‘I too in couplets would attempt to paint / Our varied woes, and versify complaint’: Poetic Form and Knowledge in Early Nineteenth-Century Satirical Poetry by East India Company Employees

Abstract

This essay explores the ways in which employees of the East India Company (EIC) used the subversive form of satirical poetry during the early decades of the nineteenth century as one way of undermining orientalist bodies of knowledge that had guided previous policies of governing British India. Moreover, it will also be examined how these satires made use of widely known formal arrangements and poetic conventions of neoclassical poetry in order to undermine or break with previously accepted orientalist values of governance and related bodies of knowledge that were central to the education and training of new company officials during the latter decades of the eighteenth century. The specific case of the EIC will be used as a springboard for further discussions about whether similar instances of adapting metropolitan poetic conventions in colonial settings were common in other European imperial spaces on the subcontinent, such as Portuguese India.