Poets of John Company. Theodore Oliver Douglas Dunn

the first period of English verse production in India. From this date until the middle of the century, poetry began to serve a less serious purpose than that exemplified in the work of Jones, Heber and Leyden. As social life began to develop in the larger cities, English verse became the medium of wit and satire. Of this kind Henry Meredith Parker is indubitably the first and best exponent. His contemporaries were John William Kaye, the founder in 1844 of the Calcutta Review, Henry Whitelock Torrens and David Lester Richardson.

      Soon after the middle of the century the Mutiny revived the interest of England in India; and at this time two authors received their inspiration from the East, and surpassed all their predecessors in the quality and variety of their work. These were Sir Edwin Arnold and Sir Alfred Lyall. The first acted as Principal of the Dekhan College in Poona from 1856 to 1861; and, in this brief period, he developed a passion for India and its people that coloured all his later writing. His shorter poems reveal a sympathetic insight into Oriental character, and an unusual power of interpretation and description. In his more ambitious work he was influenced by the same ideas and aspirations as Sir William Jones, and paid as generous a tribute to the dignity and beauty of Eastern classical poetry. His occasional verse, lyrical, descriptive and narrative, is in its combined bulk and value, finer than anything produced in India before or ​after his time. In the work of Sir Edwin Arnold and of Sir Alfred Lyall, the poetry of Englishmen in India reached its maturity. The first applied the energy of true literary genius, and the precision of scholarship to the interpretation of oriental themes: the second allowed his intimate knowledge of India to become concentrated in verse of small bulk but of unmistakable quality. As a poet he is known by one tiny volume of less than thirty pieces; but amongst these is the incomparable Siva.

      To compile an anthology of Anglo-Indian verse written during the last century and a half, and to publish it unexpurgated and unexplained implies no slight temerity. The dilettante whose travels have never drawn him east of Suez may say, as he once said to Joachim Hayward Stocqueler, the founder of The Englishman, "We eat no rice and curry in Cornhill." He will not believe that the art and spirit of poetry ever flourished amongst the merchant-adventurers of John Company—

      Men who prepared ambrosial Sangaree,

       And double Sangaree or Sangarorum:

       Now took a fleet, now sold a pound of tea,

       Weighed soap, stormed forts, held princes in terrorem,

       Drank, fought, smoked, lied, went home and, good papas,

       Gave diamonds to their little boys for taws.

      Nor is it possible to maintain that these men who builded greater than they knew, have given us more than occasional and topical verse. The writers amongst them founded no literary tradition, and they established no school of poetry. Most of them were the imitators of poets whom they had known in their youth; but they have preserved a few quaint pictures of English life in an India that has passed away, and have shown an exuberant vitality that it might be our pride to recall. Their attitude to the East was simple and undisguised—it was a place of uncongenial, if remunerative, exile.

      If this fact should ruffle any Indian reader of these pages, he will find consolation in the thought that Anglo-Indian poetry rises into originality and greatness only when it is concerned with purely Oriental themes. In his poem Siva, Sir Alfred Lyall abandons ephemeral topics and faces one of the immemorial ​problems of the world. He looks through and beyond the sensuous imagery of the Hindu temple to the conception of those terrible powers that hold man and rule his destiny. No English verse produced in India has sounded a deeper note of understanding than this; and no other poem has so concentrated the mingled sensations of mystery and awe that haunt the Western mind in contact with the tangible symbols of the Hindu faith. In The Light of Asia there is unfolded a whole panorama of Oriental life, idealised in the reflected glory of the Lord Gautama and his teaching, but the first comprehensive picture of Indian faith and custom ever given to the West.

      Apart from its intrinsic literary or artistic merit, the verse produced by Englishmen in India from the time of Warren Hastings to the close of John Company's rule, contributed to an understanding of the East of reality. About ten years after the formation of the United East India Company, The Arabian Nights, translated from the French of Antoine Galland, had come for the first time into England. The influence of this work was great and lasting; and it created a fantastic conception of the Orient that is not yet wholly dead. The Rasselas of Dr. Samuel Johnson, the History of the Caliph Vathek by James Beckford, the Mejnoun and Leila of Isaac Disraeli and even The Shaving of Shagpat by George Meredith, are all products of the craze of Orientalism that smote the literature of eighteenth century England. But this Orientalism had no root in the real East. It was a thing of coffee houses and drawing rooms. Its inspiration, if the term is at all appropriate, was of a purely literary kind, the product of quill pens and inkpots, divorced from reality and with no breath of life. In 1760, Goldsmith devoted the thirty-third letter of The Citizen of the World to a satire upon "the fictions every day propagated here under the titles of Eastern tales and oriental histories," And, had he lived long enough, he would have been as ready to attack the mellifluous Lalla Rookh of Thomas Moore, or the laborious Curse of Kehama of Robert Southey. For this pseudo-oriental literature the antidote lay in the realism of those novels of Eastern Life that appeared between 1819 and 1839, novels written by men who ​had lived for years in Syria, Persia and India. In the Anastasius Thomas Hope described the Turk of the Levant. In Hajji Baba of Ispahan James Justinian Morier depicted the comedy of Moslem life in Persia. In Pandurang Hari William Browne Hockley of the Bombay Civil Service produced the memoirs of a Hindu prince. In the Kuzzilbash James Baillie Fraser portrayed the wild life of the Afghan border; and, in 1839, Colonel Meadows Taylor compiled the Confessions of a Thug, the greatest romance of the Indian road yet given to the world. The method of these writers was to select a single roguish character such as Fielding or Smollett might have drawn, and to set him loose in the country of their own special knowledge. In this way the whole moving life of the Orient from Asia Minor into Egypt and Arabia, and through Persia into Hindustan was portrayed in detail for the West. In 1839 this achievement was complete: and, in the literary movement to which these picaresque romances belong, the poets of John Company have an assured place.

      This movement was in part a revolt from the fashionable and artificial Orientalism of the eighteenth century, and in part the result of the wars with France that made the Levant, Persia and India the centres of a critical diplomacy. After Waterloo, travel east of Asia Minor became popular; and an Orient other than that of Haroun-Al-Raschid was unveiled for a curious Europe. Of the novelists who found their themes in this new world, almost all save Morier are forgotten; and of the poets, Arnold was the last and best. But in the verse of his predecessors, there is much that the citizens of an India, greatly different from that of John Company, may be willing to recall, if not to admire.

      ​

SIR WILLIAM JONES.

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      1746–1794.

A Persian Song.

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      Sweet maid, if thou would'st charm my sight,

       And bid these arms thy neck infold;

       That rosy cheek, that lily hand,

       Would give thy poet more delight

       Than all Bocara's vaunted gold,

       Than all the gems of Samarcand.

       Boy, let yon liquid ruby flow,

       And bid thy pensive heart be glad,

       Whate'er the frowning zealots say:

       Tell them, their Eden cannot show

       A stream so clear as Rocnabad,

       A bower so sweet