H.L.V. Derozio’s sheer concetti, Fragmentation and the Indisciplines of Indian Romanticism

Abstract

This essay examines a corpus of five short lyrics by H.L.V. Derozio, recently discovered and still partially neglected by critics. It systematically interprets these texts within the early 19^th-century reception of British Romanticism in Calcutta, a vibrant intellectual and social environment encompassing the key issues of Indian literary modernity, Nationalism and the Bengal Renaissance. A second aim is to identify the probable sources of these texts by examining the poet’s other writings and the Greek literature he knew and used (Sappho). The uniqueness and peculiarity of these poetic pieces reside in Derozio’s deliberate and radical use of fragmentation as both a theme and formal property of the text. This is achieved through a form of “recalcitrant mimesis” (M.E. Gibson, Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore, Athens, Ohio U.P., 2011, pp. 145, 161) whereby the author accepts and simultaneously subverts a literary convention, the Romantic fragment genre, to move beyond the cultural dominance of colonial British discourse and explore broader philosophical, existential, and literary theoretical issues, heading towards a revolutionary kind of poetry, akin to a proto-modernist poetics.