'William Wordsworth was a Hindu poet'

[Guest guest]

'William Wordsworth was a Hindu poet'

 

UNI

 

NEW DELHI: When William Wordsworth penned one of his most famous

poems, 'Immortality Ode', it seems the English Romantic poet was

under the spell of Hindu religion and its philosophy of rebirth.

 

Afraid that the numerous passages of the poem would antagonise the

Orthodox Christians in England, Wordsworth deleted them from the

original text, according to a new book on Hindu philosophy and the

English Romantic movement.

 

Nevertheless, the poem has remained ''inveterately Hindu'',

subscribing to the Hindu doctrine of the soul's various births and

deaths, says Krishna Gopal Srivastava, the author of 'Bhagavad-Gita

and the English Romantic Movement'.

 

Wordsworth, says the professor of English Literature at the

University of Allahabad, is not the only English poet whose works had

been influenced by the Gita.

 

His contemporary William Blake shared the same belief of a long chain

of births and rebirths before the soul chieved salvation.

 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth's bosom friend, and the other

Romantic poets - Robert Southey, Percy Shelley and Joha Keats - too

were fascinated by Indian mysticism enshrined in the Gita, says

Srivastava, whose rendering of Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale' is

displayed in the reading room of the Oriental section of the

Cambridge University Library.

 

According to the author, the source of influence of the Hindu

philosophy on the Romantic poets was a revolutionary English prose

rendering of the Gita by Charles Wilkins, a clerk in the Bengal

establishment of the East India Company.

 

Wilkins translated the Gita into English in 1785 at the

recommendation of Warren Hastings, the first Governor General of

British India.

 

The translation received an enthusiastic response in England and two

prominent magazines - The British Critic and The Monthly Magazine -

published favourable reviews on the Englishman's work.

 

Srivastava bases proof of the influence on Wordsworth on lines 2-4 of

stanza V of the poem. ''The soul that rises with us, our life's

star/Hath had elsewhere its setting/And cometh from afar."

 

Wilkins's translation of the 22nd verse of the Gita goes: ''As a man

throweth away old garments and putteth on new, even so the soul,

having quitted its old mortal frames, entereth into others which are

new.''

 

''It is clear that the 'Immortality Ode' - Ode:Intimations of

Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood - is a Hindu poem,

through and through, saturated with Hindu philosophy and mythology,''

says Srivastava, who did extensive research in India and Britian for

the book, published by Macmillan India.

 

Blake, whose poem 'A Vision of the Last Judgement' was influenced by

the Gita, was so impressed by Wilkins's translation that he made a

drawing of the translator entitling it 'The Brahmin', says

Srivastava, whose articles on Artistotle's doctrine of tragic

catharsis has appeared in The British Journal of Aesthetics.

 

The 22nd verse of the Gita, he says, became very popular with the

Romantic poets. ''Southey cites it as in Wilkins's translation in a

footnote in his 'Curse of Kehama', Coleridge uses it in his

sonnet, 'On a Homeward Journey Upon Hearing of the Birth of a Son'.

 

Not everyone is impressed. ''It's is, of course, an interesting

research,'' says Shalini Sikka, a specialist in Romantic poets and a

lecturer at the Jesus and Mary College, New Delhi.

 

''But there is no clear reference on the influence. The probability

of influence is there, but there is no indication of actual evidence

that Wordsworth and others were indeed influenced by the Gita."says

Christian scholar Shalina Sikka.(No vested interested there?!!India's

media is probably the world's most anti-national of any country in

the world.)