Subaltern Squibs and Sentimental Rhymes: the Raj Reflected in Light Verse

Graham Shaw

ມ.ສ. 2021 · Jadavpur University Press

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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.

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Graham Shaw is a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, specializing in the history of the book. After a career of thirty-six years in the British Library, he retired in 2010 as Head of Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections (including the India Office Library & Records). For the past forty years he has published widely on the history of printing and publishing in South Asia from the 16th to the 20th centuries.