Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore by Mary Ellis Gibson (review)

Indian Angles is a valuable resource for those interested in the origins of English verse in colonial India. A well-researched and well-documented book, it examines the rise and expansion of English language poetics in India, beginning in the late eighteenth century and ending in the early twentieth century. As most histories of Indian writing in English show us, the origins of this body of literature lie in poetry. However, critical attention has been showered on fiction, relegating poetry and drama to a secondary position. Mary Ellis Gibson claims that poetry written in colonial situations can tell us as much as or even more than novels can about figuration, multilingual illiteracies, and histories of nation and nationalism. Poetry is crucial, she argues, to an understanding of the development of English language culture in India, since from the beginning poetry was the most important belletristic English form in India. Writing English-language poetry, being educated in the British poetic tradition, and translating poetry from various Asian and European languages into English were central to the development of Indian English.

Indian Angles focuses on the poets writing in English in colonial India. Histories of Indian writing in English typically discuss poetry written either in pre-Independence or in post-Independence times with the latter being celebrated more. Post-Independence Indian poets in English like Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, and others deny the influence of pre-Independence poetry. Critics too tend to dismiss the earlier poetry as comparatively insignificant. Gibson demonstrates that poetry of the colonial period provides an important site for investigating the “cultural contradictions of empire” (8). Inhabiting polyglot locations, the writers of this poetry defined themselves within, against, and across the British poetic canon, classical European and modern European poetry, and classical and contemporary poetry in the languages of the subcontinent.

Focusing largely on Bengal, Gibson provides valuable insights into the history of publishing and reception in Calcutta, the administrative capital of colonial India. This focus enables “a fine-grained understanding of the linguistic, educational, and economic conditions that subtended the creation of English language verse” (9). The value of the book lies in the wealth of historical detail presented which serves to yoke broader social concerns to the close reading of poetic texts. Gibson studies a variety of poets: persons of British parentage or mixed ethnicity who lived part of their lives in Bengal; and children of Bengali parentage who lived part of their lives in Bengal and either Europe or other parts of India. Among the poets discussed are William Jones, an important force in Indian orientalism; John Horsford, who enlisted in the Indian army; the anonymous poet “Anna Maria,” a young woman who was influenced by the Della Cruscan poets of late eighteenth-century London; the East Indian poet Henry Louis Vivian Derozio who is claimed as the father of Indian verse in English; his friend Emma Roberts, the first British woman to make her living as a journalist in India; Kasiprasad Ghosh, who described himself as the first Hindu poet writing in English; Michael Madhusudan Dutt, a student of David Lester Richardson; Mary Seyers Carshore, the daughter of Irish parents, who lived all her life in India; and the more familiar Toru Dutt, Mary Eliza Leslie, Manmohan Ghose, Sarojini Naidu, and Rabindranath Tagore.

Gibson draws on several concepts from postcolonial criticism and theory: globalization as a phenomenon of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; bardic nationalism of Scotland and Ireland; internal material histories of uneven development; geocultural history of the transperipheral; the psychic history of “unhomeliness” (259); “layered mimicry” of colonial poetics (12); concepts of repertoire; and the processes of repetition, citation, and revision.

Gibson helpfully underscores the complexity of the English language in colonial India; it consisted of several regional and class dialects within a thoroughly multilingual space. Though literate people were very few, those who wrote English-language poetry were often influenced...