“Who is Kailyal, what is she?” Subcontinental and Metropolitan Reader Responses to The Curse of Kehama and its Heroine
2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/10509585.2014.921856
ISSN1740-4657
Autores Tópico(s)Philippine History and Culture
ResumoAbstractThis article attempts to consider the responses of readers both in the metropole and within the subcontinent to a poem of which Jane Welsh Carlyle wrote: “I should like well to have conceived ‘The curse of Kehama’ – But I would not have written it for a thousand guineas.” Opening with an Elephanta picnic, it examines a wide array of critical and scholarly reactions which testify to the imaginative power and accuracy of Southey's poetic representation of Hindostan. Its detailed attention to “costume” led many, including seasoned India hands, to measure or recall their subcontinental experiences by the light of Southey's epic, which convinced some of its most informed readers that he had actually made the passage to India. It focuses upon reactions to the physical and moral attractions of the poem's heroine Kailyal, a character whom the young Percy Shelley thought “divine”, rendering Kehama “my most favourite poem.” The inspiration for Kailyal is viewed not only in the obvious subcontinental shapes of Śrī Lakshmī and Śakuntalā, but also in terms of Biblical Orientalism and the influence of Klopstock's Messiah. The significance of “Cidli” in both Klopstock's epic and Klopstock's life, as the name he chose to give his beloved avant la lettre epipsyche Margaretha, is considered in respect to the influence upon Southey of their love conceived as predestined and indivisible through all time. Notes1. Forster, A Passage to India (68). Begun on the picnic centenary in 1913, this novel was not completed until 1924, the year of its first publication.2. The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster (213).3. The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster (432–33).4. Captain Basil Hall (Fragments 3: 200). Henceforth “Hall” cited parenthetically.5. Walter Scott was a friend of Hall and, like Lady Abercorn, was much impressed with the captain's cultural tact: “I admire how, as a traveller, he has said so much about the manners of the people, yet avoided any breach of the confidence of private society, upon which travellers think themselves entitled to trample merely because they are travellers” (Scott to Lady Abercorn, 1 August 1824, 8: 339).6. “When Mr. Erskine wrote his elaborate and learned Essay on the Caves of Elephanta, for the Bombay Literary Society, Mrs. Ashburner was the only artist that could be found to furnish the illustrations, which she did in a series of beautiful drawings of all the principal groups of sculpture in the interior, to which she devoted some months with a zeal that was untiring, and these drawings were engraved for the Transactions of that learned body” (Buckingham 2: 345).7. It begins: “Go, youth beloved, in distant glades, / New friends, new hopes, new joys to find! / Yet sometimes deign, midst fairer maids, / To think on her thou leav'st behind.” Review by Francis Jeffrey of Amelia Opie (113–21; 116). Amelia Opie published five poems in the Annual Anthology (1799 and 1800), edited by Robert Southey.8. Sir James Mackintosh wrote from India: “Tell the fair Opie that if she would address such pretty verses to me as she did to Ashburner, I think she might almost bring me back from Bombay, though she could not prevent his going thither” (Brightwell 89).9. There was also the jingoistic picnic of 21 August 1815 when “blazing balls of tow and turpentine” were hurled down Skiddaw to celebrate victory at Waterloo.10. “Reclin'd beneath a Cocoa's feathery shade / Ladurlad lies, / And Kailyal on his lap her head has laid / To hide her streaming eyes.” Robert Southey, The Curse of Kehama (4: 28); henceforth cited parenthetically within the text.11. Scott to Southey, 23 March 1818 (Letters 5: 116).12. Southey to Grosvenor Charles Bedford, 16 February 1811, Collected Letters of Robert Southey.13. William Erskine, diary, 1811–50, BL, Add. MS 39945.14. This term was invariably used by Orientalists in India as a vindication of their authoritative positioning.15. Heber had married Amelia Shipley, the niece of Lady Anna Maria Jones, in 1809.16. Heber (3: 224–25). Compare “We had seen, the night before, the lightenings flash incessantly and most majestically from this quarter; and what we now saw was not ill-fitted for a nursery of such storms as Southey describes as prevailing in his Padalon” (Heber 1: 7). We might compare the gothicized atmosphere created in “Verses, written at the island of Saugur, in the mouth of the Ganges in 1807” by John Leyden, whom Heber had introduced to Walter Scott.17. For Southey's philistinic description of Sanskrit: “About the language, S[trachey] is right; it is a baboon jargon not worth learning.” See his letter of 23 July 1800 to C. W. W. Wynn in Collected Letters.18. “E.A.”, the author of “On the Tales Denominated ‘Oriental,’” in the London-published The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British India and its Dependencies (284–86; 285), declares: “Southey's Curse of Kehama is not only a vigorous effort of imagination, but a pretty correct imitation of the character of Hindu poetry,” but the claim is somewhat weakened as “E.A” proceeds to demonstrate his totally inadequate knowledge of Oriental literatures.19. Forbes (Oriental Memoirs 3: 63–66). Forbes's earlier Reflections on the Character of the Hindoos . . . being the preface to, and conclusion of, a series of Oriental letters, which will shortly be published (1810) had doubled as a curtain-raiser and a pro-missionary intervention in the “Pious clause” debate.20. “My