Sir William Jones and Representations of Hinduism in British Poetry, 1784-1812
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Sir William Jones and Representations of Hinduism in British Poetry, 1784-1812 Kurt Andrew Johnson PhD University of York Department of English and Related Literature September 2010 Abstract This thesis examines the representations of Hinduism in Romantic poetry from 1784 to 1812, using as case studies the poetry of Sir William Jones, William Blake, Robert Southey and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The study argues that Jones’ sympathetic and syncretic representations of Hinduism in his nine ‘Hymns’ to Hindu deities (1784-1789) influenced the use of Hinduism within the works of these later Romantic poets. It is interested in the way in which Blake, Southey, and Shelley use Hinduism, by way of Jones, to represent, react to, and recontextualise geopolitical and religious issues relative to the French Revolution and the expansion of the British Empire, as well as the rise of an evangelical, missionary, and dissenting culture highly influential to the period. By examining these four poets, the study traces the representation of Hinduism in relation to the shifting geopolitical and religious debates occurring throughout the period – and the way in which such representations subsequently contribute to the emergence of what we now call Romantic literature. ii Table of Contents Abstract ...................................................................................................... ii List of Figures.............................................................................................iv Acknowledgements .................................................................................... v Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Chapter I: ‘Lisping Tongues’ and ‘Sanscrit Songs: Sir William Jones, the Hymn(s), and the Mediation of Vedanta Hinduism.................................... 16 I: Introduction: Hinduism, Religion, and the Issue of Translation... 16 II: Jones and (Vedantic) Hinduism………………………………….. 27 III: Jones and the Hindu Hymn(s)…………………………………… 40 Chapter II: Translation, Religion and the Reception of Jonesian Hinduism ................................................................................................................. 70 I: Introduction……………………………………………………………70 II: The 'Second Wilkes': Jones' Early Poetry and Radical Politics.. 70 III: Religion, Translation, and the Reception of Jones' 'Hymns' …..77 Chapter III: ‘The Authority of the Ancients’: William Blake and the ‘Philosophy of the east’............................................................................. 89 I: Introduction: William Blake, William Jones, and Hinduism………89 II: ‘Dark Delusions’ and ‘Forms of Worship’: Blake and Religion….96 III: 'The Philosophy of the East’ and Blake’s Apocalyptic Imagination…………………………………………………………….104 IV: William Blake and The Bramins…………………………………117 V: Blake, Jones, and 'The Mundane Egg'………………………….125 Chapter IV: ‘Monstrous fables’ and ‘Sublime Institutes’: Representations of Hinduism(s) in Robert Southey’s The Curse of Kehama......................... 144 I: Introduction: Hindu Machinery, Monstrosity and Morality………144 II: Jones, Kehama, and the Question of Translation……………...158 III: Kehama, Brahmanism, and Monstrosity………………………..164 IV: ‘Faith Invincible’: Religious Conversion and Political Dissent…179 V: The ‘materials of the narrative’: Machinery, Mythology, and Southey’s Hindu Pantheon…………………………………………..195 Chapter V: ‘In Jones’s Snow’: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Jonesian Syncretism.............................................................................................. 217 I: Introduction: Shelley and Jones…………………………………..217 II: ‘Zeinab and Kathema’ and the Arabian ‘Love’ Poem…………..221 III: The ‘Widow’d Soul’: Religious Conversion and Religious Syncretism……………………………………………………………..228 Conclusion: Jonesian Syncretism and De Quincey’s Oriental Nightmare………………………………………………………………………241 Bibliography............................................................................................ 249 iii List of Figures Figure 1 – James Gillray ‘Blood On Thunder Fording the Red Sea (1788) ................................................................................................................. 11 Figure 2 – John Flaxman's monument to Sir William Jones (1797) .......... 94 Figure 3 – William Blake’s The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth (1809)..................................................................................................... 122 Figure 4 – William Blake’s The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathen (1809)..................................................................................................... 