Content area
Full Text
In Indian-English literary history, Henry Derozio often occupies a position of primacy both as the origin and as one of the most highly regarded practitioners of this literature by nineteenthand twentiethcentury critics. For example, K.R. Ramachandran Nair writes in Three Indo-Anglian Poets, his study of Derozio and the two most famous Indian-English women poets of the nineteenth century, Tom Dutt, and Sarojini Naidu:
The history of Indo-Anglian poetry begins with Henry Louis Vivian Derozio. He was bom on 18th April 1809, in Calcutta. His father, Frances Derozio was Indo-Portuguese and his mother, Sophia Johnson was English. Thus Derozio had very little Indian blood in him. But he was bom and brought up in India, he taught Indian students in an Indian college and was inspired by Indian themes and sentiments in his poetry. So we consider him as a great Indo-Anglian poet. In the nineteenth century parlance he was also called a Eurasian poet.1
In Nair's formulation, Derozio is Indian despite his race, which included "very little Indian blood". Other factors such as place of birth and upbringing, friends and professional affiliations, and the "themes and sentiments" of his poetry instead supposedly mark him as Indian. In a common misconception, race is thought to have been a fluid and non-hierarchical category in the early-nineteenth century, yet the very fact that Derozio's mixed blood crucially identifies him as other than white (whether as "Portuguese", "Eurasian", "native", etc.) in critical literature published about him both during the early part of the nineteenth century and after, shows that racial classifications mattered.
Such an extended justification for including Derozio among the pantheon of recovered Indian-English poets illustrates the contentious definition of "Indianness" itself. In a country that only officially came into existence in 1947, over a century after Derozio's death in 1825, who or what was "Indian" in the early part of the nineteenth century seems to be necessarily at odds with "Indianness" as a criterion indicating nationality or national origin in the middle half of the twentieth century.
Just as Derozio's critics claim him as Indian, Derozio himself claimed India. His second and last collection of poems, The Fakeer of Jungheer a, a Metrical Tale, and Other Poems (1828), begins with an untitled poem later titled by Francis...