Borrowed Iambs

It is not her claim that the "English" poetry produced by the anglicised Bengali babus of Hindu College and after—in somewhat over a century, from the Shelleyesque accents of Derozio in the early 19th century to the mystical maunderings of Sri Aurobindo in the early years of the 20th—is great poetry. But through a close reading of the texts, she has revealed various facets of that enforced cultural contact between the coloniser and the colonised, whose complexities are inevitably flattened in the ponderous turgidities of post-colonialism (hereafter po-co). Thus, po-co argues that native voices were silenced in colonial discourse and so it takes sophisticated po-co theorists to articulate the subaltern silences of the natives. Chaudhuri’s reading of this formative cultural process reconfigures the "gentlemen poets" as an intermediate category between the silent subaltern and the articulate po-co intellectual. Thus, she shows Derozio and his Hindu College gang were not inarticulate folk, rubbing along in native lingo; they were highly educated consumers of the contemporary discovery of "the Orient". They were critical appropriators of this emergent discourse, not mere imitators—though there is more than a suspicion of mimicry in their recycling of what were to become the cliches of the "India" of the Orientalists, foreign as well as native.

This "Orient" of the imagination was, of course, first colonised by Europeans, but was soon invaded by these poets. And in time, this imagined country could not but be influenced by Indian realities, even as India—"eternal, essential India", which was also being imagined into existence somewhat later by poets and politicians—was inevitably influenced by the literary double that owed so much to the Orientalists and the Romantic historians. Thus, Todd’s hand may be seen in all kinds of places. His Annals and Antiquities is a crucial resource in the making of the myth of "Rajputana": a resonant land of brave warriors whose largely imaginary sagas of unceasing struggles against the Muslim conquerors got grafted onto the Orientalist myth of a golden Hindu past.

What emerged consequently was a powerful mythical and ideological framework—the "Hindu period/Muslim period" caricature that is a constitutive element of our tragic commonsense. It was deployed very effectively pre-1947: current degeneracy was explained and enabled the discourse of the struggle for freedom, without offending the British. It transferred the blame that was rightly the colonial exploiter’s on to the ‘Mussulman’.

However, as Chaudhuri argues, "Such a construction, incorporating the Muslim as a trope for the foreigner, problematises the discourse of nationhood at its very inception by its exclusively Hindu orientation. " It is sobering to think contemporary horrors such as Gujarat could have had some beginning in the relatively anodyne writings of these "gentlemen poets".