‘EAST INDIAN’ COSMOPOLITANISM

Abstract

In this essay I reassess the legacy of Henry Vivian Louis Derozio (1809–31) through the first extended interpretation of The Fakeer of Jungheera (1828), his 2,050-line poem, published when he was barely nineteen. What makes this poem notable, even unique, is that it is the first long poem written by any Indian in the English language. More remarkably, it is also an intriguing conjuncture of a complex set of relations at the very beginnings of modern India: British colonialism and local resistance, the English language and Indian vernaculars, native and European miscegenation, Christian missionaries and Hindu reformers, pre-nationalism and the imagining of India, evolving gender and patriarchal norms, Hindu–Muslim negotiations, sati and colonial power, to name a few. Though the poem is justifiably famous, it has hardly received the detailed attention that it deserves. My purpose here, however, extends beyond a reading of The Fakeer of Jungheera. I wish to argue that the conventional ways in which Derozio is understood – as a pioneer of Indian modernity and a proto-nationalist – are actually insufficient if not misleading. They throw, as it were,a blanket over not only his singular career, but on the whole phenomenon of what I call ‘East Indian cosmopolitanism’. I argue that the ‘national’ as a valid social or cultural space was not yet available, that it came into being later, after Derozio's time. Those who consider him a ‘national’ poet are performing a kind of back-projection that is not borne out by the work. On the other hand, the kind of cosmopolitanism that his writings and life embody, was also short-lived, based on the opportunities of the early colonial period, which shrunk into more restricted binaries with the establishment of British paramountcy. Yet, such ‘East Indian cosmopolitanism’ was very important for the formation of public culture in India and presaged by many decades the argumentative English-speaking class and English-language media in India. I take ‘East Indians’ at their own definition and evaluation as people of mixed race who wished to distinguish themselves certainly from the Indians and, per force, from the Europeans too. Derozio's newspaper, which claimed to be the voice of this community, was itself The East Indian. The history of how Derozio has been read shows that he has been primarily seen as a representative of the Anglo-Indian (Eurasian) community, without reference to his unique and short-lived cosmopolitanism. East Indian cosmopolitanism is thus one of those ‘lost’ modes of being which were replaced and overwritten by others. By recovering it, we add a vital component to our knowledge of how colonialism in its early days gave rise to a new society and consciousness in India.

Keywords:

• Derozio
• East Indian cosmopolitanism
• Fakeer of Jungheera, The
• Indian modernities
• sati and colonial power

Notes

¹All quotations from the poem, unless otherwise stated, are from Chaudhuri (2008).

²The editor in question is Francis Bradley-Brit who in 1923 brought out a selection of the poet's works for Oxford University Press. Sometimes, the dash is replaced by a comma, as in ‘To India, My Native Land’. The sonnet remains Derozio's best-known and most widely circulated composition.

³In April 2008 such an event took place in the auditorium named after him in Presidency (formerly Hindu) College, Kolkata, where Derozio himself taught and was expelled, but now is enshrined in a bust. An earlier version of this essay was presented during this commemorative conference. I thank the organizers, especially Professor Jayati Gupta, for inviting me to the conference.

⁴Although many earlier instances in Anglo-Indian novels abound, a structurally more significant example in an Indian English novel is to be found in A. Madhaviah's Clarinda (1915), where a Brahmin widow eventually marries her saviour and converts to Christianity. Clarinda, it is important to note, does enjoy a long afterlife of sexual fulfilment and conjugal happiness in spite of once being a Hindu widow. What is more, her English husband dies too, leaving her a widow a second time. Her second widowhood she devotes to piety and good works.

⁵Curiously, most commentators on this poem, including Sunder Rajan, seem to be unaware that Shah Shuja was an actual historical person, and the younger brother of Aurangzeb, the Moghul emperor.

⁶See Chaudhuri's ‘The Politics of Naming’ for a more detailed account of the term ‘East Indian.’ Though Derozio and most other sources use East Indian to denote the mixed race Christian community in Calcutta, there is another explanation for the term. According to Elsie Baptista's East Indians of Bombay, East Indians were the native Christians of North Konkan. Though evangelized by the Portuguese after Vasco da Gama's voyage to India in 1498, they claim prior Christian affiliation. These and many other “Portuguese” Christians from Goa who came to Bombay were designated as “East Indians” to indicate that they were British colonial subjects rather than Portuguese. Such a shift in nomenclature, though not very important when Bombay was ceded to the East India Company as a part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza to Charles II in 1661, became expedient after the establishment of British paramountcy in India. In the 19th century, the Catholics of North Konkan and Bombay voluntarily discarded the designation of “Portuguese Christians” to adopt the term “East Indian” not only to show that they were loyal British subjects but that they were claimants to the rights and privileges due to the “original” inhabitants of Bombay, which was now a very prosperous city. This suggests that the term East Indian had a much different if not longer currency in Western India than in Bengal. Indeed, some websites devoted to this community continue to advance claims of their natural rights (see http://www.east-indians.com and http://www.east-indians.net (accessed 12 August 2011). The latter claims that the land on which the Chattrapati Shivaji International Airport at Sahar, Mumbai, belonged to the East Indians and was commandeered from them by the British colonial administration during World War II and never “returned” despite a promise to do so after the end of the war.)

⁷For a detailed historical account of this community, see Hawes (1996).

⁸The name ‘Derozio’ itself seems to bear the impress of such a process, being not only unusual, but singular. Edwards (1884) asserts that it was a shortening of the more standard Portuguese surname ‘DeRosario’; that Derozio's ancestry was Indo-Portuguese is well established: ‘Derozio's father, who was descended from a respectable Portuguese family named DeRozario’ (2). There is, however, some confusion over the degree of his racial admixture. Chaudhuri (2010) says: ‘Derozio's claim as a native of India was all the more laudable because his father was Portuguese and his mother an English woman from Hampshire named Sophia Johnson – if there was any Indian blood in him at all, that might have been in a hidden corner on his father's side’ (879). But E. W. Madge, whom Chaudhuri quotes, clearly states that Henry's grandfather, Michael Derozio, was listed as a ‘Native Protestant’ in the St John's Baptismal Register of 1789 (3). ‘Native’ in this context is a racial term used in contradistinction to ‘European’, suggesting that the person concerned looked like an

Indian rather than a European or, to put it bluntly, was ‘black’ rather than ‘white’. About Derozio's mother, Chaudhuri is mistaken. Edwards, who meticulously researched and recorded the known information on Derozio's life, says: ‘One other relation it is needful to mention. Henry's aunt, his mother's sister, married a European gentleman, an Indigo Planter, at Bhaugulpore. Mr Arthur Johnson, Derozio's uncle, was born at Ringwood in Hampshire in the year 1782’ (1884: 3). According to Edwards, Sophia was Arthur Johnson's sister. There is no mention of Henry's mother; her name or ancestry remains unspecified. A misreading of Edwards might have led to the repeated error in thinking that Henry's mother was an Englishwoman from Hampshire whose maiden name was Johnson, whereas the reference in Edwards is clearly to Johnson's sister, not to Henry's mother. Henry's father, Francis Derozio, married again after Henry's mother died. His second was Anna Maria Rivers and they were married on 11 May 1817 in St. John's Cathedral Calcutta (Asiatic Journal and Monthly Miscellany: 197; Mukhopadhyay: 66).