Introduction
Many aspects of Derozio's work have escaped serious investigation in Indian historical studies, but Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809–1831)—famous in his lifetime as India's first ‘national’ poet, as one newspaper review at the time described him—contributed crucially to the evolution of a public sphere in Calcutta in the first phase of British imperialism in India.Footnote 1 This neglect may be attributed, in part, to the disproportionate amount of attention paid by nationalist historians to his scandal-ridden, radical role in revolutionising the social and political life of nineteenth-century Bengal at the expense of a closer study of both his poetry and his politics. As the poetry has been discussed in some detail recently, it is the intention of this paper to portray Derozio's legendary career as India's first modern philosopher-poet-teacher in the light of two political incidents, both more or less lost to history, that also acted as signposts, or markers, of the start and the end of his literary life in Calcutta.Footnote 2
In 1825, at the same time that Derozio's career as a poet was taking off through poems published in various periodicals and newspapers in the city, a vigorous attack was launched in the correspondence columns of a leading newspaper, the India Gazette, by an amalgamation of citizens from diverse backgrounds against a perceived insult to people of mixed descent by the editor of that paper. The issue was one of naming, for the editor had used an arguably derogatory term to refer to a particular section of the Indian and mixed community who served in the position of managers, and singled them out insultingly for having formed a literary association. The other incident belongs to the year of Derozio's sudden and unexpected death by cholera in 1831, when he made some significant interventions at the meeting held by the East Indian community to draft the second petition to send to the Houses of Parliament in Britain; there too, naming was of some significance to the community as a whole. Using these controversies as a window, this paper will attempt to present the early radical interventions of the mixed-race community in initiating a discourse of civic rights and human dignity which led, ultimately, to organised attempts at constitutional change and political reform in India, whose estimation has been underrated in present-day contexts.
Significantly, the minority status of the East Indians in British Indian culture and society, as it first came to be formulated in the early nineteenth century through precisely such controversies, as well as through political action, created a paradigmatic framework that set a definition of sorts on the question of minority existence, which was then disseminated into a wider national context. This paper aims to outline significant parts of the debate in order to focus comprehensively on the zeitgeist of an era that was a formative influence on succeeding generations of Indians who were avid spectators, and sometimes participants, in the war of words in the public spaces of the Town Hall or the correspondence columns of newspapers. Later, following a sequence of meetings and political petitions, they became active contestants in similar disputes concerning their own rights in the future. These public occasions, small-scale in one instance, and quite large-scale in another, and the politics that was manifest in the manner in which both incidents played themselves out, were significant. Both events were constitutive of the newly-evolving public sphere as it emerged in early nineteenth-century Calcutta, and may be read in the context of the birth of the Indian modern to suggest, in fact, that moments such as these constituted noteworthy ‘originary’ moments in the formulation of Indian modernity.
Towards an Indian Modern
Derozio was born on the 18th of April, 1809, exactly twenty years after the French Revolution had created an era of millennial regeneration amongst the poets and intellectuals of England and the continent. The repercussions of that political occurrence upon the thinking world were unprecedented; writing thirty years later, Robert Southey famously said:
Few persons but those who lived in it can conceive or comprehend what the memory of the French Revolution was, nor what a visionary world seemed to open upon those who were just entering it. Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race.Footnote 3
The investment made by the Romantic poets in England in the groundbreaking idealism of the French Revolution has been well documented, but its effect on Calcutta intellectuals was no less profound and regenerative, if not as creative. It is said of Rammohun Roy that at the Cape in 1831, on his way to England, he insisted upon boarding a French frigate flying the revolutionary tri-colour, despite having hurt his leg in an accident, and ‘as he left the vessels he repeated emphatically “Glory, glory, glory to France!”'Footnote 4 This ardour for the principles of equality, liberty and fraternity was not unique to Rammohun, but was characteristic of many others in Calcutta, including Derozio and the students around him. On 10 December 1830, two hundred persons attended the July Revolution celebrations in the Town Hall, and notably on Christmas Day in the same year, ‘the tri-colour flag of the French Revolution was hoisted on the Monument, apparently by unknown people.’Footnote 5
Among the Romantics, Southey's student radicalism was the most short-lived of all, sliding into conventionality with some rapidity. Coleridge, who, as an intimate friend, had shared with Southey some of the dreams spawned by the French, reproached him at the time: ‘O Selfish, money-loving Man! What Principle have you not given up?’Footnote 6 Byron too, had lampooned Southey outright in the dedication to Don Juan, not published during his lifetime, ‘You're a poet—Poet-laureate,/And representative of all the race,/Although ‘tis true that you turn'd out a Tory at/Last, – yours has lately been a common case . . .’. Derozio, writing not much later in far-off Calcutta, one of the undreamt of progeny of that ‘visionary world’ the French Revolution had created, also saw Southey's co-option into the establishment, especially upon being appointed Poet Laureate in 1813 (a post that required writing verse to commemorate royal occasions), as a betrayal of his early radical principles, and was unsparing in his evaluation of him. In a poem called ‘Poetry’, originally submitted to the Helter Skelter Magazine in 1824 and reprinted only in parts in the India Gazette, Derozio, under the name of ‘Leporello’, begins by saying he ‘would not quarrel/With pension'd Southey, for his dear-bought laurel’ (the Poet Laureateship), but immediately follows this up with a description of Southey: ‘In Bathos sunk, and grovelling in the mire—/Inditing [sic] Epics, Odes, and such like things,/Abusing freedom, and bepraising Kings. . . .’Footnote 7
At the time he wrote these lines, Derozio was fifteen years old and just out of school; in time, he would, in turn, be lampooned in a poem by a friend for teaching his students to do just the opposite, to praise freedom and abuse kings. (‘Kings, Priests, and Laws, and Creeds, are but the tools/Which cunning knaves employ to govern fools;/Down with Kings, Laws, and Creeds then, and in chief/With any creed prohibiting roast beef.’Footnote 8)
