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

Notes

 Notes Introduction 1. SeeW.W.Tulloch, “Biographical Sketch of the Author,” in Leyden, Scenes of Infancy. 2. John Malcolm, “To the Editor of the Bombay Courier,” quoted inWalter Scott, “Supplementary Memoir,” which introduces Leyden, Poems and Ballads, xli. 3. Shaw’s Printing in Calcutta is an invaluable resource from which we can extrapolate the importance of institutions of literary sociality, including, for example, the Masons and the Highland Society, whose Rules and membership list were published in 1788 in, not one, but two editions (Shaw, Printing in Calcutta, 120). 4.Tracy Davis, “Sonic Repertoire,” Conference Paper. North AmericanVictorian Studies Association,Yale University, November 2008. 5. On hospitality see Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 156; Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 14–25. 6. Leyden, Poems and Ballads, 313. In a letter to his friend Ballantyne written in 1805 and subsequently reproduced in Walter Scott’s memoir of Leyden, the poet distinguished between those among the British in India whom he admired, whom he characterized as committed to good government and administration, and those “who would sell their own honour or their country’s credit to the highest bidder without a shadow of a scruple” (“Memoir of the Author,” in Leyden, Poems and Ballads, 50). Chapter 1: Contact Poetics in Eighteenth-Century Calcutta 1. Sir William Jones to George John Spencer, August 23, 1787, Letters, 2:755. The poets alluded to areVālmic (Vālmı̄ki), author of a famous Rāmāyan .a;Vyāsa (traditionally named as the author or source of the Mahābhārata), and Kālidāsa (widely acknowledged as among the greatest of Sanskrit poets, whose Śakuntalā Jones translated in 1789). 2. Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, 58–59; see also the whole of Schwab’s chapter 3, “Europe Learns Sanskrit,” 51–80. Wordsworth’s formulation comes in the preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (Poems, 1:867–96). 3. For a discussion of Jones’s poetic and religious views, see Drew, India and the Romantic Imagination; Priestman, Romantic Atheism; and Cannon, Life and Mind of Oriental Jones. 4. Horsford’s fellowship at St. John’s, Oxford (1768–71), overlapped with Jones’s time as a fellow of University College (1766–83). Details of Horsford’s life can be gleaned from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and, for his military career, from Stubbs, History. Poems in Three Parts is cataloged in Worldcat and in the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online database as written by three authors: Sir William Jones, John Hawkesworth, and John Horsford. This attribution, however, is misleading, for part one, as I detail below, consists of facing page translations into English of Jones’s Latin poems by an author writing after Jones’s death; the author of the translations is anonymous, but his style is coherent with Horsford’s  Notes to Pages – as is the esteem in which the translator holds Sir William. The second section of the volume is attributed by bibliographers to Hawkesworth, but I can find no warrant for this claim, and indeed the poem “Literary Characteristicks of the Most Distinguished Members of the Asiatic Society”was published under a different pseudonym, “John Collegins Esq.,”in the Asiatic Annual Register, 1801 (London, 1802): 118.The conclusion of the poem includes a paean to the Howrah Orphanage, from which the author claims to have taken two daughters, a claim identical to that made by J— H— [John Horsford] in the third section of Poems in Three Parts, which is signed with his own initials. Internal evidence, then, these examples among others, makes for a strong claim that Horsford was the author of all three parts of this volume, modestly saving the expanded collection of his own verse for the end of the volume. 5. Obviously the notion of culture, let alone “English language literary culture,” is subject to critique; I do not intend to hypostasize the notion of culture as a singular, uncontested entity, as my point is precisely the opposite. Any singular equation of language with identity or of identity with culture can be dismantled in numerous ways: linguistic (see Kachru, The Other Tongue and Myers-Scotton, Contact Linguistics) or philosophical (see Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other). 6.The data are based on the house tax in Calcutta, as reported in S. N. Mukherjee, “Class, Caste and Politics, 1814–38,” in Leach and Mukherjee, Elites in South Asia, 37. “Mugs” is a term referring to the natives of Arakan, particularly the area bordering Bengal. “Mug,” according to Hobson-Jobson, referred particularly to...