The Zigzag Lines of Tentative Connection: Indian-British Contacts in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This essay explores some of the indirect, tentative and imagined dimensions of early encounters between Britons and Indians within the spaces for contact that southern England made available in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The indirection I refer to – which I will describe as both zigzag and fuzzy – manifests at the levels both of what happened between, in each case, an individual Indian and an individual Briton, and also how the connections were understood and represented by these partners to the encounter. The essay asks in what ways these somewhat roundabout and diffident attempts to reach out were expressed. The beginning of an answer may lie in a highly suggestible, layered channel outside the conventional public sphere, namely, the medium of poetry, in some cases experimental, modern and avant garde, in some cases the work of tentative beginners. It is no accident therefore that each of the three pairings featured below includes at least one poet. Poets, I suggest, explore in their work some of the oblique and hitherto uncharted dimensions of the Indian-British encounter in particularly rich, evocative ways.