Derozio had been admitted to David Drummond's school, the ‘Durromtollah Academy’, in the area still known as Dharmatala just a mile or two from his house, at the age of six, and here he studied till he was fourteen. That Derozio excelled academically and in amateur theatricals throughout his years in school is known from notices in the India Gazette and the Calcutta Journal. A report in the Calcutta Journal of 1821 singles out two students for exceptional praise: ‘Henry Derozio and Hurry Doss Bose: the first for his pre-eminence among the rest of his school-fellows . . .’Footnote 9. Both contemporary and later commentators have pointed out the unique distinction of Drummond's Academy in nurturing Indian, Eurasian and European children in the same classes without any distinction made on the basis of race or class, a fleeting pedagogical moment that would be consigned to history very quickly in a few years’ time. That this was no accident of opportunism is made evident by a speech made by David Drummond in the annual function of 1821 in praise of Hurry Doss Bose, Derozio's fellow prize-winning student (what became of him?), when he said: ‘in you we have an omnipotent confutation of that impious doctrine which would make colour the test of intellect. That blasphemy is now leaving the world; and man over all the earth begun to be considered solely as the child of circumstances.’Footnote 10 It was, perhaps, this extraordinary liberal temper that Derozio inherited that made him say that he ‘gloried in the name of “East Indian,”' and assert that he was ‘proud to be called a native of this country.’Footnote 11 In the last lines written by Derozio in the paper he edited, The East Indian, on the subject, befittingly, of Drummond's Academy's annual examinations, he had commented on the ‘freedom from illiberality’ in his old school, where ‘it is quite delightful to witness the exertions of Hindoo and Christian youth, striving together in the same classes for academical honours’.Footnote 12 To reinforce the benefits of mutual interaction, he had then quoted Burns's famous lines, ‘When man to man the world o'er,/Shall brothers be and a’ that’, lines which Alexander Duff had reported specifically hearing at the meetings of his Hindu College students.Footnote 13
The report of 1821 also mentions Derozio's acting prowess, mentioning that ‘H. Derozio in the “Newcastle Apothecary” and the Tent scene in Richard III shewed great versatility of powers highly cultivated for so young a man.’Footnote 14 Another reference the following year reported that ‘A boy of the name of DEROZIO gave a good conception of Shylock. . . . Colman's humorous Vagary of the Poetical Apothecary, was recited also by DEROZIO, and with capitally ludicrous effect.’Footnote 15 Finally, in January 1824, in his last year at the school, he had composed and recited a prologue to the performance of a play, Douglas, in which, recalled John Grant, ‘his very correct accent was extra-ordinary, more especially when it is recollected that a peculiar one distinguishes his country-men in general’.Footnote 16 Grant further commended Derozio in the part of Glenalvon that evening, which was, in fact, the role of the villain in the play.
Douglas (1757), in which Derozio played the role of Glenalvon, was a tragedy by the Scottish playwright John Home, who must have been dear to Drummond's heart as a key figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. Amusingly, the philosopher David Hume, who was to become so important to Derozio's philosophy of life, had been, in fact, the first to play the role of Glenalvon in the very first (amateur) performance of Douglas in 1756.Footnote 17 Home based Douglas on the Scottish Ballad ‘Gil Morrice’, which recounted the story of a husband who mistakes his wife's son for her lover and kills him. Once among the most popular plays of the latter half of the eighteenth century, the success of Douglas proved, at the time inspirationally, that a Scottish author who wrote about his native country could compete with the masters of English literature, provoking the memorable, if apocryphal, cry from the audience: ‘Whaur's your Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ when it was performed to great acclaim in Edinburgh in December, 1756.
David Drummond was born in Fifeshire in 1786 or 1787 to a ‘Dissenting Clergyman’, at a time when Scotland was in intellectual ferment, moving to London in 1813 with a view to embarking on a ship to the colonies.Footnote 18 In the years preceding his birth, Adam Smith and David Hume, along with Adam Ferguson, Dugald Stewart, William Robertson and Thomas Reid, had established the foundation of what has come to be called the Scottish Enlightenment (1730–1790). Current accounts of intellectual history now acknowledge the Scots, alongside the French, as leading exponents of Enlightenment thought, and James Buchan, summing up their influence, says:
In demanding that experiment not inherited truth define the business of living, the Edinburgh philosophers stamped the West with its modern scientific and provisional character. They created a world that tended towards the egalitarian and, within reason, the democratic. Their prestige in English-speaking lands was carried on the wave of British and American expansion into every corner of the world.Footnote 19
The hyperbole in the last sentence here is startlingly reinforced by the example of the Scotsman David Drummond in Calcutta, who, as Derozio's teacher and mentor, was at the fountainhead of the ideas that energised Young Bengal (as the new breed of men, mostly students of Derozio, came to be known), who brought the same trenchant zeal for reform, radicalism and the spirit of enquiry into their own lives.
Alexander Duff, the Scottish evangelist on the other side of the fence from Drummond, reported on the meetings Derozio and the like-minded held in Calcutta in the following words, where he generally fails to differentiate between Scottish and English authors:
The sentiments delivered were fortified by oral quotations from English authors. If the subject was historical, Robertson and Gibbon were appealed to; if political, Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham; if scientific, Newton and Davy; if religious, Hume and Thomas Paine; if metaphysical, Locke and Reid, Stewart and Brown. The whole was frequently interspersed and enlivened by passages cited from some of our most popular English poets, particularly Byron and Sir Walter Scott. And more than once were my ears greeted with the sound of Scotch rhymes from the poems of Robert Burns.Footnote 20
Derozio had said, in his letter to Dr Wilson justifying his conduct and opinions after his forced resignation from the Hindu College, that he had thought it his
duty to acquaint several of the College students with the substance of Hume's celebrated dialogue between Cleanthes and Philo, in which the most subtle and refined arguments against Theism are adduced. But I have also furnished them with Dr Reid's and Dugald Stewart's more acute replies to Hume, – replies which to this day continue unrefuted.Footnote 21
In Hume's most famous work on religion, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, suppressed during his lifetime and published in 1779 three years after his death, he introduced a discussion of religious belief and doubt, effectively analysing various arguments for the existence of God, while asserting that morality is independent of religion. However, although the Dialogues was widely regarded as an attack on Christianity, Hume's subject is at once more comprehensive, fragmentary, and provisional; he is often more interested in asking questions than in answering them, preferring what he describes in the subtitle to his Treatise as ‘an experimental method of reasoning in moral subjects’ as our best guide through life.Footnote 22
Derozio's own preoccupations in 1831 in Calcutta sound strikingly similar. ‘Believe me, my dear Sir’, he had continued in the letter,
I am too thoroughly imbued with the deep sense of human ignorance, and of the perpetual vicissitudes of opinion, to speak with any confidence even of the most unimportant matters. Doubt and uncertainty besiege us too closely to admit the boldness of dogmatism to enter an enquiring mind, and far be it for me to say'that is’, and ‘that is not’. . . . Footnote 23
