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

Five: From Christian Piety to Cosmopolitan Nationalisms: The Dutt Family Album and the Poems of Mary E. Leslie and Toru Dutt

 five From Christian Piety to Cosmopolitan Nationalisms The Dutt Family Album and the Poems of Mary E. Leslie andToru Dutt In 1824, Reginald Heber, then bishop of Calcutta, strolling on the banks of the Ganges, found himself in much the same place that SirWilliam Jones had occupied a generation earlier.1 In his perambulatory verse “Plassey-Plain,” Jones had turned the eighteenth-century prospect poem into gentle satire. His poem became at once a compliment to Lady Jones on her escape from danger, a botanical catalogue, and a send-up of literary and scientific scholarship. Heber also engaged the prospect poem but to different ends, for Heber’s frame of reference was neither scientific nor linguistic but religious. In his most famous poem about his time in India, “An Evening Walk in Bengal,” Heber, like Jones, responded to perceived dangers, but he promised his companion that all was safe, for tigers and snakes no longer threatened. “Taught by recent harm to shun /The thunders of the English gun,” the tiger kept its distance. Heber coaxed his timid companion, “Come boldly on!” (64). Like many a British poet before him, he noted the beauties of Indian flora and fauna, peacocks and peepuls. And like many of his contemporaries, he found that singing the beauties of Bengal evoked the note of exile: So rich a shade, so green a sod Our English fairies never trod! Yet who in Indian bowers has stood, But thought on England’s “good greenwood!” And bless’d, beneath the palmy shade, Her hazel and her hawthorn glade, And breath’d a prayer, (how oft in vain!) To gaze upon her oaks again? (64)  From Christian Piety to Cosmopolitan Nationalisms The poet’s reverie of home is broken by the “jackal’s cry,” which leads him back to an alienated present. Yet in a second turn, the poet hears the nightingale—“it is—it must be—Philomel!” All this emotional reflection leads him to moralize the prospect: And we must early sleep to find Betimes the morning’s healthy wind. But oh! with thankful hearts confess E’en here there may be happiness; And He, the bounteous Sire, has given His peace on earth,—his hope of Heaven! (66) The prospect poem is shaped, in the end, by Heber’s Christian piety. In his short time in India (1823–26), Heber earned a reputation as a humane and open-minded Christian, as evidenced by famous dinners to which he invited persons who would not otherwise have been willing to meet each other and by his indefatigable travels to Anglican congregations throughout India. His ecumenical cast of mind tempered his evangelical zeal. But Heber’s broad-mindedness was, by midcentury, not the dominant tone of Indian Christianity. Later English language poets found religious discourse more dogmatic and, often, more polemical than in Heber’s time.2 Religious questions came to shape English language poetry in significant ways in mid- to late nineteenth-century India. The previous chapter traces some of these threads in describing the increasing importance of evangelicalism, the conversion of Madhusudan Dutt, and the reframing of Hindu practices by Kasiprasad Ghosh in a deliberate response to orientalist and Christian poetics. In particular, Christianity over the course of the century (as is evident in the case of Michael Madhusudan) became increasingly identified with Englishness. When Portuguese Catholic, Moravian, and Danish Protestant missionaries became outnumbered by increasing numbers of evangelical clergy in the Church of England and by mostly British missionaries sponsored by the London Missionary Society (LMS) and the Church Missionary Society (CMS), the English nationalist identification of Christianity increased. Madhusudan Dutt, in sighing for “Albion”—and in acting out his youthful rebellion—found conversion to be an appropriate response; for him, English language poetry and religion were inextricably mixed. Indeed, for Madhusudan (and others who followed), Christianity could not be taken largely for granted, as it was by his teacher David Lester Richardson, who seems to have transmitted a passion for Milton to his students much more directly than a passion for any particular religious dogma. For a number of poets after 1857, Christianity shaped a sense of poetic tradition and of social identity. The impact of Christianity is particularly evident in the concerto grosso of Dutts—brothers and nephews—whose understandings of poetry were formed at Hindu College under Richardson.Though there are differences among them, The Dutt Family Album, Mary E. Leslie, andToru...