Conclusion

Abstract

John Malcolm’s toast to the Romantic metropolitan poet Thomas Moore is revealing on multiple levels. Malcolm in the early nineteenth century was a senior member of the colonial administration and a strong advocate within the company of further colonial expansion into the subcontinent in order to protect British India’s north west frontier lands from foreign encroachment. During the course of his career he acquired the status of being an “expert” on India and Persia, having written numerous histories and commentaries of the region that were well received. It is significant that a literary text such as Lalla Rookh authored by a metropolitan author, with no experience of having lived in the subcontinent, could reach a company administrator such as Malcolm and meet with his approval. Malcolm lauds the Romantic author’s text because he considers that Moore’s exteriority and talent as a British poet has enabled him to control and improve wild Eastern fantasies and make them accord to European classical conventions and historical truth. He has in effect colonized “the fervid imagination of the East” and imposed order upon it by applying “vigorous classical taste” and the “truth of the historian.”