“Furnace-smoke ... wrapt him round”: Industrial Hinduism and Global Empire in The Curse of Kehama and Sir Thomas More

Abstract

My essay claims that Robert Southey uses Hinduism to fashion a poetics of Romantic-era technology inThe Curse of Kehama(1810). In his neglectedSir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society(1829), Southey compares the manufacturing system to Indian theology and ritual, a metaphor that relativizes religion and technology while implying that the Industrial Revolution amounts to a new breed of religious network. Southey next likens the emergent world order made possible by such technologies to the cosmic ambitions of Kehama, his own Indian tyrant-cum-demigod. TheColloquiesthus suggests an allegorical reading ofThe Curse of Kehama, whereby this tale of a king bent on cosmic rule simultaneously explores how technological and imperial networks intertwine. Accordingly, I draw from metaphor theory to read the earlierKehamaas a repository of veiled comparisons and displacements through which Southey glimpses the magnitude of the Industrial Revolution. Just as Indian wealth propels the techno-imperial enterprise described in theColloquies,Kehama’s paganism supplies the raw discursive material through which Southey fashions a poetics of manufacturing. Read alongside theColloquies,Kehamaaestheticizes the connection between imperial and technological systems, expresses the imaginative significance of twinned manufacturing novelties—the steam engine and coke smelting—and concretizes the opaque moral and poetic properties attaching to industrial power by depicting it in reference to the minutiae of Hindu religion so far as Southey understood it.