Disavowing the charge that he advocated atheism, he had emphatically declared, a few sentences ahead of this, ‘To produce convictions was not within my power; and if I am to be condemned for the Atheism of some, let me receive credit for the Theism of others.’Footnote 24 Derozio is supposed to have inherited his scepticism from Drummond, described in most accounts as a ‘free thinker’ and ‘rationalist’, whose deductive powers are evident from his book, Objections to Phrenology. Derozio's own Objections to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Kant was praised by the then Principal of Bishop's College, Dr Mill, as displaying ‘powers of reasoning and observation which would not disgrace even gifted philosophers’.Footnote 25
Alexander Duff, who had commented on Derozio's students’ reading, on the subject of religion, ‘Hume and Paine’, also documented the craze, at this time, for Paine's books, writing,
It was some wretched bookseller in America, who, – basely taking advantage of the reported infidel leanings of a new race of men in the East, and apparently regarding no God but his silver dollars, – despatched to Calcutta a cargo of that most malignant and pestiferous of all anti-Christian publications’, Tom Paine's The Rights of Man: From one ship a thousand copies were landed, and at first sold at the cheap rate of one rupee per copy; but such was the demand, that the price soon rose, and after a few months, it was actually quintupled.Footnote 26
Besides the separate copies of the Age of Reason, there was also ‘a cheap American edition, in one thick vol. 8vo.’,Footnote 27 of all Paine's works, including the Rights of Man, and other minor pieces, both political and theological.Footnote 28
Tom Paine's abolitionism, anti-monarchical views and advocacy of equal rights found an echo in Derozio's politics, as indeed his critique of religion too must have done. ‘These are the times that try men's souls’, Paine had written in The Crisis (1776–1777), and it is the contention here that Derozio belonged to a global generation that believed staunchly in the ideological underpinnings of the great upheavals of an era that encompassed the wars of Independence in both the Americas, the French Revolution, and in the coming struggle for Italian unification. It would not be an exaggeration to maintain that this period, from the 1790s to the 1820s, had created a republic of intellectuals that spanned the world from Rammohun and Derozio in the East to the figure of Simón Bolivar in the Western hemisphere, who were moved by an ideological upheaval that dreamt of nothing less than ‘the regeneration of the human race’.Footnote 29
An Offensive Editorial
Contemporaneously with these developments in world history, from May 26 to June 5, 1825, a relatively small, but in the eyes of its actors, huge controversy played itself out in the columns of the India Gazette, Calcutta's leading newspaper, in reaction to a perceived insult upon the mixed-race community that had called itself, at the time, by various appellations—‘Eurasian’, ‘East Indian’, or even ‘Anglo-Indo-Briton’—eventually settling for ‘East Indian’ as the most satisfactory nomenclature for a community defined by mixed parentage. The situation arose because of a very brief paragraph written almost certainly by the editor of the India Gazette, Dr John Grant, in which he had referred in an uncharacteristically uncharitable and caustic manner to a literary association, The Oriental Literary Society, formed in Calcutta by some ‘sircars’ or office-goers who were both mixed-race and Indian. The subsequent sequence of editorials and letters, which seem to have been written by Englishmen, East Indians and Indians alike, gives a vivid picture of the sensibilities prevailing at the time, showing, undoubtedly, that this era was more fluid and liberal in its ideas about race, at least among the influential literati, where the revolutionary ideals of France were still reverberating, than at any other time in the history of British rule in India. One of the most interesting aspects of this debate was the possible involvement in it of Henry Derozio, India's first modern poet, who might have been the letter-writer using the pseudonym ‘An East Indian’, an appellation he is known to have occasionally used in the pages of this same paper when signing his own poems.
The Editorial is short, and may be quoted in its entirety:
Several of the Sircars employed about the offices of Calcutta, mean, it is said, to form themselves into a literary, scientific and artificial association. From the well known genius and talents to be found among these individuals, we have themost auspicious hopes that the public will derive the greatest delight and instruction from their literary, scientific and artificial concatenations.
We understand that the association have given out the following as subjects for prize essays:
Show cause why Mr R.C. FERGUSSON instead of proceeding at once to England, winters at the Caucasus?
The very bothering question of the site of Palibothra, &c. &c.Footnote 30
As is evident, the tone is caustic, and the sarcasm obvious. The Hobson Jobson explains the word ‘sircar’ as having been derived from the Hindustani, and before that the Persian, where it denoted the ‘head of affairs’. It is evident from the long note on it that the word, for which three uses are given, was used indiscreetly in the editorial in the second derogatory sense, which the Hobson Jobson defined as:
In Bengal the word is applied to a domestic servant who is a kind of house-steward, and keeps the accounts of household expenditure and makes miscellaneous purchases for the family; also in merchant's offices, to any native accountant or native employed in making purchases, etc.’Footnote 31
In one fell swoop, therefore, this appellation managed to single out the managerial classes of all races in the city excepting the ruling class, and offend all at once. Apart from that, the tone is gratuitously sugary and excessively mocking, describing the society as ‘a literary, scientific and artificial association’, referring to the ‘well known genius and talents to be found’ among this class, and promising great benefit, this time from their ‘literary, scientific and artificial concatenations.’ The immense unimportance of such a society's deliberations are then wickedly ribbed; ‘they shall give prizes’, Grant concocts, ‘for essays on the fictional or real Mr Fergusson's vacations and on the vexatious issue of the location of Palibothra’. (The subject here, in the second instance, is Alexander's conquest of India, in which Palibothra was identified as the theoretical limit of his march east. This methodological problem originated in the work of Sir William Jones in the late eighteenth century, who had premised that Megasthenes’ Palibothra was the same as ancient Patna, the city of Pataliputra.)
‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’
A whole flurry of letters followed this paragraph in the next issue of the India Gazette on May 30, 1825. The signatures of almost all the letters bear pseudonyms, but the consternation, indignation, perplexed puzzlement, and general certitude that such a tone was wrong, and should not have been taken, is common to all. Two letters on May 27, 1825, from X.X. and W. Byrn, take issue with Grant in the gentlest tones of reprobation and reproach. X.X. mentions that a slur had been cast on an Association formed by ‘some intelligent young men at the Parental Academic InstitutionFootnote 32 for the purpose of meeting periodically and acquiring information by the reciprocal interchange of sentiments’.Footnote 33 X.X. continues, in defence of John Grant, that he is ‘convinced, from enjoying the pleasure of your acquaintance, that you could never be guilty of that which some techy individuals would impute to you;’ and that further, it was inconceivable, that ‘you [emphasised] would endeavour to cast a degree of ridicule’ over those whose only attempt was to improve themselves.Footnote 34 The letter-writer signs off by suggesting the Editor might perhaps like to remove any adverse impression that a casual reader might derive from the offending paragraph.
