Carol Bolton

Debating India: Southey and The Curse of Kehama

In March 1801, Robert Southey wrote to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, telling him, T have planned a Hindoo romance of original extravagance’.1 At various times during the writing of his long narrative poem, The Curse of Kehama, eventually published in 1810, Southey also added the epithets ‘wild’ and ‘monstrous’ to it, so deliberately emphasizing the ‘extravagance’ of his fiction, based on the exotic source material of Hindu scriptures.2 But Southey also discussed his project thoroughly with another friend, William Taylor, whose initial reasons for advising Southey to proceed with his Indian fiction were more political: ‘Take the Hindoo superstition for your machinery, and your country here and your readers there have both an interest in its celebrity, which must grow with the national power and extend with the national empire’.3 Over the nine years it took Southey to finish his poem, he came to share Taylor’s ambitions for ‘national empire’, as his growing commitment to British colonial expansion was motivated by a desire to extend the benefits of Christianity and civilization to other countries. This he perceived as benefiting Britain and her colonies, in that ‘being English by language and by religion, their convenience and their interest would always attach them to England’.4 Both Southey’s poetical engagement with his Oriental source material — that he feared would be seen as intemperate at best and immoral at worst — and his political commitment to the dissemination of a British civilizing code of morality and religion throughout the Indian territories were important influences that shaped Kehama, which I will trace in this chapter. However, Southey’s attempt to blend both elements in his fiction created problems in Kehama that I will discuss in terms of the wider contemporary political debate about the future of British India during the Romantic period.