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Wednesday, May 6, 2020
Henry Louis Vivian Derozio Essay Example For Students
Henry Louis Vivian Derozio Essay Henry Louis Vivian Derozio Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (18 April 1809 – 26 December 1831) was a fiery Indian teacher and poet. As a lecturer at the Hindu College of Calcutta, he invigorated a large group of students to think independently; this Young Bengal group played a key role in the Bengal renaissance. Derozio was generally considered an Anglo-Indian, being of mixed Portuguese descent, but he was fired by a patriotic spirit for his native Bengal, and considered himself Indian. In his poem To My Native Land he wrote: â€Å"| My Country! In the days of Glory PastA beauteous halo circled round thy brow And worshiped as deity thou wast, Where is that Glory, where is that reverence now? | †| Early life he son of Francis Derozio, he was born at Entally-Padmapukur in Kolkata on 18 April 1809. He attended David Drummonds Dhurramtallah Academy school, where he was a star pupil, reading widely on topics like the French revolution and Robert Burns. Drummond, a dour Scotsman, an exile and a notorious free thinker', instilled in him a passion for learning and superstition-free rational thinking, in addition to a solid grounding in history, philosophy and English literature. He quit school at the age of 14 and initially joined his father’s concern at Kolkata and later shifted to Bhagalpur. Inspired by the scenic beauty of the banks of the River Ganga, he started writing poetry. Some of these were published in Dr. Grants India Gazette. His critical review of a book by Emmanuel Kant attracted the attention of the intelligentsia. In 1828, he went to Kolkata with the objective of publishing his long poem Fakir of Jhungeera. On learning that a faculty position was vacant at the newly established Hindu College, he applied for it and was selected. This was the time when Hindu society in Bengal was undergoing considerable turmoil. In 1828, Raja Ram Mohan Roy established the Brahmo Samaj, which kept Hindu ideals but denied idolatry. This resulted in a backlash within orthodox Hindu society. It is in the perspective of these changes that Derozio was appointed at Hindu college, where he helped released the ideas for social change already in the air. Hindu College and Social Backlash In May 1826, at the age of 17, he was appointed teacher in English literature and history at the new Hindu College, which had been set up recently to meet the interest in English education among Indians. He was initially a teacher in the second and third classes, later also of the fourth, but he attracted students from all classes. He interacted freely with students, well beyond the class hours. His zeal for interacting with students was legendary. His brilliant lectures presented closely-reasoned arguments based on his wide reading. He encouraged students to read Thomas Paines Rights of Man and other free-thinking texts. Although Derozio himself was an atheist and had renounced Christianity{{Fact|date=August 2010}, he encouraged questioning the orthodox Hindu customs and conventions on the basis of Italian renaissance and its offshoot rationalism. He infused in his students the spirit of free expression, the yearning for knowledge and a passion to live up to their identity, while questioning irrational religious and cultural practices. Derozios intense zeal for teaching and his interactions with students created a sensation at Hindu College. His students came to be known as Derozians. He organised debates where ideas and social norms were freely debated. In 1828, he motivated them to form a literary and debating club called the Academic Association. In 1830, this club brought out a magazine named Parthenon (only one issue came out). Apart from articles criticizing Hindu practices, the students wrote on women emancipation and criticized many aspects of British rule. He also encouraged students into journalism, to spread these ideas into a society eager for change. In mid 1831, he helped Krishna Mohan Banerjee start an English weekly, The Enquirer, while Dakshinaranjan Mukherjee and Rasik Krishna Mallick began publishing a Bengali paper, the Jnananvesan He took great pleasure in his interactions with students, writing about them: Expanding like the petals of young flowers I watch the gentle opening of your minds†¦ He was close in age to most of his students (some were older than him). The motto of the Derozians was: He who will not reason is a bigot, he who cannot reason is a fool, and he who does not reason is a slave. So all ideas were open to challenge. Many of his inner circle of students