Anti-colonial
Subtext in Victorian Verse: Hari Singh Gour's Resistance Through Form in
Stepping Westward (1891)
Shaleen Kumar Singh,
Professor,
Department of English,
Swami Shukdevanand University,
Shahjahanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India.
Abstract: This paper seeks to analyse the anti-colonial subtext
in the first book of poetry of Hari Singh Gour named Stepping Westward and Other
Poems (1891) which was published in London when Britain was at the peak of its
imperial dominance over India. Analysing the complexity of Gour's use of what
this paper defines as ‘camouflaged dissent’ in his poetry, the paper shows how
Gour utilises the formal and generic structure of Victorian poetry (elegy, ode,
nature lyric, romantic apostrophe) in his poetry and infuses them with a
critique of empire, which his largely English audience could enjoy while not
necessarily fully realizing the ramifications of resistance to their own
ideology. Using the theories of post-colonialism, especially Homi Bhabha's
notions of mimicry and ambivalence, and Edward Said's Orientalism and culture
hegemony, the paper sees the invocations of Hope and descriptions of emigration,
Gour's speech to Tamerlane's gravestone, his astronomy poem and the symbolism
discerned by editor Laxmi Pandey in the original cover image of the book Kaliya
Krishna as a continuous (if coded) reflection on colonial subjugation and the
desire for Indian self-determination. The paper therefore suggests that Gour's
poetic achievement is that he significantly manages to maintain a
double-voicedness: a Victorian poem that can be easily understood by the
coloniser, and an anti-colonial manifesto that can be easily understood by the
colonised.
Keywords: Hari
Singh Gour, Victorian poetry, anti-colonialism, postcolonial mimicry, Indian
literature in English, camouflaged dissent, Stepping Westward
Introduction:
The Colonised Poet in the Empire's Language
When Hari Singh Gour the barrister, jurist,
future Vice-Chancellor, and founder of Sagar University published Stepping
Westward and Other Poems in London in 1891, he performed an act that was
quietly radical. An Indian scholar from Bundelkhand writing in the metropole's
own literary language, invoking Wordsworth in his epigraph and addressing his
verses to the traditions of English Romanticism, Gour appeared, on the surface,
to be the model colonial subject: assimilated, educated, producing literature
in conformity with the cultural norms of the empire that governed his homeland.
Yet the appearance of conformity masked something far more complex. Gour's
collection, the first edition of which bore a cover illustration of the
child-god Krishna subduing the serpent Kaliya in the river Yamuna carried within its Victorian frames a
sustained and searching critique of empire. Laxmi Pandey, the editor of the
2024 Anuugya Books republication, observes in her prefatory essay, the Kaliya
Krishna image was no casual decorative choice. The serpent, she argues,
represents the colonial power; the child-god's act of subduing it from atop its
own head taming it by its own laws, dancing upon it encodes Gour's own purpose in travelling to
England: to master the coloniser's instruments of law and language, and to use
them against colonial domination (Pandey, 2024, pp. 11–12).
The present paper takes that editorial
reading as its starting point and extends it through close analysis of Gour's
poems. It argues that Stepping Westward is a work of what this paper
calls 'camouflaged dissent', a practice in which the colonized writer employs
the formal and rhetorical conventions of the dominant literary culture to
articulate a counter-ideology that remains encoded enough to be published,
reviewed, and read within the imperial context, yet clear enough to speak to a
reader who knows the codes. This strategy, anticipated by theorists of
postcolonial literature, is both a political necessity and an artistic
achievement.
Mimicry,
Ambivalence, and Camouflaged Dissent
The paradox of the colonised intellectual
writing in the coloniser's language and writing well has been one of the
central concerns of postcolonial theory. Homi Bhabha's influential analysis of
colonial mimicry provides perhaps the most useful starting point for
understanding Gour's practice. For Bhabha, mimicry is the demand that the
colonial subject become a reformed, recognisable Other: 'almost the same, but
not quite' (Bhabha, 1994, p. 122). This 'not quite' is crucial: the mimic's
very closeness to the original unsettles the authority of that original,
introducing what Bhabha calls ambivalence — a doubleness that makes colonial
discourse unstable and available for subversion.
