‘It was as if a Briton, of the time of Severus, had suddenly written a poem in good Latin’, read the 1829 Oriental Herald Review appraisal of the 1827 and 1829 volumes of Henry Derozio’s poetry. This was high praise indeed by a reviewer (quite possibly the editor of the Oriental Herald, J.S. Buckingham) who had earlier puzzled over the viability of Indian writing in English: ‘the very language … can hardly be called English’. The poet in question was Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, a Calcutta ‘Eurasian’ of Portuguese and Indian ancestry, and a pioneer Indian English writer. Derozio’s poems imagined and apostrophized a unified India from the limited scope of the plains of ‘Bhaugulpore’ or the rock of ‘Jungheera’ and gave tremulous form to its nascent nationalist imagination. Derozio’s elegiac poems of India situate him as a belated arrival to the once glorious but now subjugated country. In ‘The Harp of India’ (March 1827), for instance, he writes:

Derozio’s ‘postcoloniality’ inheres not in dates but in the postimperial tone of the nationalist poetry. And his enthusiastic appropriation of the English literary canon to write of the emancipation of India testifies to the predicament of the postcolonial writer, whose conscious or unconscious affiliation and allusiveness to the Western literary tradition is an inheritance that is often as unwanted as it is laboured for.