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Full Description
From Little London to Little Bengal traces the traffic in culture between Britain and India during the Romantic period. To some, Calcutta appeared to be a "Little London," while in London itself an Indianized community of returned expatriates was emerging as "Little Bengal." Circling between the two, this study reads British and Indian literary, religious, and historical sources alongside newspapers, panoramas, religious festivals, idols, and museum exhibitions. Together and apart, Britons and Bengalis waged a transcultural agon under the dynamic conditions of early nineteenth-century imperialism, struggling to claim cosmopolitan perspectives and, in the process, to define modernity. Daniel E. White shows how an ambivalent Protestant contact with Hindu devotion shaped understandings of the imperial mission for Britons and Indians during the period. Investigating global metaphors of circulation and mobility, communication and exchange, commerce and conquest, he follows the movements of people, ideas, books, art, and artifacts initiated by writers, publishers, educators, missionaries, travelers, and reformers.
Along the way, he places luminaries like Romantic poet Robert Southey and Hindu reformer Rammohun Roy in dialogue with a fascinating array of lesser-known figures, from the Baptist missionaries of Serampore and the radical English journalist James Silk Buckingham to the mixed-race prodigy Henry Louis Vivian Derozio. In concert and in conflict, these cultural emissaries and activists articulated national and cosmopolitan perspectives that were more than reactions on the part of marginal groups to the metropolitan center of power and culture. The British Empire in India involved recursive transactions between the global East and West, channeling cultural, political, and religious formations that were simultaneously distinct and shared, local, national, and transnational.
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
A Note on Usage
Introduction
1. "Little London": Imperial Publics, Imperial Spectacles
Indian Public Opinion and John Bullism of the Heart
The Panorama and the Fabled Cap of Fortunatus
Inventing Tradition: Durga Puja, Idolatry, and Sympathy
2. Secret Sharers and Evangelical Signs: The Idol, the Book, and the Intense Objectivism of Robert Southey
Baptists, Print, and Idolatry
The Museum of the Bristol Baptist College and the Service of Idols
"Amenable to wooden gods": Evangelicalism, Idolatry, and The Curse of Kehama
3. "I would not have the day return": Henry Derozio and Rammohun Roy in Cosmopolitan Calcutta
East Indians and "Modern Hindoo Sects"
Rammohun Roy and Hindu Unitarianism
Derozio, Memory, Modernity
4. "Little Bengal": Returned Exiles, Rammohun Roy, and Imperial Sociability
Oriental Tales and Orient Pearls
Jaut Bhaees in Hanover Square: Returned Exiles and the Oriental Club
"The Rajah was there": Rammohun Roy and the Romance of Conversation
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