The following letter, by W. Byrn, is equally short and conciliatory. ‘From the tenor’ of an editorial paragraph in ‘last night's India Gazette’, ‘many suppose’, that it was about the ‘Oriental Literary Society’. He doesn't ‘say so himself’, in case that allows the editor to retort, ‘if the cap fits you, you may wear it’. But universal opinion believes the Society has been disparaged, and such comments will ‘have a bad effect on it.’ He too, he says, thinks such comments will have ‘a decidedly injurious effect.’ However, he should ‘still hesitate to impute a bad feeling to you’ unless he is absolutely sure the comments were made about the Society, and he ends by asking for a clear statement from the editor about whether the reference was to the Oriental Literary Society or not. Wale Byrn, the letter-writer, was a name well-known in the East Indian community at the time. Son of an Irishman and an East Indian lady, he served the government in various capacities and was active socially as Secretary to the Calcutta Church Missionary Association, as Governor of the Free School, and as Honorary Secretary to the Parental Academy for 24 years. He served on the East Indian Petition Committee and spoke from the same platform as Derozio at the ‘monster meeting’ held in 1831 upon the return of the agent of the committee, Mr Ricketts, from England.Footnote 35
Aminadab, writing next on the same day, adopts a patrician and reproachful tone. The writer seems to be a senior citizen (he refers to himself in the letter as ‘an old man’), perhaps British or European, who has the standing to reprimand the erring editor. The language in the letter is archaic and involved—it begins:
Thy uncourteous departure from that gentlemanly and conciliatory course of conduct which has hitherto marked thy Editorial career, in having, without reason or provocation, insulted a respectable and inoffensive class of the inhabitants of this peaceful Community in thy paper of last Thursday evening has occasioned loud complainings. . . .Footnote 36
That the politics of the writer lies to the left can be made out from his subsequent reference to his satisfaction at Grant's effective handling of the ‘lordly Bull’ in a previous instance, meaning the John Bull, the Calcutta paper that was described as ‘a thick and thin defender of all things Governmental, a Tory of the Tories’, and the letter ends with the advice that the editor render an apology for his misdeed.Footnote 37 This was the only letter the editor responded to, saying, in a short note at the bottom of this letter: ‘We received our friend Aminadab's epistle after our comments referring to the subject were concluded. We thank him for his good advice—Ed.’Footnote 38
The most sarcastic and amusing letter of the lot on that day, however, was signed by someone calling himself ‘Gureeb Doss’; would it be too much to speculate that this was a pseudonym for ‘Hurry Doss Bose’, Derozio's classmate and fellow prize winner, whose command over European literature was feted by Drummond in the prize-giving ceremony of 1821? There are several indications from the letter itself that the writer was Indian, and intimately involved in the setting up of the Oriental Literary Association—he mentions, for instance, that the first meeting of the society was in his ‘mansion’ on—and he gives the Indian month—the 4th of ‘Joistee’ or Jaistha, which runs in the Gregorian calendar from the middle of May to the middle of June. But it is the style and the tone of the letter-writer, who is not only fluent with his Shakespeare but confident enough to mimic the Indianisms of Indian English that really stand out. The letter starts:
Sir—The Sircars alluded to have ‘formed themselves into a Literary and Scientific Association,’ and what for no? ‘Have not Sircars eyes? Have not Sircars hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die?’ and if you, or any one else, wrong us, shall we not be permitted to complain?Footnote 39
In a tone of friendly mockery, Gureeb Doss continues with his argument,
Produce a person to say no, and let him be orator, author, artist or amateur, I will combat his arguments, or in the classical language of the ‘East Indian’ in today's Hurkaru, ‘un-dertake to un-deceive him, in the mistake un-der which he so egregiously labors.’ Footnote 40
The quoted sentence is taken from another letter on the subject published on the previous day in another paper, the Bengal Hurkaru, by ‘An East Indian’; this letter caused the most controversy and offence, and was perhaps written by the poet Henry Derozio, who had in the past used that pseudonym as a signature under poems published in the India Gazette. The conjecture that Gureeb Doss was indeed Derozio's classmate ‘Hurry Doss Bose’ receives a further impetus from the affectionate manner in which the letter makes fun of the unintentionally alliterative phrase of the poet's that he quotes with such emphasis, and calls ‘classical’. The tone of Gureeb Doss's letter then changes and becomes serious, continuing, ‘Sircars, Mr. Editor, have as much right to cultivate the arts and enlarge their range of intelligence, as any other class of men.’ If some of ‘our’ customs are ‘uncourtly and require reform’, he says, then they—the editor's tribe—too should ‘look inward’ to their own strange ways, and proceeds to poke fun at the European codes of dress strictly adhered to in Calcutta by the ruling classes: ‘we do not put our necks in the stocks, or suffer semi-strangulation from a cravat, nor yet wear a shirt collar like the winkers of a horse’. By mentioning that ‘loose habits suit us best’, the writer further reinforces the impression that he is an Indian, and sufficiently well-placed to mock the pretensions of the European dress code in a tropical climate; the italicisation of the phrase ‘loose habits’ also shows him not to be averse to a double entendre that pokes fun at his own people at the same time.
Gureeb Doss then dwells on the history of the literary association that is the focus of so much debate, and discusses the hire of a house for future meetings. From the names of the gentlemen and the proposed sites, the association seems to have had a considerable Indian presence, for ‘Cossinath Gooshall’ proposed Chitpore Road, ‘where a decent bungalow might be obtained for four rupees per month’ and this was seconded by ‘Radhachurn’ Banerjee. ‘Collypersaud Doss’ decided, however, in favour of St James Lane, but ‘Joggomohun Goor’, ‘a very intelligent, as well as a round sleek robustions [sic] gentleman’, proposed Jaun Bazar. In the end, Giri Babu's Lane was agreed upon, and the writer ends by inviting the editor to ‘No. 12, Geree Babu's Lane’ on Wednesday evenings, where the topic for the next discussion was ‘whether the usury laws are or are not of public utility.’ This reference to the names of some of the Indian gentlemen who were present at the meeting, spelt in the letter with almost ludicrously anglicized spellings, is one of its most interesting features, demonstrating the close interrelations between the East Indian and the Bengali sircars; significantly, no other writer presents quite the same picture.Footnote 41 After a further digression or two about not admitting ‘riff-raff’ to ‘our society’ and a word of caution against being made the subject of ‘after-dinner jokes’, the letter ends with a quotation, again from the East Indian's letter, wanting to know ‘how any person “would have acted were his parents to have left him defenceless and unprovided.” Answer this classical question,’ the letter ends, ‘and believe me your friend and well wisher, Gureeb Doss.’