Gour is a textbook case of Bhabha's mimic
man, but with an important difference: he is not merely the passive product of
mimicry but its active, self-conscious exploiter. He writes in the Romantic
tradition not because he has been colonised into believing it superior, but
because he recognises — as the Kaliya metaphor suggests — that to dance on the
serpent's head, one must first stand on it. His mastery of the English literary
tradition is a form of what Stuart Hall describes as 'the struggle over
cultural hegemony': the colonised subject seizing the master's tools not merely
to survive, but to build the master's undoing (Hall, 1996, p. 468).
Edward Said's concept of 'worldliness’ the
insistence that literary texts are embedded in and shaped by the historical and
political conditions of their production
is equally important for reading Gour (Said, 1983, p. 35). Said argues
in Culture and Imperialism that 'the novel, and the culture associated
with it, did a great deal of the work of empire' (Said, 1993, p. xiii). Poetry,
equally, participated in this cultural labour. Victorian verse celebrated the
expansion of empire, mourned fallen warriors, and constructed a mythology of
civilising mission. For Gour to work within this tradition is to work within a
deeply ideologically loaded space. His achievement is to infiltrate that space
to write poems that look like Victorian verse and function, at another register,
as anti-colonial argument.
Elleke Boehmer's work on colonial and
postcolonial writing offers another useful frame. Boehmer observes that early
Indian writing in English often operated through 'strategic hybridity' — using
the forms of the coloniser to articulate the consciousness of the colonised,
creating texts that were 'legible to multiple readerships simultaneously'
(Boehmer, 1995, p. 77). This multiplicity of address is precisely what
characterises Stepping Westward: a book that could be shelved in a London
bookshop and reviewed in the English press as a creditable colonial
contribution to Victorian poetry, while simultaneously offering, to the reader
prepared to receive it, a searching indictment of the imperial system.
The concept of 'camouflaged dissent' that
this paper proposes builds on these theoretical foundations while attending to
the specific literary-historical conditions of Gour's moment. Writing in 1891 —
four years after the founding of the Indian National Congress, in the same
decade as Bal Gangadhar Tilak's incendiary journalism and six years before the
Partition of Bengal agitation would gather force — Gour inhabited a political
moment in which open anti-colonial expression by an Indian publishing in London
was extraordinarily dangerous. Mimicry, hybridity, and strategic ambivalence
were not merely theoretical possibilities; they were practical necessities. The
camouflage of Victorian form was the condition of possibility for Gour's
dissent.
Stepping
Westward: Emigration as Colonial Allegory
The longest, most intricate poem in the book
is the title poem, which is subtitled 'Emigrants to the West', with more than
150 lines. The action of this story has a Victorian topicality on the surface:
emigrants sail away from a port in England or Ireland and are watched by a
sympathetic narrator. There is a pastoral opening which depicts an 'English
spring' – an abundant springtime, in Keatsian style:
It is the queen of beauties joyous spring,
Sweet summer nears; and now the greenwood
glades
Look 'tired in festal trim, soft crystal
gems
Of loveliest hue bestud enchanting scene
And turn the land into an Eden fair.
This opening, evoking an Eden, immediately
sets up a note of irony; the reader will slowly begin to make more sense of it.
When Adam and Eve leave Eden, it should come as a fall. However, Gour's
emigrants don't fall, but are willing to leave because of forces that the poem
is careful to detail. Included in these emigrants on board the ship bound for
the West are not only British labouring men and Irish peasants but 'others'
whose names remain unexplained, who in any case were, or were not travelling,
on a ship on this route in 1891, actions which are inevitably colonial for an
Indian reader. The Irish, a racially marginalised people in the United Kingdom,
feature prominently in the ‘luckless race of sad Erin' (Gour, 1891, p. 29), and
their situation as colonised people within the United Kingdom was a topic of
much political debate at precisely this time. But this sympathy for these Irish
emigrants is not an accident–Gour's sympathy for colonised peoples, which
"humanitarian" seems to be the sole reading available from his
English publisher, is political statement intended for an Indian reader.
