Derozio, Poet of India

Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809-31), poet, thinker, radical, and one of the earliest Indian educationists to disseminate Western learning and philosophy among the young men of Bengal, was also, crucially, the first modern Indian to write of the incumbent nation extensively in English. Derozio, Poet of India brings together all of Derozio’s poems, along with their notes, as well as available prose, correspondence, and journalism. This definitive edition comprises not just the two volumes of poetry that appeared when Derozio was alive — Poems and The Fakeer of Jungheera –but a substantial number of new poems, essays, reflections, letters, notices, reviews, and responses to Derozio’s poems published in newspapers and periodicals during his lifetime as well as posthumously. This wealth of original material is supported by an important introduction by Rosinka Chaudhuri that places Derozio at the conceptual beginnings of a nation that has begun to be conjured into existence through metaphor and image, rhetoric and philosophy, poetic practice and political activism. The result is a ground-breaking study of a young man at a historical juncture of great inspiration and promise, who not only propelled a section of the Bengali elite into revolutionary reformism, as is well known, but who also embodied, in his writing and philosophy, the birth of the Indian modern. With exhaustive critical commentary, rare, photographs and reproductions of poems and prose pieces as they had originally appeared, and an extensive bibliography, the book will appeal to students and researchers of English literature, history, sociology, and cultural studies.