Michael Franklin

“Who is Kailyal, what is she?” Subcontinental and Metropolitan Reader Responses to The Curse of Kehama and its Heroine

This article attempts to consider the responses of readers both in the metropole and within the subcontinent to a poem of which Jane Welsh Carlyle wrote: “I should like well to have conceived ‘The curse of Kehama’ – But I would not have written it for a thousand guineas.” Opening with an Elephanta picnic, it examines a wide array of critical and scholarly reactions which testify to the imaginative power and accuracy of Southeys poetic representation of Hindostan. Its detailed attention to “costume” led many, including seasoned India hands, to measure or recall their subcontinental experiences by the light of Southeys epic, which convinced some of its most informed readers that he had actually made the passage to India. It focuses upon reactions to the physical and moral attractions of the poems heroine Kailyal, a character whom the young Percy Shelley thought “divine”, rendering Kehama “my most favourite poem.” The inspiration for Kailyal is viewed not only in the obvious subcontinental shapes of Śrī Lakshmī and Śakuntalā, but also in terms of Biblical Orientalism and the influence of Klopstocks Messiah. The significance of “Cidli” in both Klopstocks epic and Klopstocks life, as the name he chose to give his beloved avant la lettre epipsyche Margaretha, is considered in respect to the influence upon Southey of their love conceived as predestined and indivisible through all time.

“Drafts upon Heaven”: Robert Southey, Tapas, and the “monstrous fables” of Hinduism and Romanism

This article considers how far Southey understood the relationship inherent in the Vedic concept of tapas between the incandescent energy produced by ascetic practices and the dangerous power of knowledge. With a scholar’s austere devotion, he subjects the practice of severe and mortifying austerities to a detailed consideration which mingles horror and fascination. The idea that such penance and sacrifice accrue a “sterling” value, bankable in Heaven, and independent of the devotee’s motives, evokes especial revulsion. At the time of the composition of The Curse of Kehama (1810) this is viewed as a peculiarly Hindu tenet. Subsequently, Southey’s desire to demonize Catholicism leads him to regard it as a received opinion of the Catholic church, and to juxtapose Hindu and Romish austerities in catalogues of repulsive penitential practices. His vigor in denouncing Hindu and Catholic austerities was ambivalently matched by his delight in writing poetry about them, and the article examines the complex interaction of his politics, poetics, proclivities, and prejudices. Southey’s representations of Hinduism are analyzed against the background of sources and analogues in the research of William Jones and other Bengal Orientalists; the criticism of both metropolitan and colonial reviewers; and the delineations of other Romantic period writers.

‘The Hastings Circle’: Writers and Writing in Calcutta in the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century

This essay will examine the self-representations of early Indology, focusing upon an exceptional group of middle-class imperial administrators whose professional avocations, whether governmental, commercial, or military, encouraged the creation of a circle of amateur writers and scholars centred in the emergent capital of British India. The spheres of public and private interest were intricately interwoven in the evolving texture of a distinct and distinctive discourse of academic Orientalism. Jurgen Habermas has claimed that the bourgeois public sphere in Continental Europe was created through opposition to the absolutist state; its miniature version in colonial Calcutta was in many respects the offspring of Enlightened Orientalist despotism.

“Harmonious” Jones and “Honest John” Shore: Contrasting Responses of Garden Reach Neighbors to the Experience of India

ABSTRACT The Orientalist Sir William Jones and the Governor-general Sir John Shore were neighbors and close friends in Garden Reach, Calcutta on the banks of the Hugli. Opening with a consideration of their mutual reaction to an imperial neighbor, Bodawpaya, King of Burma, this article explores the differing reactions of long-term East India Company hand, Shore and newly-arrived Crown-appointed Supreme Court judge to the experience that is India. Both keen collectors of Indo-Persian manuscripts, where Shore regretfully found alienating Otherness, Jones excitedly uncovered disconcerting similitude. John Shore, in many ways a straightforward man, was simultaneously something of “a riddle wrapped inside an enigma,” his genuine Orientalist and linguistic interests stunted and deformed by his evangelical convictions. While Jones produced world-modifying ideas and translations which announced the arrival of world literature, Shores intellectual interest in Vedantism was such that he translated a Persian version of the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha, an important and inherently syncretic text containing elements from Vedantic, Jainite, and Mahāyāna Buddhist traditions. The admiration Shore once felt for Vedantic Hinduism may have evaporated before his fiery conviction that even these sacred writings encouraged “idolatry, obscenity, and vice,” but the sincerity of his desire to save Indian souls remained a guiding light.