The scene is departure is brilliantly done at
an emotional level. The old man's blindness and age giving pressure to his
son's arm upon the quayside is ‘never again’ (Gour, 1891, p.31); it is an
expression which has the weight of permanent separation. But the political
thrust of the poem is strongest in its attack on the economic pressures which
impelled emigration. The footnote, added by Gour, explains how labourers were
shipped, 'by tender', 'to foreign countries', noting that 'twelve hundred
persons were thus emigrated from a single seaport', in one year, and that they
were 'one of great privation and suffering', and the capitalist 'exact to his
bond, even the pound of flesh' (Gour, 1891, p. 35). The Shylock comparison is
not only aptly provided, it is provided in a footnote: Gour thus makes
imperialism as a thing of "pure" capitalism identify with extortionate
cruelty, and does so while still maintaining the outline of a scholarly,
detached and academic observation, even in his delivery of a political charge.
What is perhaps more amazing, is that the
poem specifically mentions slavery: ‘O slavery! As churning out freemen like a
sack of coal' (Gour, 1891, p. 35) and 'What better is thy name, And thou the
blushless thing Humanity' It's Gour at his least circumspect place; and the
charge is universal, not simply at the "slave trade," but at the
whole "colonial labour extractive system. The fact that he delivers this
condemnation in a poem that ostensibly addresses the question of voluntary
emigration, intensifies its critique: As a poem about voluntary emigration, it
implies, 'free' migration is no less coerced than any other, as the colonial
system does a number of tricks to weaken that argument. The last movement of
the poem centres on Hope, 'O Hope! fair goddess born of morning light, / How
with thy soul thou guidest Destiny, / How Phoenix-like when life's last embers
burn' (Gour, 1891 p.37). This is not just a consolation format, this is an
apostrophe to Hope at the end of a poem which has chronicled dispossession,
loss and economic betrayal. This is, as the following section will
substantiate, the main philosophical-political idea behind the whole volume and
it literally has a meaning with which Victorian readers may have been reassured
and with which Gour meant not to reassure them, but to assert political faith.
The
Figure of Hope: A Philosophy of Resistance
Hope in Stepping Westward is far from the
simple, sentimental emotion of Victorian consolatory poetry. An honourable and
active, an almost militant, force, which thinks, and acts as a ‘fair goddess
born of morning light’ (Gour, 1891, p. 37), the director of Destiny, and which
rises phoenix-like from destruction. The Mexico City picture of the Phoenix is
essential: the Phoenix embodies the potential for national resurgence from
colonial oppression, which need the darkness of the "last embers" here,
as its precondition.
Politically, the image of a Phoenix, rising
from the ashes of the nation, was not uncommon. The Phoenix was a very popular
symbol in Irish nationalist literature, in particular, symbolizing a nation of
people that would rise from the ashes of colonial suppression. The trial's
likelihood that that Gour's Phoenix-Hope will turn up at the end of a poem so
mindful of the Irish circumstance is hard to imagine being an incidental. It
lets Gour speak, shot through mythology, something which he dare not say in
political prose: Colonial subjection is not indestructible, the colonised will
rebel.
The collection's second longest poem,
'Sunshine and Shade' subtitled 'A Dream of Realities,' continues the philosophy
in the complex visionary structure. Unable to sleep, the speaker of the poem
enters dream-state and sees all sorts of historical figures—warriors,
statesmen, voice from the grave telling of the Man who failed—all complaining
of how short-lived their power was and how cruel the period was. But the dream
has a philosophical burden, and this is its problem: its question of why things
have to be so bad: 'Why I was made to quit this world so soon, / And not
reserv'd to hail this happy day' (Gour, 1891, p. 29). The resolution in the
voice at the end of the poem is this: 'e'en as weeds the world shall yield some
good, / And man's as rose distill'd to better life' (Gour, 1891, p. 53) - a
stoic humanist approach. This is far from quietism, but a philosophy of patient
change—the changing weed into rose—which has a very distinct political
application to a people in the colonies being asked to wait, and be patient,
and trust to the slow operation of being given self-government.
What Gour does here comes into light when
viewing Frantz Fanon's analysis of the psychology of the colonised subject. The
foremost task of the colonised intellectual is to get rid of the doubt
instilled in him by colonial repression – to restore the "humanity,
historical roots, cultural life of the colonized people" (p. 148, Fanon
1963). Gour's calls on these emblems of hope (Hope, Hope HOPE!) and his ongoing
contemplation of the potential for resurrection after suffering do exactly this
- psychological restoration. To the Indians reader they say by allegory, by
philosophical argument, by implication, that subjugation is not destined.
