In the first years of the nineteenth century a British army officer called Thomas Duer Broughton became enchanted by the songs and poems that his soldiers knew by heart. He started to get them noted down and eventually his collection became the first published anthology of Hindi poets. What sort of poems were memorised by Indian sipahis at that time? Surprisingly enough most of them were not folk poems but apart from some devotional quatrains and songs, were products of court poetry in the most refined period of Hindi literature, the so called ritikal, ‘period of mannerism’. Broughton’s anthology serves as a source to the cultural interaction between the Indians and the British. His book also indicates the extent to which a member of the British Indian elite was able to appreciate Indian culture through mannerist Hindi poems. Since in Europe the era of Romanticism was that of a widespread interest in Oriental cultures and the time of the discovery of folk art Broughton presented Braj poetry as ‘popular’ and ‘rustic’ and at the same time considered it to be one of the greatest achievements of universal literature. That is why he tried to bring it close to the general English reader. Apart from Broughton’s text, the book contains reconstructed Hindi versions of the poems with their new English translation as well as a critical introduction.
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