Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780-1913: A Critical Anthology

Henry Meredith Parker

140 Henry Meredith Parker d D Little is known of Henry Meredith Parker’s youth save that he perhaps was a violinist at Covent Garden before going out to India as a clerk. He was clearly a man of great wit and multiple talents. Once in India, he managed to enter the Bengal Civil Service, where he rose through the ranks to become a member of the Calcutta Board of Customs, Salt and Opium (later the Board of Revenue). The British governor general William Bentinck declared that Parker (1796–1868) combined the incompatible: “literary attainments and excellence in dry o2cial routine” (Laurie, 186). Parker commenced by publishing verses under the pseudonym Bernard Wyclife and went on to publish both prose and verse in various Indian periodicals from literary annuals to newspapers to sporting journals. His 0rst volume of poetry, The Draught of Immortality (1827), included Byronic echoes, a long translation from the Mahābhārata (the title poem), and a variety of ballads and songs. Upon his retirement, Parker collected his miscellaneous writings in a volume he titled Bole Ponjis, Containing The Tale of the Buccanneer; A Bottle of Red Ink; The Decline and Fall of Ghosts; and Other Ingredients. Parker’s later publications included a collection of what he ironically called “sermons” but which were actually essays: TheEmpireoftheMiddleClasses. These essays were a reaction to the Indian rebellion of 1857 and, more proximately, to the British government’s abolition of the East India Company in 1858. Parker opposed this move—arguing that the English were as likely to fail in India as in Ireland and that such a move was a mistaken continuation of evangelical folly. Parker sarcastically dedicated his “sermons” to “that devout, earnest, and conscientious body of Englishmen, whose fervent zeal for Conversion has clearly helped to create a fearful Mutiny, and will probably excite a National Rebellion in India” (Empire, n.p.). Parker argued that, as Hindus had no wish to convert Christians to their own religion, they could not but believe that evangelical fervor proceeded from “advancement of our own worldly interests” (Empire, 17). A similar inclination to skepticism and irony is evident in the lighter items in Bole Ponjis, “the bowl of punch.” The unease surrounding Parker’s response to midcentury Indian politics is pre0gured in an earlier work, a futurist 0ction titled “The Meeting of the Oceans,” published in 1835 in the Bengal Annual. In this story of a twentieth-century deluge that followed the completion of a Panama Canal, Parker betrayed a profound anxiety about cultural cataclysm. Henry Meredith Parker D 141 Despite his imperial anxieties and later reactionary politics, Parker evidently was a man of many talents and was very popular in Calcutta literary circles. Both Kasiprasad Ghosh and H. L. V. Derozio dedicated verses to Parker, acknowledging his support of young Indian makers of verse. Sources Henry Meredith Parker, The Draught of Immortality (London: J. M. Richardson, 1827); Bole Ponjis, Containing the Tale of the Buccanneer; A Bottle of Red Ink; The Decline and Fall of Ghosts; and Other Ingredients (London and Calcutta: W. Thacker, 1851). See also Parker, The Empire of the Middle Classes (London: W. Thacker, 1858), and W. F. B. Laurie, Sketches of Some Distinguished Anglo-Indians with an Account of Anglo-Indian Periodical Literature (London: W. H. Allen, 1887). d D from “The Decline and Fall of Ghosts, with the History of Certain Apparitions which A6icted the Author” I Why should we sing of men and their misdeeds, When mighty nature in her silent strength Gives us more noble themes? First the heart bleeds For human pain and misery: but at length Grows callous as fresh woe to woe succeeds 5 I mean in our dark poems and romances, (Heaven forbid ’t should be so in real life,) Where all the griefs the unhappy author fancies Move one no more than parting with one’s wife. II The time is past, too, when the mysteries 10 Of wild Udolpho made the cold lesh creep;1 Or sentimental bachelors, with knees Of breeches half unbuttoned, lost their sleep 1. Udolpho: Ann Radclife’s novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), a gothic tale of supernatural tension. 142 d Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India To snivel over Werter’s2 snivellings these Were glorious days indeed; the author then, 15 Ambitious of lugubrious renown, Had but in blood or tears to dip his pen To terrify, to move, to...