Political
Allegory: Tamerlane, Saturn, and the Critique of Empire
On the Tomb of Tamerlane: Power and Its Ruins
The most political of the poems
in the collection is 'On the Tomb of Tamerlane', although the political is set
at a remove from present-day history. The fourteenth-century Central Asian
conqueror Tamerlane (Timur) rambled all over Persia, India and the Middle East,
destroying everything in his path, offering Gour his historical version of the
mirror he gazes into to reflect his own imperial power. The poem is a direct
address to the conqueror himself, who is no longer living, and the main
rhetorical effect–or plea, if you will–is to remove the glory of Tamerlane by
considering the utter emptiness of his dead state:
Read softly, pilgrim! this is sacred ground;
Beneath these gypsum monuments have lain
The ashes of once mighty Tamerlane,
Who in one earthquake shook whole realms, to
found
His stately dais.
The irony is they took the 'sacred ground'
and it was just a place where the ashes put to rest. The man who 'in one
earthquake shook whole realms' has now become dust under the gypsum monuments.
More specific is the description of Tamerlane dominating 'the holy land of Ind
/ With iron chains' (Gour, 1891, p. 55), in the poem. The subjugation of India,
both by Timur (14th century) and the British (19th century) is described with
those two words: iron chains. And the conclusion of the poem is almost
comically pessimistic: 'By one, or all? — By all, but most by stab' (Gour,
1891, p. 57), in which the means of conquest is reduced to raw violence and the
rhetoric of civilising mission normally used by conquering powers, including
the British, is removed.
It is a shrewd choice that Gour selected
Tamerlane (not for example the Mughal emperors). Criticizing the Mughal
empire's conquest of India would have been communal, to criticize Tamerlane
would have been simply writing in a received Western canon of poetry, Marlowe
had made him the hero of a play on the English stage. But the poem's actual
object, which a reader with sensitivity to allegory would note, is any empire
that chains the 'holy land of Ind' in chains of iron. For the Victorian reader
is the meditation on the Tybalt of history well out of the circle of danger.
The Indian reader sees a mirror image for himself.
To
Saturn: Cosmic Distance as Political Critique
In 'To Saturn (As Seen Through A Telescope)'
the distance from the immediate to the political is even greater; the politics
is at the same time the most searching in the collection. Saturn is described
as 'distant, solitary, magnificent' (Gour, 1891, p. 63): a distance, isolation,
grandeur. The narrator admits that he longs that he could be alone with Saturn,
that he could 'live in saintly solitude like thee' with him.
As a Victorian poem of pure esthetic
sensibilities, 'To Saturn' is a masterpiece of the astronomical sublime,
inspired by Keats's 'Hyperion' and Tennyson's 'the thanksgiving', a lyrical
meditation. However, Gour's Saturn has more significance. The planet's famed
rings, the ‘iron chains' that can be seen through a telescope, resonate with
the ‘iron chains' of the poem’s Tamerlane. The last lines of the poem 'Since
Saturn's nature's hidden horror, / Show himself, hide, though terrible, / Thou
never shunst him; and the Poet is satisfied with that (Gour, 1891, p. 63): the
revelations of Saturn's true nature (smaller, less magnificent than his mythic
glory) serve as a form of disillusionment: the myth, when seen, is less than
enrapturing.
In this case, the telescope is NOT a neutral
instrument of scrutiny. Early in the nineteenth century, the telescope was
being used as a stand for empiricism, rational inquiry and the demystification
of superstition - values refused for the colonies as uniquely European. Gour's
use of this instrument on Saturn and seeing it "ne'er as fancy
feign'd" is a gestured form of empirical examination of the claim of
empire more generally - and a failure.
The
Formal Dimensions of Dissent: Metre, Diction, Allusion, and Annotation
An anti-colonial project is neither content
only but also takes shape in the formal means by which Gour builds up his
poems. His analysis of the metre, diction, allusion, and, importantly, his
footnotes apprentices his careful handling of the twin prerequisites of
legibility, to the imperial audience, and legibility, to the resolute reader.
Metrically speaking, Gour's style is mainly
blank verse, the natural rhythm in iambic pentameter, such as is employed by
Milton and Wordsworth, and is occasionally replaced by lyric shorter measures.
