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 six Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Aestheticism in Fin-de-Siècle London Manmohan Ghose, Sarojini Naidu, and RabindranathTagore And rhyme shall rule o’er reason, And Swinburne overTime, And panting poets seize on Each continent and clime; Aching alliteration, Impotent indignation, Eternal iteration, Wrapt in eternal rhyme. —Laurence Binyon, “The Garden of Criticism,” Echoes The practices of literary culture, by contrast, are practices of attachment. —Sheldon Pollock, “Cosmopolitan andVernacular in History” In the 1870s, writing in her garden at Baugmaree on the outskirts of Calcutta, Toru Dutt daringly claimed the lotus as the most beautiful flower—or poem—in Psyche’s garden, surpassing the lily or the rose, surpassing the flowers of English poetic tradition , the roses of Cowper and Tennyson, and surpassing even the roses of the Persian tradition. Yet the victory of the lotus, the image of purity, belied the poetic practices of attachment and detachment, identification and disidentification that subtended the creation of this English sonnet from the outset.There was no Archimedean point from which Toru Dutt could claim a natural or single-minded attachment to her “native clime,”as she called it in “Our CasuarinaTree.”The garden at Baugmaree was already full of foreign transplants, the casuarina among them. By the time she wrote “The Lotus,” Toru Dutt had seized on various “continents and climes,”as Laurence Binyon would put it a decade later; her verse was to mark a cosmopolitan reality made from English language lyrics and in translations from French and from Sanskrit (Binyon, “Garden,” 90).  Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Aestheticism In the years following the publication in London of Toru’s posthumous book, Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (1882), the discourses of “native clime,” nation, and purity took a further turn. Nation, gender, race, and religion were conflated in ways that framed the reception of poets writing in English through at least the 1910s. Issues of authenticity and cosmopolitan friendship were articulated in shifting nationalist contexts. The Ilbert Bill, proposed by Lord Ripon in 1883 to allow Indian judges to try British citizens, fanned racist discourse within the Anglo-Indian community and in Britain, which, in turn, provoked angry reaction on the subcontinent. Indian reaction to the Ilbert Bill and to the terrible famine in south India (1876–78), along with other issues, led to the formation of the Congress Party and to a new phase of Indian nationalism. The partition of Bengal in 1905 further galvanized nationalist opposition. As a result, the discourses of nation—both in Britain and, differently, in India—adumbrated the cultural power of “authenticity,” which in turn shaped the canons of reception for Indian belletristic writing in English. At the same time, and paradoxically, the continuing movement of writers and artists from the subcontinent to Britain and vice versa expanded the reach of the kind of cosmopolitan sensibility we see inToru Dutt and others. The poets I discuss in this chapter, Manmohan Ghose (1869–1924), Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949), and Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), published their English language poetry in London or, inTagore’s case, almost simultaneously in London and the United States. Each of these poets encountered—furthered, resisted, managed, or was managed by—discourses of authenticity and the urgencies of nationalism. At the same time, their English language poetry emerged within a crucial nexus of friendship that at once exceeded and was shaped in these discourses. Although the period of the fin de siècle was more intensely nationalist and racist than earlier decades, it still saw Indian poets writing in English remain invested in the tropes and structures of feeling that preceded them. Principal among these tropes was the trope of authenticity, which gained increasing power in India as it moved from the discourses of religious or regional identity to an identification of race, nation, and Hinduism. Authenticity provided a conceptual structure through which a poet could claim to be (or, more often, could be claimed by others to be) “Indian.” Srinivas Aravamudan reads the process as a late version of orientalism. He sees the discourses of orientalism with respect to India as moving through three phases: the “patronizing” orientalism of the early scholars; the “Romantic” sort “commenced by German Indologists and carried through” by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay; and the “nationalist” style of Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo (Manmohan Ghose’s brother). In this late nineteenthcentury adaptation of orientalism, “pure roots are sometimes professed in relation to a background that is ironically hybridized” (Aravamudan, Guru English, 91). The past is read as a Hindu past, an...

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