drawings and accompanying descriptions, during these travels, fill 150 folio volumes, containing upwards of 51,000 pages” (Forbes, Letter 734).21. [Southey] review of Forbes (Review 180–227; 182).22. Graham (Catalogue 5). The Revd. P. Anderson, in a note to his translation of a passage in the Bhatti Kávya describing red lotos beds, also cites Southey's lines as demonstrating “the versatility of the poet's genius in describing oriental scenery” (“Account” 23–24).23. On Southey's most appropriate choice of “household” goddesses (Marriataly and Bhūdevī) for Kailyal and Ladurlad, see Michael J. Franklin (Citation2011, 257–76; 268–70).24. See Joyce's parody of the song from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, “To Sylvia Beach” (86–87).25. Southey to Grosvenor Charles Bedford, 12 May 1805, Collected Letters of Robert Southey.26. Although no critics, contemporary or modern, have appeared to notice, I feel that Southey's choice of name for his eponymous “Man-Almighty” was something of a joke inspired by Kamehameha I (d. 1819), first king of the Hawaiian Islands, popularly termed “Kamehameha the Great” or the “Napoleon of the Pacific.” Compare Walter Scott's joke concerning his sun-burnt son Walter appearing like “a wild Arab . . . having chosen to let his mustaches and beard attain a formidable growth. He has really a most Saracenic appearance, and were not Kamehameha departed, I should certainly have passed him off for King of the Sandwich Islands at a review of the yeomanry which we attend to-day. By the way, was it not a foolish fuss they made about these poor savages, besides cramming them to death as children do their pets?” Scott to Lady Abercorn, 1 August 1824: The Letters of Sir Walter Scott 8: 340. Kamehameha II and his wife Kamāmalu had died of measles in London in July 1824.27. “Keradou,” an early working-title for Kehama, had been borrowed from Pierre Sonnerat: “Kéradou, un des dix Broumas,” Voyage aux Indes orientales et à la Chine (1: 282).28. Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1: 101). Eight days later on the 19 June he is writing rapturously to Thomas Jefferson Hogg about the heroine of Sydney Owenson's The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811): “Will you read it, it is really a divine thing. Luxima the Indian is an Angel. What a pity that we cannot incorporate these creatures of Fancy; the very thought of them thrills the soul. Since I have read this book I have read no other – but I have thought strangely” (1. 107; see also 1: 112).29. Robert Southey to James Montgomery, 26 March 1812, Collected Letters of Robert Southey.30. Monthly Mirror (July 1810: 122–35); Eclectic Review 7 (March, 1811: 185–205; April, 1811: 334–50).31. In reply to this letter, Southey writes on 21 February 1809: “Kehama would never have been resumed had it not been for you. It had lain untouched for five years, and so it would have remained,” Southey to Landor, 21 February 1809, Collected Letters of Robert Southey.32. Compare “Mr Southey will never acquire all the fame, which his poem is capable of conferring, until he obtain readers who reverence and adore his deities, and that time can never come until The Curse of Kehama is translated into Hindoostanee” (Dubois, 135).33. For Jairus's daughter, see Matthew (5: 22–24; 35–43) and Luke (8: 41–42; 49–56) and for the youth of Nain, see Luke (7: 11–16). Southey might well have seen Blake's Christ Raising Jairus's Daughter (1799–1800) at the Pantheon in Oxford Street. He certainly knew Francis Wrangham's poem The Raising of Jaïrus' Daughter (1804); Wrangham also wrote A Poem on the Restoration of Learning in the East (1805), and contributed six poems to Southey's Annual Anthology (Bristol, 1800).34. Southey, inhabiting the persona of Dr. Daniel Dove of Doncaster, was later to play with this idea of epipsyche or antitype with the aid of King John (II.i.432–40): “You may rest assured that if the Doctor had set out upon a tour, like Coelebs, in search of a wife, he could never have found one who would in all respects have suited him better. What Shakespeare says of the Dauphin and the Lady Blanch might seem to have been said with a second sight of this union:Such as she is Is this our Doctor, every way complete; If not complete, O say, he is not she: And she again wants nothing, to name want. If want it be not, that she is not he. He is the half part of a blessed man, Left to be finished by such a she; And she a fair divided excellence Whose fullness of perfection lies in him. (Robert Southey, The Doctor 268)35. See Memoirs of Frederick and Margaret Klopstock (133–39).36. Robert Southey to Charles Watkin Williams Wynn, 27 November 1804, Collected Letters of Robert Southey.37. Southey to Neville White, 30 September 1808, Collected Letters of Robert Southey.38. Robert Southey to Neville White, 10 October 1809, Collected Letters of Robert Southey.39. That a consummated union is in Southey's mind is evident from his 1803 plan of the poem: “A Grindouver, i.e. the most beautiful of all the good spirits – finds her under a manchineel. he carries her first to the dwelling of old Casyapa the father of the Gods (– for whom see Sacontala) then to the Sorgon the paradise of Indra. he takes a liking to her – but Kalyal will not remain in Paradise without her father, & Indra, for fear of the almighty Rajah will not permit Laderlad to enter. Ereenia therefore goes to earth with Kalyal – they build a hut in an lonely place, & feed Laderlad with the Sorgon fruits – but Kalyal will not become Ereenias wife till her father is completely safe” (emphasis mine), Southey to Grosvenor Charles Bedford, 2 January 1803, Collected Letters of Robert Southey.
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