The language of his blank verse is technically well done, maintaining the
qualifying elevation that Milton had demanded for such large matter, but at the
same time allowing for the direct, colloquial thrust that has been demanded for
political statement. This declaration of blank verse over the more flamboyantly
rhyming couplets of Pope, or the intricate patterned stanzas of Keats, itself
says something about the choice of blank verse; blank verse was the form of
Paradise lost, of the Prelude, of the epic aspirations of English Literature.
In doing this, Gour takes his Indian subject in equal measure and dignity with
that which the English tradition applied to its own concerns.
He is ever elevated in his diction 'bestud,'
'embosomed,' 'bespangled' (even 'ductorous' – Spenserian and Miltonic
poeticism). It does much more than just show Gour's command of the English
poetic tradition (it is through this elevation of the status of his subject
that one gains access to the Victorian literary world); it also gives his
subject matter the grandeur and seriousness of the dominant culture's concerns.
In his diction, when Gour tells stories about Irish emigrants, he accuses them
of having a quality that English pastoralists assume as their own: dignity.
His references are well-regulated. The
epigraphs in Wordsworth are also included with the other sources of inspiration
for the collection. The Wordsworth epigraphs are among the other means of
inspiration for the collection: ‘The moving accident is not my trade, / To
freeze the blood I have no human arts; / ‘Tis my delight, alone in summer
shade, / To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts' (Gour, 1891, p. 7).
Allusion to Wordsworth is both a statement of affiliation to the Romantic
movement and a gentle reorientation of it: the 'thinking hearts' were largely
English, while Gour's 'simple song' resonates with Indian readers for whom the
song's simplicity has quite oppositeand certainly more pointedconnotations.
Gour's formal approach to writing is the most
advanced in his use of footnotes. It is, however, quite remarkable for a volume
of poetry, and the pages contain many annotations giving information on the
Indian customs, quoting phrases from European philosophers (such as Herbert
Spencer) and making references to historical events. The footnotes sit somewhat
awkwardly fashioned rhetorically as the outsider and detached
"scholarly" eye of Gour on the phenomena he describes; they offer
some extra reportorial objectivity to a poem which occupies in the body itself
that same rhetorical position, and which, in this volume, is engaged in deeply
political writing. The note on 'labour-emigration trade' (quoted above) is
exemplary because it makes nothing but a complaint about the capitalistic
nature of the colonial system without resorting to verbo-tide, as its
competitors were wont to do, but at the same time it is a perfectly neutral
narrative in the historical register.
Marjorie Levinson's research on Keats and the
politics-of-poetic form are in the service of confirmation here. Never is any
formal selection in poetry politically neutral, according to Levinson – to use
a particular form, use a certain kind of diction, deploy a certain allusive
framework carries ideological weight (Levinson, 1988, p16). This ideological
cargo-loaded paraphernalia is handled by Gour a century from Keats, and under
the political constraints of a lawyer's hand.
The
Kaliya Krishna Cover: Paratextual Resistance
Translating the original cover image in which
Lord Krishna plays with the multi-headed serpent Kaliya which is danced over in
the river Yamuna and then interpreted as an allegory of Gour's anti-colonial
mission – goes on, and it is worth keeping a close eye on, as the paratexts of
a literary work are not a separate entity but part of it. The concept of a
paratext is a major one in book theory which was introduced by Gerard Genette,
in his seminal work, "Paratexts" (1997), in which he stated that the
border of a book, its cover, its title, its preface, its illustrations, etc.,
'constitutes a zone between text and offtext, a zone not only of transition but
of transaction' (Genette, 1997, p. 2). The cover image is the first thing the
reader sees when reading the text and it helps to open up the interpretation
window through which the text is read.
The well-known story is that of the young
Krishna, after coming across the river Yamuna, where he found the serpent
Kaliya had poisoned it; upon discovering this, he dove in, and swallowed the
serpent and dances on its hoods, allowing it to then go away. The script is
considered to be a mythical allegory of good triumphing over evil; and of the
divine safeguarding the helpless folk (Braj cowherds) against a fearsome
predator. Pandey decides that this implies his goal: ‘Images chosen for the
collection, which were published in London in 1891, allude to the purpose of
his going abroad to study law: tame them with their own written laws, suppress
them, namely placing one's feet on their heads, establish India's independent
sovereignty' (Pandey, 2024, p. 12, translation from Hindi). On this reading,
Gour would conquer the serpent not through force but through knowledge: through
his learning and mastery of the laws of the coloniser, and then utilising them
to push for the self-determination of Indians.
