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Dawn of Shakespeare studies Shakespeare Studies In Colonial Bengal: The Early Phase
The study also gives an account of the historical role Rammohan Roy and David Hare played in creating this college that acted as the nerve centre for the spread of modern ideas on science, secularism, and democracy, showing how Western humanism was blended into the Young Bengal - the name given to the followers of the radical teacher of Shakespeare, Henry Derozio. The writer also takes up the early history of preparing critical editions of Shakespeare's texts and of performing and reciting them, offering some original and surprising conclusions about the educational and ideological work performed by the teaching of Shakespeare at Hindu College in Colonial Bengal. It goes to the credit of Hema Dahiya that she provocatively contests the postcolonial idea of Shakespeare as an instrument of imperialism. Her work proposes a newly recuperative understanding of the 'infamous' Macaulay's Minute on Indian Education, implemented in 1835. Her argument comes out rather heavily on the angular interpretations of Shakespeare by the fanatical scholars on both sides of the political and cultural divide. It also provocatively draws attention to the serious limitations of contemporary postcolonial theory, showing how all its reductive interpretations led to distorted readings of Shakespeare.
An absorbing study, Hema Dahiya's book is important in tracing the early teaching of Shakespeare in Calcutta and the new wave that it generated among the Bengali youth so many of whom later became eminent in literature, culture, and politics of Bengal, including Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra, Chattopadhyaya, Sarat Chander Chatterji, Michel Madhusudan Dutt and Vidya Sagar. A reading of Shakespeare Studies in Colonial Bengal is not only bracing, being objective in its presentation of facts, but also stimulating, being interrogative in addressing the conflicting ideas and ideologies involved in India's march towards freedom. The way it brings out the significance of Shakespeare teaching at Hindu College, as to how it became the nucleus for spreading new learning and democratic ideas of freedom and self-esteem, makes Hema Dahiya's book a valuable piece of research. Its value also lies in its inquiry into the grounds that formed the basis for a uniquely Indian style of Shakespearean scholarship which cannot be called an exclusive product of English imperial impositions. For these various qualities of Dahiya's wonderful piece of research, her book Shakespeare Studies in Colonial Bengal: The Early Phase will make a valuable addition to Shakespearian scholarship, promoting research in English studies wherein Shakespeare is an integral component. Originally pursued as her research project at Sheffield Hallam University (UK) for which she was awarded the doctoral degree, Hema Dahiya's book is a carefully constructed and forcefully argued work. Free from the jargon of ever-narrowing specialisations of literature, splitting the subject of literary criticism into numerous area-studies based on cultures and ethnicities, races and nations, ideologies and sexes, this book makes a satisfyingly insightful reading.
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A
comprehensive work of literary research, Dr Hema Dahiya's Shakespeare
Studies In Colonial Bengal offers a perceptive account of the dawn
of Shakespeare studies in early colonial Bengal. Primarily focused on
three extraordinary figures: the precocious young poet Henry Louis
Vivian Derozio (the Indian Keats); D.L. Richardson, mainly a poet but
also an essayist and a critic; and H.M. Percival, a scholar-critic who
prepared numerous critical editions of Shakespeare's plays, the study
touches upon a number of complex and conflicted ways in which
Shakespeare was interpreted in the specific context of the first
Indian college of English education started in 1817 as Hindu College,
later changed to Presidency College, and subsequently converted into
Presidency University.
Offering
a comprehensive account of how English education in India came to be
introduced in an atmosphere of conflicting interests emanating from
various forces at work in the early nineteenth-century Bengal, the
book places in a normative perspective the part played by each player
in this highly contested historical drama, including the Christian
missionaries, British Orientalists, Macaulay's Minute, the secular duo
of Rammohan Roy and David Hare, and above all, the Shakespeare
teachers at Hindu College.