Henry Louis Vivian Derozio is known as India’s first national poet. He received this accolade as a result of writing poetry at a time when British imperialism and colonization threatened the long historical culture of his native country while also introducing trepidation about an uncertain future. The title and opening line of his definitive poem says much about the life and legacy of this author. “To India—My Native Land” commences with “My country! in thy day of glory past / A beauteous halo circled round thy brow, / And worshipped as a deity thou wast— / Where is that glory, where that reverence now?”
That opening assertion of possessorship in which the speaker proudly stakes the claim of being a native of India characterizes much of the entire body of work of Derozio. The elegiac questioning at the end points to a national feeling of loss of culture in the face of British occupation and rule during the height of the British Empire. That was an empire built upon enforced assimilation by those foreign lands invaded and taken over by the might power England.
It is that very assimilation that really makes Derozio’s poetry so fascinating. His verse reflects a grand paradox. While Derozio was writing allegorical poems comparing the relationship of native Indians to the British with those of ancient Spartans massacred by the Persians under Xerxes he was also writing verse that hailed Romantic English poets like Lord Byron or that demonized Hinduism. Derozio attained a reputation for radical thought that produced a generation of followers originally known as Derozians who eventually became a forceful generation known as the Young Bengals. Such was his radicalism and influence over these students that he was eventually fired from teaching position at, perhaps omewhat ironically, India’s Hindu University.
Such contradictions are really the thing which best characterize Derozio and his poetry. This paradoxical foundation of the poet began quite early, at the tender age of just nineteen, with the publication of The Fakeer of Jungheera. This epic is more than 2,000 lines and holds a place in Indian poetic history by being the first such long work of verse written by a native Indian in English. And so it goes through legacy of Derozio’s canon. A poem about Indian history will be followed by a poem about Shakespearean characters. Another allegorical poem about British oppression of Indians begins with the inspirational lines “He who dies his land to save, / Rests within a glorious grave” but is preceded by an epigraph from British poet Lord Byron. Derozio’s rose to the level of being recognized as the first Indian poet to be nationalistic toward his country while writing poetry inspired more than anything else by those Romantic poets like Byron and Shelley.
Derozio taught his New Bengal followers the value of questioning traditions and ritualism customs while promoting the power of free thinking. Any such commitment to progressive thought carries with it the potential for contradictions which those whose cling to established ideologies may see as hypocritical. It this very potential to see Derozio as, paradoxically, either hypocritical or iconoclastic which truly endows his writing with the power that makes it relevant and relatable two centuries later.