The context of the biographical reading
further supports it. Gour attended the Inner Temple of London and grew into one
of the most prominent legal scholars in India; yet he authored several statutes
such as seeking reform of Hindu law in matters of women's rights and personal
liberty – that are contradictory to, but at the same time engaged with the
underlying justification of the colonial legal system. In this light, the
attorney and the poet are doing the same task and subduing the colonial serpent
by dancing on its head.
Gour's motivations for publishing in London
even though India was an ideal market for his work are further explored in the
readings attached to the front of the cover image, and are further informed by
this paratext covering. An Indian writer might have had more kinds of
censorship and suppression against its attack on British imperial practices
when the book was published in 1891 in either Bombay or Calcutta. Chapters that
the English publisher's eye may well have considered nothing more than exotic
Indian mythology the collection could circulate freely, and reach the Indian as
well as the English reader, without attracting the mechanism of colonial
censorship, which had already been coming into action against more obviously
political Indian writing.
Gour in
the Tradition of Indian Writing in English
Gour's achievement must be set in the context
of all Indian authors who wrote in English in the nineteenth century. This fact
is not always known, but Michael Madhusudan Datta's English poetry was already
out in 1840; the remarkable Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan by Toru
Dutt was published in 1882, nine years before the appearance of Gour's
collection; and the translations and original writings of Romesh Chunder Dutt
were just as widely distributed in the same period. Gour belongs to a
generation of Indian writers who, while being educated in colonial schools,
were indeed resisting the teaching of colonial ideology, which viewed education
as a means to implant in the minds of Indians a class of 'persons in blood and
colour, but English in taste, not in opinion, not in morals, not in intellect'.
The closest bearer to Gour's strategy is Toru
Dutt. As with Gour, also Dutt employed European literary forms such as the
French sonnet and English ode, strikingly and more and more emphatically
declaring the Indians' sense of pride in their culture and implicitly
challenging the colonial certitude of literary hierarchy of civilisations. In
analyzing Dutt's adoption of European poetic forms, Alpana Sharma points out
that her work was ‘always marked by thematic emphases on the depth, richness
and continuity of Indian cultural tradition', that is a double act which
shifted the ground from under the colonialist idea that the Indian tradition
needed improvement through the ‘modernization' of the Europeans (Sharma, 2009,
p. 44). If Dutt is gesturing toward the enchanting Hindu golden age, Gour is
gesturing toward political liberation: whereas Dutt's theme is in some way chock-ola-hindu,
Gour's theme is the political critique, which he does as a double movement.
Much of the political color of Gour's work
comes when placed in the context of the development of the Indian nationalist
movement during the 1880s and early 1890s. In 1885 membership in the Indian
National Congress was restricted to English-educated lawyers, journalists,
civil servants like Gour, and other Indians who formed the first organised call
for granting Indians self-governance. A strategy adhered to by both the
Congress and Gour, as poetry, was that of working within the confines of the
British constitution and culture: making a petition, appealing, asserting a
right to loyalty, protesting, etc. Gour's poetry, as does the early Congress,
asserts in the aesthetic arena what it does in the political arena: equality
and eventual independence – but equality for the self that is making those
claims must be expressed in the forms and languages of the coloniser.
This is not to diminish Gour's poetry from
political pamphlet. His verse is not just political; his accomplishments, his
feeling, the range of his subject-matter, all of this is what is meant by the
quality of his verse. The elegy for the emigrant father, the apostrophe to
Saturn, the dream-vision of 'Sunshine and Shade' are, as liturgical acts quite
impressive literary performances. These do not have a simple anti-colonial
reading: their anti-colonial attribute enlivens them. What Said states in
Culture and Imperialism that the greatest tools that the colonial era possess
do not always have just one ideological purpose. 'The power to narrate, or to
block other narratives from forming and emerging, does not operate simply at
the level of explicit political statement but at deeper levels of form,
imagery, and structure' (Said, 1993, p. xiii). But Gour acts on at all these
levels at once.