An East Indian's Objections
The letter written by the East Indian on the subject of the India Gazette editor's depredations was sent to the Bengal Hurkaru, and reprinted in the India Gazette a few days later. The involvement of the Hurkaru might conceivably have been because that paper was a daily and could intervene more promptly in the debate than the India Gazette, which still appeared only twice weekly; the letter-writer himself maintains, however, that ‘where the Editor of a Newspaper is guilty of an offence in his public capacity, our only resource is to seek reparation for it through the columns of another Paper’.
The East Indian launches headlong into his argument, articulating his thoughts with a passion and indignation unmatched in any of the other letters. The offending paragraph by Grant is provided at the head of the letter, following which he proclaims he is ‘at a loss’ and afraid ‘to trust my feelings’ when he considers ‘By what suitable epithet he should characterise the liberal spirit’ issuing ‘from the pen of a public Editor’.
Does the Editor of the India Gazette suppose, Sir, that because an individual is employed in a public office, he compromises his right to the character of a rational and an intelligent being; and that, by reason of this single circumstance, he is rendered incapable of self improvement in any branch of science or literature? Does he suppose, Sir, that, because such an individual has a certain class of duties to perform at stated hours of the day, he is thereby incapacitated for giving exercise to his intellectual faculties as a man? Or does he suppose, Sir, that ‘genius and talents’ are the peculiar property of the vulgar great?Footnote 42
Here, the words ‘liberal’, ‘rational’, ‘intelligent’ and ‘intellectual faculties’ are emphasised, and the words ‘liberal’ and ‘liberality’ repeated in italics once again in the next paragraph, pointing, perhaps, to his privileging of these parameters derived from an investment in readings of Enlightenment philosophers.
Continuing in the same vein, the letter goes on to assert that ‘Genius springs not from rank in life, but from the virgin hand of nature; and talents are the productive result of an enlightened education . . .’ Further, he challenges,
I can inform the mistaken Editor, that there are, to my certain knowledge, young men born in this country, who have both ‘genius and talents’ enough to bear competition with the Editor himself, or with any set of young men similarly educated in any part of the world. I can tell him, that, if there be any mental difference between the youths of this country and those born in England, or elsewhere, such difference is owing not to any difference of color, which is but skin-deep, but solely to a difference of education. . . . I can further tell the Editor, that there exists among persons born in this country as large a stock not only of intellect, but of principle and every honourable feeling, as there is to be found among any class of men in any part of the known world.Footnote 43
After some more indignation on the issue of the contempt heaped on sircars, he mentions that it was hardly their fault that their parents had abandoned them (implying thereby that many in this community had been deserted by their biological parents), he asks the question Gureeb Doss had quoted, ‘I should be glad to know,’ he says, ‘how the sarcastic Editor himself would have acted, were his parents to have left him defenceless and unprovided for in the world?’ Finally, he ends by asking for a public apology and by explaining why he had written to the Hurkaru for a redressal of his grievance. If there is evidence to be furnished about the fact that the writer of this letter was indeed Derozio, then just the style and rhetoric of the language might have been enough proof. The honest indignation felt by the youth—for Derozio would have been no more than sixteen at this time, the year before he joined the Hindu College as a teacher—is evident in every phrase, but more importantly, apart from the language, the liberal politics of the letter-writer uncannily echo the sentiments of his teacher and exemplar, the free-thinking David Drummond.
Two days after the East Indian's first letter appeared on May 28, 1825, an explanation was offered by Grant in his paper in his own defence on May 30. However, a second long letter written by ‘An East Indian’ was then reprinted from the Bengal Hurkaru on June 2 in the India Gazette, accusing Grant of ‘mere subterfuge’. Point by point—and there are four in all—Grant's excuses are refuted, and the East Indian doubts that Grant was ever ‘ignorant of the existence of the Oriental Literary Society’ when he wrote the offending piece and asserting that the Editor would be unable to swear by this fact. He wonders if Grant would ‘have displayed the same spirit of Editorial magnanimity in cracking a joke’ at their expense if the society had been headed by the Governor General. In the penultimate paragraph, in phrases of high indignation, he responds to Grant calling him a ‘hot-headed wiseacre’, saying,
Why, Sir, England owes all her glory, if she have any, to the patriotic exertions of ‘hot-headed wiseacres,’ [to use the Editor's designation] who are ready to come forward upon every fit occasion to vindicate the national character from infamy and contempt; and so long as I am not chargeable with the use of ungentlemanly epithets, I care not about the degree of warmth with which I may express myself. . . . Footnote 44
This was the letter that Grant then vehemently objected to, as this was written in spite of an editorial explanation on the matter in the pages of the India Gazette. On June 2, 1825, a furious response by the Editor of the India Gazette to this second letter of the East Indian was published in the Hurkaru, and reprinted in the India Gazette. Describing the East Indian's letter as a ‘foul and infamous attack’, the editor of the India Gazette threw down the gauntlet, inviting the anonymous correspondent to reveal his identity. John Grant mentions here, in the context of the Hurkaru's position on this issue, that,
we would beg to explain, that however much it is to be regretted that the infamous letter alluded to should have found insertion in a respectable paper, we are convinced our friend who edits it, acted against his own feelings of regard for us and what is due to gentlemanly controversy, from a conscientious principle of impartiality and public duty.Footnote 45
The editor of the Hurkaru makes a similar point himself when he states, in a small note under the East Indian's letter:
We do not feel justified in excluding this letter, merely because we differ in opinion with the writer, but we think that the dispute ought to have ended with the explanation of the Editor of the India Gazette, and we regret that it was ever written.—Ed. of Hurkaru.Footnote 46
Finally, a third letter on the subject in the Hurkaru by ‘An East Indian’ appeared on June 6, 1825, which responded to the correspondent ‘Y’, who had warmly supported Grant and condemned the East Indian's ‘foul and disgraceful epistle’, and condemned the character of the East Indian as that of a ‘masked slanderer’, threatening, in strong language, to drag him out of hiding to chastise him for casting aspersions on such a gentleman as the Editor of the India Gazette. The East Indian's response is dignified and firm; he states that he had quite justifiably doubted the Editor's supposed ignorance on the matter not only because of the wide publicity the institution of the Society had received in the press, but because, and he reveals this for the first time, an advertisement for the Society was actually printed at the India Gazette press. He thinks the editor's admission, in his explanation, that ‘I consider Sircars as synonymous with East Indians’ as conclusive proof of the fact that the editor had levelled his ‘liberal sarcasm’ at East Indians generally, by placing them ‘on the same pedestal of honor with “Sircars”.’ Further, he writes, ‘Sir, I decline the honor of being a gentleman at the expence of truth, conscience, justice, reason, and argument. My business is not with persons or parties, but with the abstract merits of the question’. In a sentence that seems to point to Derozio, and perhaps, conjecturally, behind Derozio to Drummond, the letter concludes, ‘I will not receive my notions of gentility from the mere dictum of your correspondent, but from the more correct sources of philosophic and rational truth’, asking, at the end, why the editor should be considered to be ‘stooping’ to take notice of him, asserting humorously, that if he has indeed stooped to notice him, it has only served to bring him so low ‘as to put him to the trouble of unstooping again.’