eventually rebelled against Hindu orthodoxy, and joined the Brahmo Samaj, while some like Krishna Mohan Banerjee converted to Christianity, and others like Ramtanu Lahiri gave up their sacred thread. Others went on to write in Bengali, including Peary Chand Mitra, who authored the first novel in Bengali. The radicalism of his teaching and his student group caused an intense backlash against him. Expulsion Due to his unorthodox views on society, culture and religion, the Hindu-dominated management committee of the college, under the chairmanship of Radhakanta Deb, expelled him as a faculty member by a 6:1 vote, for having materially injured Morals and introduced some strange system the tendency of which is destruction to their moral character and to the peace in Society. .. In consequence of his misunderstanding no less than 25 Pupils of respectable families have been withdrawn from the College. Though facing penury, he continued his interaction with his students, indeed, he was able to do more, helping them bring out several newspapers, etc. However, at the end of the year, he contracted cholera, which was fatal at the time, and died on 26 December 1831 at the age of 22. Being a Christian apostate, he was denied burial inside the Park Street cemetery; instead he was buried just outside it on the road. Poetry Derozio idolized Byron, modeling many of his poems in the romantic vein. Much of his poetry reflects native Indian stories, told in the Victorian style. The Fakeer of Jungheera(1828) is a long lyrical poem, abundant in descriptions of the region around Bhagalpur. The melancholy narrative involves a religious mendicant, who saves his erstwhile lover from satihood, but comes to a romantic end fighting her pursuers. Among his short poems, there are several ballads, such as The Song of the Hindustanee Minstrel: Dildar! Theres many a valued pearl In richest Omans sea; But none, my fair Cashmerian girl! O! none can rival thee. Fired by a patriotic zeal he also wrote a good bit of nationalistic poetry, some quite openly rebellious, as in The Golden Vase: Oh! when our country writhes in galling chains When her proud masters scourge her like a dog; If her wild cry be borne upon the gale, Our bosoms to the melancholy sound Should swell, and we should rush to her relief, Like some, at an unhappy parents wail! And when we know the flash of patriot swords Is unto spirits longing to be free, Like Hopee returning light; we should not pause Till every tyrant dread our feet, or till we find Graves This anti-imperialist fervor also separated him from the Anglo-Indian (then Eurasian) community, who were overwhelmingly pro-British. At one point, he urged his fellow Anglo-Indians that it would be in their interest to unite and be cooperative with the other native inhabitants of India. Any other course will subject them to greater opposition than they have at present. 6] Despite his poetic bent, and his flamboyant dresses, he never showed much interest in women, though he was a strong advocate for female emancipation. The women in his poetry also appear a little wooden and lacking in individuality. A 1905 biography subtly hints that his expulsion may have had some underpinnings of homophobia; all his student meetings were exclusively attended by young male students Influence His ideas had a profound influence on the social movement that came t o be known as the Bengal Renaissance in early 19th century Bengal. And despite being viewed as something of an iconoclast by others like Alexander Duff and other (largely evangelical) Christian Missionaries; later in Duffs General Assemblys Institution, Derozios ideas on the acceptance of the rational spirit were accepted partly as long as they were not in conflict with basic tenets of Christianity, and as long as they critiqued orthodox Hinduism. Derozio was an atheist but his ideas were also partly responsible for the conversion of upper caste Hindus like Krishna Mohan Banerjee and Lal Behari Dey to Christianity. Many other students like Tarachand Chakraborti became leaders in the Brahmo Sama Henry Louis Vivian Derozio,a poet, philosopher and thinker, who passed away at the age of 22. Derozio was an Anglo-Indian(referred to as an Eurasian during his lifetime) poet and teacher who was born in Calcutta on the 10th of April,1809. He was the son of Francis Derozio, a Calcutta merchant. Henry was educated at Drummonds Academy in Dharmtala. He left school at 14 for commercial work, which he gave up after his father died. Derozio joined his Uncle in Indigo planting at Bhaugalpore. At the age of sixteen in the varied work and life of an Indigo-planter at Bhaugulpore, under the hospitable roof of his Uncle