School (1839), Rajnarain Bose, the author of Osmyn: An Arabic Tale (1844), poet and Toru Dutt’s father Govin Chunder Dutt (Dutt Family Album, 1870; Cherry Stones, 1881), Radhanath Shikdar and Peary Chand Mitra (pseudonym Tekchand Thakur) (1814-83), the author of Alaler Gharer Dulal (1857), the precursor of the modern Bengali novel.

T.O.D. Dunn, in his ‘Introduction’ to The Bengali Book of English Verse (1908) acknowledges, ‘It is worth recording that the first volume of Bengali verse in English appeared five years before Thomas Babington Macaulay gave judgment in favour of the teaching of English in Indian schools and colleges’ (p. xv). Here, Dunn is apparently referring to the publication of Kasiprasad Ghosh’s The Shair and Other Poems (1830), reluctant to recognize Derozio as a Bengali/Indian although he had already published two collections of his poems, Poems and The Fakeer of Jungheera in 1827 and 1828 respectively and was an influential teacher, who had mentored a generation of precocious talents known as the ‘Young Bengal’. Curiously enough, in his ‘Introduction’ to The Bengali Book of English Verse, Dunn mentions Derozio as ‘One of the earliest teachers’ who ‘was himself a poet’ (p. xvi), but does not include Derozio, the poet who wrote sonnets like ‘The Harp of India’ and ‘To India, My Native Land’. Dunn’s standpoint becomes obvious when he includes Derozio as an ‘Anglo-Indian’ poet in Poets of John Company (1921). For F.B. Bradley-Birt also, Derozio is an ‘Anglo-Indian’ poet as is evident from the title of his 1923 book: Poems of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio: A Forgotten Anglo-Indian Poet. However, in course of time, the Indian identity of Derozio has been restored. Pallab Sengupta rightly summarizes how Derozio’s identity had been distorted by the predisposed perceptions of the various constituencies:

Actually, an attitude of opposition against all sorts [of] authoritarianism and vested socio-economic as-well-as political interests, was the keynote of Derozio’s social philosophy. This spirit of protest never lost its ground in our social life through all these years since his time. And the continuum of progressive ideals in our nation’s history of these one hundred and sixty-eight years, should be regarded as an obvious inheritance (may be indirect, though) of Derozian movement. This is a reality, which cannot be denied of its rightful place in our history.

But even then, we often face a reserved attitude towards Derozio’s contribution due to some misconceived notion. The bogey of being an ‘Eurasian’ was partly instrumental for this in the nineteenth century. But the actual underlying reason was perhaps something more serious in nature. What Derozio wanted to establish, was not at all congenial to the interests of the overlords of our society. Had he been a European by birth, our social psyche would have eagerly welcomed his contributions. Or, had he been an ardently religious man, our predecessors would have eulogised him. And, had he not been a rebel that he was, he would have been made a celebrity even then! Our inherent social conservatism has deprived Derozio the honour he deserved. But, however, presently the overall attitude towards this ‘stormy-petrel’ is being changed. (pp. 55-6)

The output of the young Indian English poets had been impressive enough for being included in several anthologies published in the early nineteenth century. We find the earliest instance of the appropriation of Indian poets by the English/British literary tradition in Selections from the British Poets, from the Time of Chaucer to the Present Day, with Biographical and Critical Notices (Calcutta, 1840), selected and edited by David Lester Richardson. In this volume, supposedly compiled at the request of Lord Macaulay, two very young poets, Derozio and Kasiprasad find themselves in the company of great ‘English poets’.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, a number of anthologies were published which included poems and writings of Indians. It is significant to mention here that there were at least two anthologies—The Poetry of Our Indian Poets (Calcutta, 1861), edited by Thomas Philip Manuel; and English Poetry in India, Being Biographical and Critical Notices of Anglo-Indian Poets with Copious Extracts from their Writings (Calcutta, 1869), edited by Thomas Benson Laurence—which included poems written by Indians. Anglo-Indian Prize Poems: Poems by Native and English Writers, in Commemoration of the Visit of His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales to India (London, 1876), edited by Hamilton Adams is yet another interesting publication.

One of the major activities in the nineteenth century was the presentation of the ancient texts through either translation or scholastic interpretation and the texts chosen were mostly Sanskrit classics: the Vedas, the Upanishads, Shastras [treatises], Puranas and Mahakavyas. Right since the beginning of the nineteenth century, we have works like the anonymous English rendering of Dhewdas’s The Vetal Panchavishi: Or Twenty-five Stories of Vetal (1825).

Another significant work of the early phase was Biographical Sketches of D...