This was, confusingly, followed by a generous retraction from ‘An East Indian’ in the same issue of the paper, in which the writer, however, emphasised that he retracted all he had said since the Editor's explanation, not before.
I am willing to acknowledge that I am to blame for not having allowed the controversy between me and the Editor of the India Gazette to rest, after the explanation given by him in his Paper of the 30th ultimo. With the same candour and rectitude that I indicted him, I now come forward to retract all that I have said, since his explanation of the matter; and when I express my regret at any pain caused to the Editor's feelings through my conduct, I hope he will give me credit for the sincerity of my expression, and consign the present controversy to perpetual oblivion.Footnote 47
Under this paragraph, the Editor of the Hurkaru printed a note ‘To Correspondents’ that said he had great pleasure in accepting the East Indian's retraction, and that ‘as we think that this controversy ought now to rest, we beg leave to announce that we shall feel disposed to decline inserting any more letters addressed to us on this subject.’Footnote 48
Was ‘An East Indian’ Derozio?
Intriguingly, the first instance of the signature ‘East Indian’ appearing in the India Gazette was beneath a small poem that was written by a woman, printed in the Correspondence section on April 14, 1825. No date or place following the poem, as was the usual practice, has been provided.Footnote 49 The poem refers twice to ‘Henry’, who is described as the ‘fair Bard’ who has urged her to leave her ‘silken thread’. The poet assures us that she will not give in to Henry's exhortations to leave her embroidery for all the benefits of nature's beauty (and she lists quite a few), but continue to make her tapestry of flowers of every colour for she is sure that love will make it a welcome gift for him. It can only be conjectured that this public protestation from someone, who refers to a poet named Henry as somebody dear to her and who signed herself as ‘An East Indian’, a nomenclature that Derozio himself is known to have used in the pages of the same paper, could conceivably have been none other than his sister, Amelia.
Two long poems were printed in the India Gazette dated ‘Calcutta, Jan. 26, 1826’ called ‘The Ruins of Rajmahal’ and ‘Address to the Greeks’—both these poems, for the first time, carried the signature ‘East Indian’, rather than ‘Juvenis’, which was the pseudonym more commonly used by Derozio. We can only be sure they are by Derozio because of their inclusion in the first volume of poems published by him in 1827. Derozio's involvement with the term ‘East Indian’, however, was most vehemently marked, perhaps, by his use of it for his daily newspaper, The East Indian, which he established on June 1, 1831, after leaving the Hindu College in April of that year.
In the final instance, however, as regards the trace marks of Derozio upon the East Indian's letters, apart from the question of style and then politics, the argument comes to rest most conclusively on the premise of character. It was in Derozio's character to instantly and warmly retract from stated positions whenever he changed his mind upon the subject, and in each instance he did so, in his own words, with ‘candour and rectitude’. In his notes to the Fakeer of Jungheera in 1828, Derozio had written against the banning of the rite of sati, or widow burning, from regard for the feelings of Hindus on the subject, and because he believed that education should cause reform to come from within, and not be imposed from above. In 1829, when the law was passed banning it, however, he was the first to write a poem on the abolition of sati, congratulating Bentinck warmly and celebrating the removal of this evil from society. Even when the matter concerned a student, his conduct was equally honest and impetuous. In his ‘Thoughts on Various Subjects’ he had written:
I, this day [October 19, 1829], most rashly, told one of my students that I disbelieved him—a circumstance which has given me much sorrow. It appeared afterwards that I was mistaken; and I confessed my indiscretion before the whole class.
Who censures me for this, and tells me that I gave the boy an opportunity to triumph?—I reply, that it was the least I could have done, after having hurt his feelings, and wounded his honor. Pride and pedantic authority might have directed the adoption of another course; but justice required that even a man should have made due reparation to a child whom he had offended.Footnote 50
Similarly, in one of his speeches at a mammoth meeting held to congratulate Ricketts upon his successful representation of the East Indian's grievances in both houses of the English Parliament, Derozio had mentioned that he had, in fact, originally opposed Ricketts's proceeding to England, but now warmly received him upon his return. This speech is one of the great speeches of national awakening ever to have been made in modern Indian history, and deserves a place at the very head of all nationalist speeches made in India; unfortunately, barely a handful know even of its existence.
Derozio had begun by saying his appearance at the meeting might have surprised many people, ‘labouring as I am under painful indisposition’, but ‘circumstances and the occasion’ impose upon him a sense of duty. He then asks, in some of the most stirring words addressed to country and community:
Why then am I here this day: why have I offered myself to your notice? I have already answered that question. I have intimated that I am called here by duty; and that is a voice which I dare not disobey. I am an East Indian, and therefore I ought to be here; I am interested in the welfare of my countrymen, and therefore I ought to he here; I am anxious to know what measures have been adopted to promote that welfare, and therefore I ought to be here; I love my country, and therefore I ought to be here; I love justice, and therefore I ought to be here? Shall it be said of me that I was the man who having committed an error was afraid or ashamed to acknowledge it; They know me not who entertain this opinion of me. Before the East Indians’ petition was sent to England, it is well known that I offered much persevering opposition to the proceedings of Mr Ricketts; since that time, however, I have had ample reason to change my view of those proceedings.Footnote 51
Derozio's opposition to the petition Ricketts carried was due to his mistaken notion that ‘descendants of European foreigners were not included among the parties from whom the petition was said to [have] come’ and he had failed to be convinced otherwise.Footnote 52 When, upon his return, he read Ricketts's evidence before the Committees of the two houses of Parliament he saw that he had been wrong in his assumption. ‘Publicly was the error committed: as publicly is it recalled’, he generously announced, before going on to condemn the denial of privileges to East Indians as worse than ‘savage degradation’, for ‘of what barbarous tribe has it yet been recorded that the parents have consigned their offspring to infamy; that the fathers have stepped in between their children and those children's rights’? ‘No, Sir,’ he goes on, ‘it has been left for civilized men to do what no barbarian has ever yet conceived, and that has been to work out for an unhappy class the condition against which we complain.’Footnote 53 The speech concludes with some handsome suggestions—that of presenting Ricketts with a silver vase, commissioning a portrait of him, and holding a public dinner in his honour.