Johnson and the kindly eye of his mothers sister, the young Derozio for a time found congenial occupation.. From his Uncles plantation at Bhaugalpore, Derozio sent to Dr. John Grant of the Indian Gazette those poetical contributions which bear the signature of Juvenis. The encouragement given by Grant of The India Gazette and his appreciation of the poets merits,induced Derozio to collect his verses and publish them in a separate volume. Below is a stanza from the poem Happy Meetings written by Derozio with the pseudonym of Juvenis. This poem was published in The India Gazette of 15th March 1825. How keen the pang,how sad the thought,                 How oft to quiet remembrance brought,                When friend from friend is forcd to part                When distance separates the heart. In the year 1827, he came to Calcutta and the young man of 17 saw his first production through the press, and almost immediately found himself famous. Indigo-planting and Bhaugalpore became things of the past. Henry Derozio as Assistant editor of The India Gazette, Editor of The Calcutta Magazine,The Indian Magazine, The Bengal Annual and The Kaleidoscope. At the age of 18, Derozio published a volume of poems and obtained a teachership at the Hindu College. In March 1828, Derozio was appointed Master of English Literature and History in the second and third classes of the Hindoo College. No teacher ever taught with greater zeal or enthusiasm, at the Hindu College. As Assistant-master in the senior department of the Hindoo College,Derozio adopted teaching as a profession and Literature as a sceptre, to unleash his creativity. He was very successful as a teacher of philosophy, but lost his appointment, though the charges against him, of propagating atheism and encouraging disobedience failed. Still he continued to exercise great influence over his former pupils, many of whom became distinguished men. Derozio contributed to journalism and he established a newspaper, The East Indian. Dr. John Grant,David Hare,Meredith Parker and D. L. Richardson, all men of ability were the close friends of Derozio and admirers of his genius. In 1827 Derozio published several poems,below is a stanza from the poem Ode-From the Persian of Half Queez. Without thy dreams, dear opium,                   Without a single hope I am,                   Spicy scent, delusive joy;                   Chillum hither lao, my boy! In 1828, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio published his second volume, which was a reprint of the first, with some additions, notably the Fakir of Jungheera. This book raised the fame of Derozio as a poet to the highest point which his too brief life permitted him to reach. I Stand Here Ironing EssayIt was a period of anarchy and war in India. The beginning of the century saw the English mere traders struggling for a foothold in India; its closing decades saw them sovereigns of vast territories. Alexander Hamilton, who was in the east from 1688 to 1723, wrote A New Account of the East Indies, but his book, though comprehensive, is rather rambling and commonplace. Between his date and 1780 there are only a few names which call for comment. Pre-eminent among them was that of Robert Orme. Born in India in 1728, he returned to the land of his birth as a â€Å"writer†in 1743, and there, during the course of a successful official career, in which he was closely connected with many of the events afterwards discussed in his books, he gathered the knowledge which enabled him to become one of the greatest of Anglo-Indian historians. 2 His History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan is the prose epic of the early military achievements of our race in India. An indefatigable, rather than a brilliant, writer, Orme remains a mine in which all subsequent historians must quarry. In his Historical Fragments of the Mogul Empire, of the Morattoes and of the English concerns in Indostan from the year 1659, the conscientious and unwearied narrator of contemporary events became the industrious investigator of past history, though it is by his first book that Orme’s name chiefly lives. Alexander Dow, who died at Bhagalpur in 1779, not only translated histories from the Persian, but wrote two tragedies, Zingis and Sethona, which were produced at Drury lane. His authorship of these plays, which were oriental in setting, was challenged by Baker in his Biographia Dramatica, â€Å"for he is said by those who know him well to be utterly unqualified for the production of learning or of fancy, either in prose or verse. †Others who may be mentioned are John Zephaniah Holwell, a survivor of the Black Hole, who wrote on historical and other subjects