The poetics of nation and empire: Imagining 'India' in English

This dissertation analyzes poetry written in English by Indians in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, in order to demonstrate the relationship between poetic form and the formation of a nascent Indian nation and the Indian subject-citizen. The circulation of various poetic genres in various print media---newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, books, illustrations---contributed to a national discourse that used the English language to create a public sphere for the complex articulation of regional, national and international identifications in India, thus calling into question the boundaries of empire.;Chapter 1 explores the conflation of political and aesthetic representation through poetry published in two Indian-English newspapers, the Bombay-based Indian Spectator and the Calcutta-based Reis & Rayyet . Chapter 2 examines how female Indian poets who published in the Madras-based Indian Ladies' Magazine transformed the figure of the Poetess to represent a feminized Indian "nation." Chapter 3 turns to publications about the Indian National Congress, including poetry included in pamphlets by Bipin Bose and in speeches by Sarojini Naidu, and claims that this poetry connected political debates to the cultural sphere. Chapter 4 considers alternate claims for a history of the nation made through the epic genre, as represented in two Indian-English retellings of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, published in books by Ramakrishna Pillai and Toru Dutt. The conclusion links Indian-English poetry to the popular prints of nineteenth-century paintings by Raja Rava Varma and argues that these prints reproduce the contradictory poetic effects of a national Indian identity.;The dissertation considers works affiliated with regions throughout the subcontinent, placing these regions in dialogue with one another to map out the concerns and aspirations of a "nation" through its poetry. By reading English verse culture beyond British boundaries and thinking beyond the linking of nation to narration, the dissertation also extends the historical and geographical range of Victorian studies and postcolonial studies.