122 Figure 5 – The ‘Orphic Egg’ (1774) from Jacob Bryant’s A New System, or An Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1774-1776)....................................... 126 Figure 6 – William Blake’s ‘Mundane Egg’ from Milton (1811)................ 130 Figure 7 – Siva Punchamuki from Edward Moor’s Hindu Pantheon (1810) ............................................................................................................... 163 iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank most sincerely Professor Jane Moody for her steady stewardship, critical council and patient advice during this long process; you’ve taught me more than I realise. I would also like to thank Dr. Jim Watt for his learned guidance and support, as well as Dr. Michael J. Franklin for generously serving as an external examiner for this thesis – while also inspiring so many ideas for it thanks to his own extensive knowledge and research. But for your incessant patience, support, encouragement and love during these long five years, my eternal gratitude and amazement will always go to you, Racheal…always…I couldn’t have done it without you… v Introduction …thus finite we compare With infinite… – Sir William Jones, ‘A Hymn to Náráyena’ (1785) This thesis explores the prose and poetical works of Oriental scholar Sir William Jones, examining his introduction of Hinduism to British literature and the way in which his representation of Hinduism influenced British poetry from 1784 to 1812. A famed polyglot, translator and poet, Jones worked and lived in India as a Supreme Court Judge for the East India Company from 1783 until his death in 1794. During that time, Jones published volumes of translations, prose researches and poetic compositions on Arabian, Persian and, most importantly, Hindu literature and language – much of which, this thesis argues, proved influential to the poetic works of later Romantic writers, including William Blake, Robert Southey and Percy Bysshe Shelley. By examining Jones’ translations of Hindu source materials as well as his original composition of nine ‘Hymns’ to Hindu deities (1784-1789), my thesis investigates how Blake, Southey and Shelley reacted to, incorporated and developed Jones’ often sympathetic representations of Hinduism in their own poetry. As such, the study seeks to accomplish two main objectives: 1) to trace Jones’ poetic legacy throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through the subject of Hinduism, establishing both his popular and poetic appeal during those periods in order to illustrate his significant contributions to Romantic period verse; and 2) to demonstrate Hinduism’s sustained and pervasive use as a poetic subject during the period and suggest its importance in crafting the poetic aesthetic and polemic for Jones, Blake, Southey and Shelley. There have been a number of worthy critical studies investigating India’s influence on the literature of the Romantic period from which this work draws and develops. For example, Raymond Schwab’s pioneering The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880 (1958) first broached the 1 subject by recognising and identifying the frequency with which India was a topic of literary concern. Schwab argues that ‘The Orient served as alter ego to the Occident’, suggesting the way in which the two complemented each other, rather than competed with – or controlled – the other.1 Although Schwab spans two hundred years of British literary history, his primary focus is the Romantic period and the way in which ‘Romanticism [was]…an oriental irruption of the intellect’.2 That is, Schwab views the Romantic period as an Oriental ‘Renaissance’ whose natural philosophy and pantheistic ideals of the divine reconsidered and reworked the scientific empiricism of the Enlightenment; ‘India’, Schwab argues, ‘had worked to reunite the human with a divine that is the Universe’, thereby locating Romanticism’s penchant for the mystic and pantheistic in writers’ fascination with the subcontinent.3 This thesis agrees with – indeed, takes as its initial premise – Schwab’s assertion that, When the day comes that a philosopher studies in technical detail the influence exerted by Hindu thought on…nineteenth-century philosophy, he will be surprised that such influence was not recognized earlier. Unfortunately, Schwab never explores the potential of this claim fully, particularly from a historical perspective. Moreover, he is more concerned with philosophy rather than literature. This may explain why he often fails to engage critically with Jones’ influence on poets such as Blake, Southey and Shelley; while he notes Jones influence, Schwab is more preoccupied with tracing Jones’ work in the German philosopher Frederich Schlegel, who referenced Jones much more conspicuously than the British poets.4 This work seeks to develop these areas which Schwab left critically