This is the first anthology to be devoted exclusively to light verse composed by British authors in undivided India, plus a few items illustrating parallel experiences in Sri Lanka and Myanmar. Written overwhelmingly by the junior ranks of the military and civil service, these works constitute a 'running commentary' on the Raj from below. The typical subaltern liked to picture himself as unduly put upon, unfairly ignored, and inexplicably underrated. Before departure for India, the impressionable heads of young recruits could all too easily be filled with stories of immense fortunes to be easily made by 'shaking the Pagoda Tree'. Once in India, such dreams quickly evaporated for a variety of reasons - the climate, the isolation, the slow pace or complete lack of career advancement, illness, or untimely death.
Whatever the authors may have lacked in technical skill and refinement. of poetical expression, they more than made up for by the vast range of subject- matter tackled and the outspokenness of the reactions recorded - amusing, surprising, shocking, scurrilous, abusive or otherwise thoroughly distasteful. As witnesses to both attitudes and events, these verses are of enormous value to social and cultural as well as political historians of nineteenth-century India.
Poetasters under the Raj
In anthologies by and large
Hardly feature (too naff!)
Dismissed as mere chaff-
Forgetting their subaltern charge.
This is the first anthology to be devoted exclusively to light verse composed by British authors in undivided India, plus a few items illustrating parallel experiences in Sri Lanka and Myanmar. Written overwhelmingly by the junior ranks of the military and civil service, these works constitute a 'running commentary' on the Raj from below. The only previous attempt to republish some of this material was made by Raymond Veveysan Vernède, an ex-Indian Civil Service officer, in British life in India: an anthology of humorous and other writings perpetrated by the British in India 1750-1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). But that work included prose as well as poetry, and not a single piece of verse from either The Delhi Sketch Book or The Indian Charivari, two of the principal sources quarried for this anthology.
Nor are almost all the poems represented here to be found in the two most recently published collections of poetry produced by the British in India, both of which display an inbuilt, if unconscious, bias against light verse (they contain. for instance, just three pseudonymous and no anonymous pieces). Mary Ellis Gibson's Anglophone poetry in colonial India, 1780-1913: a critical anthology (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011) relegates comic verse to an appendix of just four well-known poets - 'Quiz, Sir Charles D'Oyly, 'Pips', and 'Aleph Cheem'. Márie ní Fhlathúin's more substantial two-volume British poetry in India, 1780- 1905 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011) does include a wider representation of light verse, but this still forms only a minor part of the anthology as a whole. Where the same few poets are included here, care has been taken as far as possible to avoid duplication with the pieces featured in those collections while still selecting some of their finest verse. Concentrating solely on light verse also enables a greater selection of their work to be republished than has hitherto appeared in anthologies. The complete absence here of any piece by Kipling is explained by Andrew Rutherford's excellent compilation, Early verse by Rudyard Kipling 1879-1889: unpublished, uncollected, and rarely collected poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). Other very well-known works such as Charles D'Oyly's and James Atkinson's Tom Raw the Griffin (London: R. Ackermann, 1828; reprinted Berlin & New Delhi: Studio Orientalia, 2013) have also been omitted.
The usual structure of most poetry anthologies is to present individual pieces either author by author or chronologically by date of publication. But here the poems have been arranged under broad subject headings that reflect the shared experience of the 'ordinary life' of the British subaltern in the Indian sub- continent. Where extracts only rather than the whole of a poem are included, the places where text has been omitted are indicated by the use of four full stops. Where annotations accompanied individual pieces in their orginal published form, these have been preserved as part of the text. Notes have been given for some poems, where necessary, to provide the historical context, but various allusions have no doubt escaped me which hopefully others will be able to elucidate. As well as an index of first-lines, short biographical notes have been included on the minority of poets who could be identified. Finally, a glossary of unfamiliar personal and place names, abbreviations, words and phrases (from English, French, Italian, Latin, etc. as well as Indian languages) has also been provided to assist those who may be familiar with either the Indian or the British background but not vice versa. More words may have been glossed than expected, but I have deliberately erred on the side of inclusion rather than exclusion, especially where archaic English words or usages are concerned. Some words, such as 'boxies', 'chupkins', 'hsine', 'kivvies', and 'zerolet' (not listed in the online Oxford English dictionary). and the names 'Champdicul', 'Dan Arathoon', 'Papoe', 'Ranji' (too early to be the famous cricketer), and 'Wittit, have defied my attempts at elucidation.
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