Shelley, one of the major English Romantic poets, was greatly
influenced by the Indian thought that reached him through the works
of the early English Orientalists of his time. Although his dream of
personally visiting India had never materialized, his favorite readings
included Sir William Jones’s poems and essays on Indian subjects in
1770s, Captain Francis Wilford’s essay, “Mount Caucasus” (1801),
Sidney Owenson’s The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811), and James
Henry Lawrence’s The Empire of the Nairs, or, The Rights of Women:
An Utopian Romance (1811). This paper provides an account of the
influence of these works on some of Shelley’s major poems (such as
Queen Mab, Alastor, The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound,
“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Adonais”) in their setting, style,
and themes. As a revolutionary, Shelley was influenced by the forces
of liberation and freedom suggested by oriental models as opposed
to the hackneyed and overused neoclassicism of European literature.
This paper argues how his was an attempt at a sympathetic
understanding of India as a cradle of ancient civilization that knew
no divide in terms of the so-called Western moral and racial
superiority. His creative vision of India embraced an approach to
integration as opposed to the Victorian reaction of mixed feelings.
In fact, the Indian influence was not just a matter of stylistic
embellishment away from the traditional but an indirect yet powerful
means of attacking Western political system he so passionately
rebelled against.
Romantic
ideals of love and romance, permanence and transcendence,
and freedom and liberation found expression through
a variety of modes and motifs such as Hellenism, Medievalism,
Pastoralism, and Orientalism. Initially conceived as
a fanciful exercise about passing curiosities of the
East, Romantic orientalism came to be connected with
the rise and glory of empire and the accompanying challenges
and tensions, subsequently becoming more imaginative,
academic, and objective. Compared with the similar writings
in the past, romantic orientalism claimed to be more
realistic on account of the local details it made use
of, as it became more poetically interesting and suggestive
at the same time. In the wake of European colonial expansion,
many European writers, including the major English Romantic
poets, participated in the fashionable discourse of
orientalism approaching their subject matter with scholarly
disinterestedness and leading to the concept of orientalism
as a body of serious scholarly works on the Middle East
and South Asia. |
