Henry Louis Vivian Derozio

Henry Derozio taught in Calcutta for four years, was forced out for corrupting his students, and died of cholera at twenty-two. He was Anglo-Indian - Portuguese and Indian descent on his father's side, English on his mother's - which in the Calcutta of the 1820s placed him outside both the European and the Hindu establishments. He worked as an indigo assistant, published poetry in his teens, and at seventeen was appointed a teacher at the new Hindu College. What he did there was less to teach a syllabus than to make his students argue: he set them Hume, Locke, Paine and the French revolution, founded the Academic Association where they debated free will, idolatry and the authority of the Vedas, and told them to accept nothing on authority including his own. The young men who came out of it, called Young Bengal, publicly ate beef, refused ritual and attacked caste, and the college's Hindu managers forced his resignation in 1831. He died five months later. His poems, including the sonnet to India as a fallen eagle, are among the first English verse written by an Indian. He edited and wrote for several Calcutta papers, including the India Gazette, and defended himself in print against the charge of atheism without conceding anything. The Fakeer of Jungheera, a long narrative poem published in 1828, is his most ambitious work. Among the Young Bengal students were Ramtanu Lahiri, Rasik Krishna Mallik and Dakshinaranjan Mukherjee, who went on into journalism, law and reform movements. He was buried in the South Park Street cemetery in Calcutta without a Christian service, since no church would take him. His reputation as the first nationalist poet in English was built by Bengali writers a century later.

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