after his retirement in 1760, including a Narrative of the deplorable deaths of the English gentlemen who were suffocated in the Black Hole, which was included in his India Tracts. Charles Hamilton, who wrote a history of those Rohilla Afghans whose expulsion from Rohilcand brought much odium upon Warren Hastings; James Rennell, the father of Indian geography, who wrote after his retirement in 1777; and William Bolts and Henry Verelst, whose quarrels in India resulted in the production of polemical history by them both. 6  The closing years of Warren Hasting’s Indian career saw the real birth of English literature and literary studies in India. Hicky’s Bengal Gazette, the first newspaper of modern India, was founded at Calcutta by James Augustus Hicky in 1780. It was a scurrilous production, but a sign of life. James Forbes left India in 1784, carrying with him the collected materials which he afterwards published as his Oriental Memoirs. The appointment, in 1783, of Sir William Jones as judge of the supreme court was an event of high importance in the history of the relations between east and west, as was also his foundation of the Asiatic society of Bengal. He is remembered primarily as the earliest English Sanskrit scholar; but, in the domain of Anglo-Indian letters, he takes rank not only by his translation of Kalidasa’s Sakuntala, but, also, as the first Anglo-Indian poet. He had written verse before he came to India; while in India, he addressed the gods of Indian mythology in a series of hymns which, if not of the highest order of poetry, are yet aflame with enthusiasm and knowledge. Inferior to Jones as an orientalist, but superior as a poet, was John Leyden, that â€Å"lamp too early quenched,†as Sir Walter Scott put it. He lived in the east from 1803 to 1811, and, though he, too, is remembered chiefly as an orientalist, he is to be noted as the first of that long line of writers who expressed in verse the common feelings of Englishmen in â€Å"the land of regrets. †His poetry is a simple expression of the emotions which all Anglo-Indians experience at some timeâ€â€pride in the military achievements of our race, loathing at the darker aspects of Indian superstition and the exile’s longing for home. His Ode to an Indian Gold Coin deserves a place in every Anglo-Indian anthology of verse as an expression of this last emotion. 7   The closing years of the eighteenth century, and the first two decades of the nineteenth, were marked by other signs of literary advance. Hugh Boyd, who, by some, was alleged to be Junius, was in India from 1781 to 1794, and made some attempt, in essays on literary and moral subjects in local journals which he conducted, to keep alive the flame of English literary culture in his adopted country. In 1789, the quaint translation into English of Ghulam Hussein Khan’s Siyar-ul-Muta’akhkhirin by the Franco-Turk Raymond, alias Haji Mustapha, was published in Calcutta. The intrinsic interest of this contemporary history of India, combined with the oriental phraseology and the Gallicisms with which the translation abounds, renders Raymond’s book one of the most curious pieces of literature among Anglo-Indian writings. Meanwhile, Henry Thomas Colebrooke made a name for himself as the leading Sanskrit scholar of the day; James Tod was carrying on those researches in Rajputana which he ultimately gave to the world in the classic Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, a work fuller of romance than most epics; Mark Wilks, in the south of India, was both helping to make history and amassing the materials for writing it, which he eventually published as his impartially and critically written Historical Sketches of the South of India. Sir John Malcolm, who, also, took part in many of the events which he described, followed with his Political History of India in 1811, and, subsequently, with his History of Persia, his Central India and other works, including a volume of poems; while Francis Buchanan-Hamilton wrote on scientific and historical subjects, including An Account of the Kingdom of Nipal. As belonging to this period, too, may be mentioned Eliza Fay’s Original Letters rom Calcutta, descriptive of her travels from England to Calcutta, and the anonymous Hartly House, described as a novel, though, in form, a series of letters written by a lady and descriptive of life in Calcutta towards the close of the eighteenth century. Finally, Mary Martha Sherwood, the children’s writer, was in India during this period and her Little Henry and his Bearer was the gift which she gave to Anglo-Indian children in memory of the child she had lost.   