Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal

Emergent Nationalism and the Orientalist Project

Rosinka Chaudhuri

 

6.5 x 10 inches, 219pp. 2002

ISBN : 9788170461852

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Extensive historical research and a detailed examination of the English poetry written by Indians in the nineteenth century in its social, historical and political contexts, reveals the engagement of the colonized with one of the implements of colonization, the English language. This study shows how the intertextuality that existed between this body of verse and concurrent Orientalist scholarship on the ancient Indian heritage resulted, ultimately, in a complex appropriation, by the Indians, of British scholarship on India for nationalist, literary, social, and personal ends. 

Rosinka Chaudhuri is a scholar of literary criticism and history from Oxford, who specializes in nineteenth-century Bengal. She is a Fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences, Calcutta. Her articles have appeared in several journals and anthologies. The author examines works by Henry Derozio, Kasiprasad Ghosh, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, the Dutt family, and, in conclusion, the poems of Toru Dutt and Tagore.

 

Literary Criticism
Culture Studies