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

One: Contact Poetics in Eighteenth-Century Calcutta: Sir William Jones, Sir John Horsford, and Anna Maria

 one Contact Poetics in Eighteenth-Century Calcutta Sir William Jones, Sir John Horsford, and Anna Maria To what shall I compare my literary pursuits in India? Suppose Greek literature to be known in modern Greece only, and there to be in the hands of priests and philosophers; and suppose them to be still worshippers of Jupiter and Apollo; suppose Greece to have been conquered successively by Goths, Huns,Vandals,Tartars and lastly by the English; then suppose a court of judicature to be established by the British parliament, at Athens, and an inquisitive Englishman to be one of the judges; suppose him to learn Greek there, which none of the countrymen knew and to read Homer, Pindar, Plato, which no other Europeans had even heard of. Such am I in this country; substituting Sanscript for Greek, and the Brahmans for the priests of Jupiter andVālmic,Vyāsa and Cālidāsa for Homer, Plato and Pindar. —SirWilliam Jones to George John Spencer, August 23, 1787 Adieu to India’s fertile Plains, Where Brahma’s holy Doctrine reigns; Whose virt’ous Principles still bind The Hindoo’s meek untainted Mind; Far other Scenes myThoughts employ, Source of Anguish, Hope and Joy; I hasten to my native shore, Where Art and Science blend their Lore: There Learning keeps her chosen Seat— A millionVot’ries at her Feet, Ambitious of the laurel bough, To wind about their honor’d Brow. Yet ere I go—a grateful Pain Involves the Muse’s parting Strain. —The Poems of Anna Maria, 1793 Ganga, for him, with drooping head appears, For him ev’n holy Pundits shed their tears! Crishna for him wail’d Matra’s groves among,  Contact Poetics in Eighteenth-Century Calcutta And his romantic grot with cypress hung; Alive!—we prais’d the path sublime he trod,— Dead!—Learning hails him as her demi-god! —Sir John Horsford, “Literary Characteristicks of the Most Distinguished Members of the Asiatic Society, 1799” On September 25, 1783, two days after his thirty-seventh birthday,William Jones, recently knighted, disembarked from the Crocodile at Calcutta’s Chandpal Ghat. Within weeks he had recommenced his studies of Persian, Arabic, and Hindustani, taken up a position as judge on the Supreme Court of Judicature, founded the Asiatic Society, and purchased a suitable house on the banks of the Hooghly at Garden Reach. Over the next twelve years, he did more than any other single person to invent English language poetry in India. By the time of his death in 1794, it seemed only natural that he was hailed as learning’s “demi-god.”1 When Jones arrived in Calcutta, the metropolitan area was home to half a million people, half the population of London. Like London, the city was an important port, stretched along the banks of a river. Like London, it had impressive private homes and equally impressive slums, lovely gardens and open drains. As the Scots poet James Atkinson put it a generation later, Calcutta had its “tombs / And dazzling splendors, towering peerlessly,” yet “bitters too” under “attractive seeming” (City, 6). A center of credit, commerce, and trade both internal and external, Calcutta was already the first city of empire. Atkinson called it the City of Palaces, a name that stuck, but not a name that would have impressed a man of William Jones’s republican turn of mind. Instead of aspiring to palaces, Jones had modeled himself upon Cicero and hoped to combine learning, letters, and law to create a life of civic virtue. He saw his legal researches as a step toward creating a civic society within, and against, the trajectory of empire. Yet poetry was his first love, what Wordsworth was to call at century’s end “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.”2 Jones took far more seriously than Wordsworth the fundamental importance of knowledge to poetry, perhaps because he defined knowledge comparatively and with reference to multiple languages. Although he did not live, as he had hoped, to cultivate poetry in retirement, we might compare Jones’s intellectual though not his religious disposition to Milton’s. Jones’s impact on European letters, particularly the impact of his translations of Śankuntalā, the Hitopadesha, and the Laws of Manu, has been clear at least since Raymond Schwab’s Oriental Renaissance, published more than half a century ago. His impact on British romantic poetry has been widely recognized.3 But his place in the beginnings of English language poetry in India has...