Hearing Celtic Minstrelsy in Persian: Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, Kasiprasad Ghosh, and Audiation in Anglo-Indian Persianate Poetry

Abstract In the early nineteenth century, an incipient national identity for India first found expression in the English literature of the Bengal Renaissance, an aesthetic movement influenced by skeptical Enlightenment philosophies, Orientalist philology, and bardic nationalism from Britain’s Celtic periphery. The movement’s most prolific spokespersons were Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809–1831), the Indo-Portuguese poet, teacher, and journalist; and his student Kasiprasad Ghosh (1809–1873), the first Hindu to write poetry in English. While literary critics have emphasized their contributions to global Anglophone literature, they have obscured the Persianate past’s ongoing audial resonances. This article’s two case studies are Derozio’s parodic imitations of Hafiz’s ghazals in the late 1820s and Ghosh’s Sanskritizing of the popular Arabic-Persian romance Layla and Majnun in his debut collection, titled The Sháïr, and Other Poems (1830). Their imitation, adaptation, and translation of what are now considered signature traits of British Romanticism—bardic music, lyric originality, and sentimental love—transmit audiovisual sensations from classical Persian and Arabic literatures. The result is an Indian nationhood that became hearable in a minor key before its visualization in a territorial state with a religious and ethnic core.