Cornelius Beckers

My thesis examines poetry written by East India Company officials during their deployment in India between the 1780s and the so-called Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 that reflected about their experiences on the subcontinent. It explores to which extent this type of literary production was related to or integrated into processes of colonial knowledge production. More specifically, my thesis examines how poetry as a literary form, by way of its inherent affordances, provided a more direct and immediate access to bodies of colonial knowledge about the Indian subcontinent when compared to other forms of writing such as prose or historiography. The analysis of the text corpus in the main part of my thesis will be carried out using a case study-based approach. The three case studies are tailored to specific topics addressed in the poems examined throughout my dissertation, as well as to specific forms of knowledge production. The first case study deals with poems that address the military conquest of the subcontinent. The underlying form of knowledge production in this case study is the memorialization of those conflicts which formed an essential part of a specifically British culture of remembering the conquest of India. The second case study examines poems that are either translations of Indian texts by Company poets or ones that impersonate Indian speaking positions. In this case, knowledge was produced through colonial mimicry which enabled Company poets to make India more tangible, and by extension more controllable, for themselves and their readers. The third and final case study examines poems that explore India as a geographical space which is imagined on the one hand as a place of discovery and monetary gain but which is simultaneously clearly marked as an undesirable place of exile on the other hand. In total, approximately forty poems will be analysed in my dissertation. This is done either through close readings of exemplary texts or through contextual analyses of selected poems.