The Subject of Naming
The warmth of feeling in Derozio for an ‘ideality’ of country and community was commented upon by a nineteenth-century critic, who, on the evidence of the poems rather than the above speech, appropriately identified ‘The most prominent feature of his character [as] an ardent and exalted patriotism.’ Clarifying further, Thomas Benson Laurence, editor, in 1869, of one of the earliest Indian anthologies of English poetry, said,
Unlike others of his class he gloried in the name of ‘East Indian’ and was proud to be called a native of this country. He did not appear to see, as others did, that there was any merit in being descended from an English or foreign ancestry, and gladly assimilated himself with the ligitimate [sic] sons of the soil on which he was born. The fervour of patriotism breathed through most of his writings in the East Indian, and endeared him much to his countrymen, who, with such a noble representation before them, began to feel less ashamed of being East Indians. This had always been considered an obnoxious term, but Derozio rejoiced in it, and had no desire to be known by the more pretending and ostentatious appellation of ‘Eurasian’, which his countrymen are so anxious to adopt, to trumpet forth, as it were, that they are half Europeans and half Asians. Derozio was content to be recognised only as a native of India.Footnote 54
Derozio's claim as a native of India was all the more laudable, the subtext of this passage seems to suggest, 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. Henry Derozio was a descendant of a respectable Portuguese family in Calcutta; Portuguese merchants, after all, had preceded the British to India, and were well established in the coastal cities of trade and commerce. His grandfather, Michael Derozio, was described in the St John's Baptismal Register of 1789 as a ‘Native Protestant’, and in the Bengal Directory of 1795 as a ‘Portuguese Merchant and Agent in Calcutta’.Footnote 55
The deteriorating state of race relations in India may usefully be traced from the attitudes shown in relation to the naming of the mixed-race community, which changed radically as the nineteenth century progressed. At the time Laurence is writing in 1869, the term ‘East Indian’, in his perception, is already one that a majority of the community are ashamed of and wish to disown; his imputation to Derozio of a valiant stance, a resistance, against this stigma of naming might not, therefore, have had quite the correct implication, as the situation in Derozio's own time was certainly substantially different from his own. In this context, it might be worth citing some among a series of letters on the subject of ‘naming’ that appeared in the Calcutta Journal of November and December 1821, four years before the controversy in the India Gazette took off in May 1825. From these letters, it is possible to ascertain that the naming of the community was a subject of great current interest, and the various suggestions made by a variety of people point towards the bewildering heterogeneity of social situations in India at this time. On November 1, 1821, A.H. wrote in to say:
I think the term Eurasians, suggested by Mr. Ricketts, in his excellent little Address, written some months ago, is the most comprehensive that can be established, as it is a compound formed from Europe and Asia, and will apply more or less, to the children of Europeans of all nations born in India. My father having been a German, I do not see, how I can, without tacitly disavowing my origin, call myself an Indo-Briton, an Asiatic-Briton, or even an Anglo-Asiatic.Footnote 56
This proposal, however, was rejected as unsuitable by the next letter-writer in these columns. Among various other letters that came in on the subject, such as one from ‘Phileriphus’ on ‘Indo-Britons’, and two more on ‘East Indians’ by A.H. and Asiaticus, this gentleman wrote, ‘As my father was born in Philadelphia and my mother in Rohilcund, the word which A.H. proposes to substitute (Eurasian) would not suit me. The word Eurasian is quite as vague in its import as Indo-Briton’. After deliberating on the unsuitability of several other appellations, the writer then concludes with a suggestion that points towards a breadth of liberalism that must have been unusual even in those comparatively liberal times. ‘What then do I wish to be called?’ the writer asks, continuing,
Why, Sir, am I not an Indian? With that name I am content. All the rest is a matter of pedigree. . . . I am an Indian and the friend of India. I am also the cordial friend and admirer of England, grateful for many benefits that she has bestowed on my country, and expectant of many more, and of much higher value, that are to come.Footnote 57
Two strands of thought in this brief portion of an anonymous letter of 1821 would go on to become fully developed issues in the affairs of the mixed race community, and in extension, the Indian community, as the century progressed. The first of these was the predominantly liberal spirit that animates the sentiments of the letter—the perception of racial equality embedded in the desire to be identified with India and Indians. This was a spirit that would ebb and flow in members of the mixed community; strongly in favour of assimilation and regeneration at this particular point in time, the sentiment would turn by mid-century, so that by the 1870s, there was a distinct decline in the feeling of belonging to India, although Laurence in 1869 was still trying to uphold that original liberal impulse by condemning the pretension of the term ‘Eurasian’. By the turn of the century, when Herbert Stark and E.W. Madge published their study, East Indian Worthies, in 1911, the achievements of the community were felt to be in need of rescue and resuscitation, an attempt made by both these authors, who showcased the glory days of the community in the heroic achievements of its best known early representatives. From the days of the white Mughals of the eighteenth century, to the revolutionary liberalism of the early nineteenth century, to the conservative Victorianism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the tide in the affairs of these men and women had turned fully by the time of Indian independence, which led to an attitude exactly the opposite to that of the letter writer, who wanted to be identified as an Indian, leading to an exodus of sorts.
