Introducing South Asian Poets in English: Kasiprasad Ghosh
Kaiser Haq
An exact coeval of Derozio, Kasiprasad Ghosh (1809-73) became the second Indian to publish a volume of English verse. Titled The Shair and Other Poems (shair of course is Urdu/Hindi for "poet"), it appeared in Calcutta in 1830 and was noticed in both local and British periodicals; the latter (the New Monthly Magazine, the Atheneum and Fraser's Magazine), unsurprisingly, were patronizing. In Calcutta of course Ghosh became a significant figure in the so-called Bengal Renaissance.Born into a wealthy zamindar family, Ghosh was one of the earliest batches of students to be educated in the Hindu College (now Presidency College). He excelled in his studies and was chosen to present an essay at a prize distribution ceremony. Titled "Critical remarks on the first four chapters of Mr. Mill's History of British India," it evinced a nascent awareness of national identity, and was subsequently published in the Government Gazette (14 February 1828) and later reprinted in the Asiatic Journal; clearly, it made quite an impact. Ghosh began writing English verse in 1827 at the encouragement of the Orientalist H. H. Wilson, and a couple of years later started publishing prose pieces of a critical-scholarly or historical-narrative nature, e.g., "On Bengali Poetry" and "On Bengali Works and Writers" in the Literary Gazette; and "Sketches of Ranjit Singh" and "The King of Oude" in the Calcutta Monthly Magazine. In 1846 Ghosh launched a weekly paper, the Hindu Intelligencer from his own printing press. It appeared regularly till the Sepoy Revolt, after which a law passed by Lord Canning to suppress the native press ended its illustrious career. Besides pursuing his literary activities Ghosh undertook various civic responsibilities: he served on the management board of the Bethune School, on the Calcutta Supreme Court Jury, and as an Honorary Presidency Magistrate and Justice of the Peace. He died in 1873. Kasiprasad Ghosh's poetry, like Derozio's, is enmeshed in an intertextual network involving Orientalism, the great tradition of English poetry (which, as Raymond Schwab has demonstrated in Oriental Renaissance, registered the impact of Orientalist scholarship), and British versifiers living in India. These connections have been examined in considerable detail by Rosinka Chaudhuri in her book Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal: Emergent Nationalism and the Orientalist Project (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2002). No one has a very high opinion of Ghosh as a poet, but his historical significance cannot be denied. "To a Dead Crow", interestingly reflects self-critical awareness, while his other poems ("To a Young Hindu Widow", for example) were characteristic of the social criticism that was the hallmark of "Young Bengal.” Kaiser Huq teaches English at Dhaka University.
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