Few topics connected to the study of colonial India have produced quite as much scholarship in recent years as the issue of colonial Indian education reform. The past decade alone has witnessed the publication of no fewer than eight English-language books on the subject, as well as a steady stream of journal articles. Part of the appeal of such research is no doubt a result of India's privileged place in the British Empire during the nineteenth century. In 1881, India's first complete census documented the existence of 253,891,821 Indian subjects living under the British Raj – or, to put it another way, a population nearly ten times the size of England and Wales's own population during the same period. For scholars, education offers a particularly fruitful site for understanding British colonial ideology. In addition, it provides an important glimpse into the lives of Indian subjects. An extensive print archive, manifest in sources as diverse as political speeches, bureaucratic files, periodicals, and memoirs, has greatly aided research into the development of colonial education. At the same time, the tendency for research to privilege particular regional focuses has left troublesome gaps in the historical record.

In her groundbreaking bookMasks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989), Guari Viswanathan established that “the discipline of English came into its own” not in England but in India, as an instrument of cultural colonization: “As early as the 1820s, when the classical curriculum reigned supreme in England despite the strenuous efforts of some concerned critics to loosen its hold, English as the study of culture and not simply the study of language had already found a secure place in the British Indian curriculum” (2, 3). Pausing to summarize the English literary curriculum fostered by “government schools in midcentury India,” she lists the following poetical works, gleaned from a report reprinted for the House of Lords in 1853: “Richardson's Poetical Selections (Goldsmith, Gray, Addison, Pope, and Shakespeare), Otway's Venice Preserved, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, Pope's Iliad by Homer, [and] Milton's Paradise Lost (the first four books)” (54). Although Viswanathan does not identify Richardson or his Poetical Selections, she is right to head the list with that textbook, which is mentioned in many other government reports of the period, and which was instrumental in establishing a classroom canon of British poetry in India before any such curriculum had been determined in Great Britain.

This essay examines the reception of Byron's work, and some responses to it, among the poets of the British community in India during the first half of the nineteenth century. The first section sketches some of the routes by which Byron's work and accounts of his life were circulated and read in India and demonstrates the impact of his work on the poets of British India. These poets co-opted Byronic texts into their own writings in the form of epigraphs and other citations and allusions, composed responses to Byron and his work, and imitated the tropes, formats and themes of Byron's poetry. The second section of the essay looks in more detail at selected examples of the many adaptations and imitations of Byron's work that proliferated during this period. In these poems, Byronic models are appropriated by writers whose chosen professions or relationships have the effect of aligning them with the colonial project of the East India Company. They re-imagined the encounter with the romanticized Orient that characterizes many of Byron's works in response to the specific political and cultural contexts of British India in the nineteenth century.

“When the history of the literature of our country comes to be written, there is sure to be a page in it dedicated to this fragile exotic blossom of song” (Dutt xxvii). This sentence is Edmund Gosse's famous final flourish to his memoir of Toru Dutt, which introduced her posthumous volume Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, published in 1882, five years after her death from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-one. But what would Dutt's page look like in the history of “our country,” by which Gosse means of course England? This question is a tricky one, because placing a late nineteenth-century Bengali who was a Europhile, a Christian convert, and an English-language woman poet within a British Victorian tradition is a simplistic, if not a problematic appropriation of a colonial subject into the centre of the British Empire. Where Dutt belongs has long preoccupied critics who try to recuperate her poetry for an Indian national poetic tradition, or for a transnational, cosmopolitan poetics. The issue of placing Dutt allows us also to press questions about the conception of Victorian poetry studies, its geographical, cultural, and national boundaries, not just in the nineteenth-century creation of a canon but in our current conception of the symbolic map of Victorian poetry. But, while recent critics have celebrated her poetry's embrace of global poetry as a challenge to the parochialism of national literary boundaries, Dutt's original English-language poetry also suggests an uneven, uncomfortable hybridity, and a wry, ironic interplay between distance and proximity that unfolds through her use of poetic form. This essay investigates what it means to “make something” of Toru Dutt, in the nineteenth century and in the twenty-first century, what is at stake for Victorian poetry studies in privileging Dutt and her multi-lingual writing, and whether her celebrated transnationalism might not also include a discomfort with hybridity that reveals itself through the relation between space and literary form in her poetry.