The thirty or forty years which preceded the mutiny were f ull of events of the greatest moment for the future of the English language in India. Macaulay was in India from 1834 to 1838, and his minute on education resulted in the definite adoption by lord Bentinck’s government of the English language as the basis of all higher education in India. Ram Mohan Roy, the Bengali reformer, had advocated in English writing this and other reforms, the style of which Jeremy Bentham compared favourably with that of James Mill. David Hare, a Calcutta watchmaker, gave him strong support, and eventually in 1816 the Hindu college was founded at Calcutta for the instruction of Indians in English; and the decision of the government of India, in 1835, that its educational subsidies should promote mainly the study of European literature and science, found its natural sequel in the foundation, in 1857, during the very crisis of the mutiny, of universities in which English was to be the medium of instruction at Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. The government of India had set out to give its subjects, so far as might be, an English mind.   As a result of this policy, there is, in modern British India, a steady and increasing output of English literature written by Indians. But, as is only natural, so drastic an innovation as the complete changing of a people’s literary language could not bear immediate results of value, and not only has the bulk of Anglo-Indian literature continued to be written by Englishme n, but, for a very long time, it remained doubtful whether Indians, could so completely become Englishmen in mind and thought as to add, except in the rarest and most exceptional cases, anything of lasting value to the roll of English literature. 0  While this remarkable change was beginning in India, Anglo-Indian writers were not idle. Heber, Bishop of Calcutta, claims attention here rather by his Narrative of a Journey from Calcutta to Bombay than by his few Anglo-Indian poems; Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, most famous of those of our Indian fellow-men who are neither exclusively European nor Indian but share the blood of both, put all the pathos and passion of his own sensitive nature into his metrical tale The Fakeer of Jungheera; Henry Meredith Parker is remembered not only as an actor and musician but as a poet, essayist and story-teller. Among his productions was an Indian mythological narrative poem called The Draught of Immortality and two clever volumes of miscellaneous prose and verse entitled Bole Ponjis (The Punch bowl). Major David Lester Richardson, of the Bengal army, abandoned military life and devoted himself to education and literature. He takes rank among Anglo-Indian writers mainly as a literary critic, though he also wrote poetry and history. The titles of his books, such as Literary Leaves, Literary Chit-Chat, Literary Recreations, are an index of the general trend of his mind, and suggest that he was probably happier in his work at the Hindu college, to which, by Macaulay’s influence, he was appointed in 1836 as professor of English literature, than he had been in his previous career. Henry Whitelock Torrens, who was secretary of the Asiatic society from 1840 to 1846, was a clever essayist as well as a journalist and scholar, and his scattered papers were deservedly collected and published at Calcutta in 1854. Sir Richard Francis Burton was in India during this period, but his fame cannot be said to be specially Anglo-Indian. 11   Of the historians during the period, James Grant Duff and Mountstuart Elphinstone are pre-eminent. Grant Duff’s History of the Mahrattas (1826) and Elphinstone’s History of India (1841) are two of the classics of Indian history. The romantic interest of the former book, the accurate though uninspiring conciseness of the second, and the pioneering ability shown by both in the untilled regions which they surveyed, gave these books a standing which they still hold, despite the advance of knowledge since they appeared. Other historians were Horace Hayman Wilson, the Sanskrit scholar, who continued and edited James Mill’s History of British India; John Briggs, the translator of Ferishta’s Muhammedan Power in India; Sir Henry Miers Elliot, the unwearied student of the history of Mussulman India, whose History of India as told by its own Historians was edited after his death by John Dowson; and Sir John Kaye, prominent in the history of Anglo-Indian letters as the founder, in 1844, of The Calcutta Review, to which he frequently contributed. He also, long after his departure from India, wrote Indian history voluminously, his History of the Sepoy War in India being his best
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