Indian Ink, Irish Pens and British Cartridge Paper

It is now more than 20 years since the publication of Marlon B. Ross’s The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry and the appearance of Stuart Curran’s “The I Altered” in Anne K. Mellor’s groundbreaking collection Romanticism and Feminism. These stunning reappraisals of the place of women’s poetry in Romantic literary culture compelled a redefinition of our field and ushered in a wave of exciting and palpably new scholarship on Romantic women poets. The names (if not always the poetry) of Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Anna Barbauld, and Letitia Landon are now well known to students of Romanticism, to single out but a few of the distinctive female voices that have emerged in the last two decades from over a century of virtual silence. Both Stephen Behrendt’s British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community and Lilla Maria Crisafulli and Cecilia Pietropoli’s Romantic Women Poets: Genre and Gender invite retrospective observations on the distance scholarship on Romantic women poets has traveled since 1988, Behrendt’s book because it offers a panoramic perspective on Romantic women’s poetry as a whole and Crisafulli and Pietropoli’s collection by virtue of its effort to delineate a spectrum of women’s specific contributions to generic innovation in Romantic poetry. Fittingly, Stuart Curran is a prominent presence in both books. His “Anna Seward and the Dynamics of Female Friendship” is the lead essay in the Crisafulli-Pietropoli volume and Behrendt dedicates his book to him. Behrendt makes clear that his aim is to continue the work of reconfiguring the poetic landscape of Romanticism begun by such critics as Curran, Ross, Mellor, Paula Feldman, and Susan Wolfson. He eschews theoretical generalizations about this landscape in favor of the representation of what he terms “shades.” By “shades” Behrendt means both “shadings” and “shadows”; he evokes the nuances of tonality and color characteristic of individual, newly discovered and appreciated poems as well as the ghostlike presences of the hundreds of women – until recently overlooked and unacknowledged – who were writing poetry in the Romantic era. This work of honoring the accomplishments of “historically neglected or marginalized writers” (28), giving “greater form and substance to some of these shadows by revisiting their works, . . . making them visible again” (29) is clearly Behrendt’s passion. And his is a passion for justice as well. He argues forcefully and effectively, often letting reviewers’ blindnesses and prejudices speak for themselves, that masculinist critical and poetic norms have made it virtually impossible, from the late eighteenth century to the present day, for women poets to get a fair hearing either in reviewing circles or in the halls of

Sir William Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works@@@Sir William Jones

This edition provides a representative selection of the key works of Sir William Jones (1746-94), one of the foremost Orientalists and intellectual pioneers of his generation. The range of his interests and accomplishments was diverse and this volume provides convenient and reliable points of access to Joness remarkable work which extended to 13 volumes in the collected edition of 1807 (recently reprinted by Curzon/New York University). This book represents an annotated critical edition of important poetical, cultural and political works produced both in Britain and India, and care has been taken to establish authoritative texts and contexts for each item. The texts are arranged in chronological order of composition, and each has a headnote on its general significance, together with substantial footnotes elucidating its particular obscurities and a discussion of its meaning and occasion. Jones is of critical interest for two major reasons: his historical significance for Orientalism and Romanticism; and the specific climate of current debate over issues of race, colonialism, and nationhood. With the advent of cultural pluralism, and from the modern perspective of comparative literature, Jones is being seen as a crucial integrator, synthesiser and transmitter of Eastern culture, and one who avoided the gross ethnocentricity of most of his contemporaries. There is also a renewed interest in Orientalism and colonial discourse following the publication of works by Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha and others which may involve critical reassessment of Sir William Jones.