The spirit of the early part of the nineteenth century in certain sections in India, which was intellectually liberal and spiritually ethical and rational rather than narrowly religious, was a crucial intervention in the construction of Indian modernity which would endure, despite setbacks and limitations, and take form ultimately in the broad and inclusive nature of the Indian constitution. The moment in the early nineteenth century when racial distinctions seemed not to be as important as intellectual affinities was one that produced also the sentiments of the following sort from the pen of an Indian:
It is now generally admitted that not religion only but unbiased common sense as well as the accurate deductions of scientific research lead to the conclusion that all mankind are one great family of which numerous nations and tribes existing are only various branches. Hence enlightened men in all countries must feel a wish to encourage and facilitate human intercourse in every manner by removing as far as possible all impediments to it in order to promote the reciprocal advantage and enjoyment of the whole human race.Footnote 58
This was Rammohun Roy, in a letter in 1831, to Prince Talleyrand, French Foreign Minister in London, urging the French minister to abolish the requirement for permission from the minister before visitors from England could set foot in France—a measure he felt unworthy of ‘a country standing in the foremost rank of free and civilized nations’ that was not only ‘so favoured by nature and so richly adorned by the cultivation of arts and sciences’, but ‘above all blessed by the possession of a free constitution.’Footnote 59
Petitions, Politics, Protest
In 1831, the East Indians of Calcutta petitioned both houses of the British Parliament for a redressal of their grievances, and the committee of concerned East Indians sent an agent, John William Ricketts, to England to argue their case. After a generous reception in Madras on his way back, Ricketts returned to a resounding ovation at the Town Hall in Calcutta. His mission had been conceptualised, argued and drafted in public meetings of East Indians, and the final meeting and its adopted resolutions were then being reported in full in the newspapers of the day. The letter-writer, in whose veins ran the blood of Rohilkhand and Philadelphia, but who nevertheless identified himself as an ‘Indian’, had said, before signing off, ‘I am also the cordial friend and admirer of England, grateful for many benefits that she has bestowed on my country, and expectant of many more, and of much higher value, that are to come.’Footnote 60 This concluding hope was the animating principle, it may be argued, in the early language of politics and protest in colonial India—a language that spoke in tones of gratitude and anticipated benevolence, rights and concepts of justice and legal procedure. This language was first put in use in colonial India in the service of the demands of the mixed race community, who were among the earliest to publicly petition the British government in England for a restitution of their rights in India.
On 28th March, 1831, it was reported in The Calcutta Magazine and Monthly Register that:
‘A numerous and respectable Meeting of the East Indian Community, was held on the 28th March, by public advertisement at the Town Hall, for the purpose of receiving the report of the Agent to the East Indians, who has lately returned from his deputation to England.’Footnote 61 The proceedings of the meeting were recorded in minute detail. Mr W.M. Woollaston was ‘called to the chair and opened the business of the Meeting with some prefatory observations’, following which he called upon the Secretary to the Committee to read Mr Rickett's report.Footnote 62 This was followed by Mr A Heberlet first addressing the meeting, and Mr W Kirkpatrick seconding his resolution. Mr Pote rose to propose the second resolution, which was then seconded by Mr Welsh. When Mr Ricketts rose to address the meeting, the report said that ‘the applause was so great, that for several minutes he could not be heard.’Footnote 63 After he spoke, Mr Derozio rose and made a speech, which has been quoted from above, where he expressed his love for his country and community in stirring language, declaring the community's great indebtedness to the services of Mr Ricketts, and ended by declaiming:
If then I am surrounded by East Indians; if there be in your bosoms one spark of manly feeling which may be kindled into flame; if you consider patriotic exertions in your cause as worthy of imitation; if you are alive to the principles of duty; I charge you, by all that is dear to your hearts, to support the proposition which I shall now submit –Footnote 64
These proposals were suggestions for honouring Mr Ricketts with gifts, a portrait, and a public dinner, resolutions which were seconded by Mr Hoff, ‘and carried with acclamation amidst loud and continued applause.’Footnote 65 As the meeting continued, however, Derozio rose a second time to speak, this time in support of a proposition made by Mr Pote that a second petition be prepared by the Committee to be despatched to England a second time.
Although Ricketts had obtained assurances that their cause would be looked into, the petition had not yet been acted upon in the English Houses of Parliament and since, as Derozio put it, ‘the fact that one House of Commons rarely takes cognizance of petitions addressed to its predecessor, [that] should be alone sufficient to convince us of the imperative necessity of appealing to the legislature of Great Britain once again.’ As the rights they demanded had not been restored to them, it was incumbent upon the East Indian community, he felt, to reiterate them before the legislature of Britain. Articulating some disbelief in the noble intentions of the English peer Lord Ashley, who had said he felt sympathetic to their cause but had failed to present their case because of other more pressing matters, Derozio advocated petitioning the legislature once again, ending his second speech with the words:
Gentlemen, you have nothing to fear from firm and respectful remonstrance. Your calls for justice must be as incessant as your grievances are heavy: complain again and again: complain till you are heard—aye, and until you are answered. The ocean leaves traces of every inroad it makes upon the shore; but it must repeat those inroads with unabated strength, and follow them up with rapidity, before it washes away the strand.Footnote 66
The language in this speech is significant on two levels—the rhetorical level of the metaphor and image, which brings English literary language into play in the domain of political demand, and on another level, that of the underlying sub-structure of the formal semi-legal language of meetings and societies, enacted here in the sequence of events. The resonance of the entire procedure of a public meeting, with speakers rising to speak, chairmen opening the proceedings, the formal language of speeches and responses, the resolutions adopted and motions seconded, all contribute towards the formulation of a language of method and procedure that then proceeded to become institutionalised in the Indian political domain. This was also the time when English had displaced Persian as the legal language; what this meant was not only the physical consequence of English replacing Persian as a powerful vehicle of influence, but also an incorporation of the subliminal ethos that accompanies language, the ‘aura’ emanated by systems and procedures belonging to the ruling culture that is encoded in language which needs to be acquired by the citizens in order to furbish their claims with the necessary equipment to handle the institutional networks of colonialism.
By December 26, 1831, in the same year as the meeting we have been following above, Derozio would be dead—struck down by cholera at the age of twenty-two in his home on Circular Road in Calcutta. Between 1825, the date of the controversy over the Oriental Literary Society in the India Gazette, and 1831, the year that saw the drafting of the second petition to Parliament by the East Indian community, Derozio had lived a life that was at the crux of one of the most creative and revolutionary eras of Indian modernity, contributing to the incipient Indian nation a new sense of the literary, the revolutionary, the philosophical and the cultural. In a sense, then, the two seminal events of 1825 and 1831 portrayed here bracketed his career appropriately with the literary and the political—each encapsulating a moment in history that was to be both formative and significant for the future shape of modern Indian literature and politics.