The
Question of Audience: Double-Voicedness and Its Limits
The notion of double-voicedness, developed
most extensively in Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic novel theory but also pertinent to
poetry, is a guiding theme of Gour's practice and a limitation on it (Bakhtin,
1981, p.324). Bakhtin states that some types of discourse are double-voiced—a
discourse with two voices, and two audiences who hear two messages that can
rarely if ever be the same. The critical gaze of the educated, politically
conscious, alert to allegory reader of India perceives the criticism in the
complaisance, and Gour's poems sing to him in this double voice: they sing to
the reader of Victorian English, who meets an accomplished, fully assimilated
colonial poet writing within established forms.
It is important to recognise the restrictions
of this strategy. To be effective, double-voicedness must have a readership who
can receive both voices. Readership of poetry in English was limited at that
time in India; it was mainly restricted to the ranks of the educated few who
were educated in English, as were colonial institutions. Stepping Westward
would have been unavailable to the mass if people were even literate in Hindi or
Urdu or were even literate in their local vernacular language Bengali or
others. In this sense the anti-colonial subtext of Gour was directed not
towards the people, but towards the elite; it was a trait shared by a number of
early Indian writers in English, which later nationalist writers tried to
overcome in facing narratives in or translated from the vernaculars.
In addition, even the use of the camouflage
can threaten to undermine the protest – a protest that is like the oil smell,
and too well hidden, can be too well hidden. The political aspect would not
have been included by the reviewers at Gour, however, if there were any, since
they would have judged the poems, which he later told me were indeed his, as
simple but somehow exotic Victorian verse. The most effective camouflage is
also the most effective silencing for paradoxical effects of camouflaged
dissent.
But, to make judgment on the grounds of
immediate response, one overlooks its ultimate value. Gour's collection is
republished for the first time in 132 years and now finds a readership familiar
with the theoretical and historical context that are integral to its voice, its
power, and often its illness. Norway's colonial censorship has been hidden
these text, which have survived for us.
The Legibility
of Resistance
Stepping Westward and Other Poems by Hari
Singh Gour is a book that must be read twice - on the page and on the page! The
collection - in its blank verse, pastoral beginnings, Romantic apostrophes,
scholarly footnotes - is a welcome, deceptively accessible thing to the English
reader: the poem, most English of literary forms. In the allegories of Kaliya
Krishna and the iron chains of Tamerlane, in the solidarity with Irish
emigrants, as well as with colonial capitalism, in the philosophy of
Hope-as-resistance and the Phoenix as national rebirth, the collection offers
its Indian reader something altogether different: a sustained, searching,
courageous critique of the empire under whose jurisdiction Gour lived and
wrote.
The methodology of writing in disguise which
this paper has outlined is not peculiar to Gour but has been used by many
colonised writers, from necessity and from art, in many traditions. Gour's
skill lies in the accuracy and self-awareness with which he uses the camouflage
– the footnotes that carry political meanings in the language of scholarship;
the picture that embodies an Indian resistance programme in the mythology of
the cover; the poems that offer both the language of Victorian consolation and
the language of anti-colonial aspiration. In this sense, Gour is a creation of
the colonial educational system and one of its most accomplished and
thoroughgoing surreptitious underminers.
Stepping Westward, edited by Laxmi Pandey and published 132 years after
its original London publication in 1893, comes at a time when postcolonial
scholarship has begun to pay increased attention to the voices the
soon-to-be-recovered artists of early Indian writing in English. This reward is
abundant in Gour's collection. It is his purpose to attest that the
anti-colonial voice was not restricted to the explicitly political platforms of
the nationalists and the Congress; indeed, it was at work subtly and artfully
in the form of Victorian verse.
A future study of Stepping Westward
ought to be concerned with the intertextual connections between Stepping
Westward and Gour's legal and philosophical literature, especially his massive
body of work on Hindu law reform, and the volume of such writing, which is a
unified career of contestation against the sovereign assumptions of colonial
government. It should also place Gour more fully in the comparative perspective
of colonised writers who, in the Victorian era, found analogous strategies with
which to demonstrate dissident viewpoints — such as the poets of the Celtic
Revival in Ireland, the Bengali bhadralok, and the West Indian writers who are
beginning to appear as part of this period, writing in a comparable imperial
context. Hari Singh Gour's name must be remembered not just as a jurist as well
a university founder but also as one of the first and most mature practitioners
of the anti-colonial literary imagination in the Indian tradition.
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