A QUERY AND A BRIEF NOTE ON THE FIRST IDIAN PUBLICATIONS IN ENGLISH
Shri N. Venkata Rao, in an article in Annuals of Oriental Research (University of Madraas, vol. xxviii, no. 2, 1963), called Cavally Venkata Ramaswamy ‘the first among the Indian writers of English verse’. In the 1973 edition of his magisterial survey, Indian Writing in English (Asia, 1962), Professor K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar included this information in a footnote (p.33).
So far as I can discover, however, the only volume of Ramaswamy’s work ever to be published, Biographical Sketches of Dekkan Poets, was issued in Calcutta in 1829 – two years after Derozio’s Poems. Did Ramaswamy perhaps publish poems in English in Madras journals before Derozio started publishing in Calcutta journals?
While Indian English prose writers were contributing to periodicals before the end of the eighteenth century, Raja Rammohan Roy’s three translations from the Sanskrit published in 1816, have generally been considered the first Indian publications in English. With the discovery of P. Ragaviah Charry’s A Short Account of the Dancing Girls* the date of the first Indo-English publication has to be pushed back to 1806. Charry’s is a ten-page leaflet, printed at ‘The Gazette Press – 1806’. Taking into account the difficulties of travel in India, and the fact that the author signs the matter at ‘Triplicane, 3rd December 1806’, it may be assumed that the press was located at Triplicane in Tamilnadu. It has not proved possible, so far, to discover any further information on the author or the press.
The language of the pamphlet is, as might be expected, slightly orotund. One explanation for the author’s somewhat patchy knowledge of English, at this early date, is that he may have been employed by the East India Company for at least a brief period. The pamphlet was, however, published ‘as a sort of hand bill (sic) for the respectable persons whose affability and natural goodness has given a ready acceptance to my request of witnessing a tamasha (i.e., event, occasion, noisy and colourful spectacle)’. Such a public relations exercise would be indulged in probably by a businessman selling goods to the British. Charry’s nervous abruptness of manner also suggests that he was one of the nouveau riche. The pamphlet was thus probably privately printed to eliminate the repetition of substantially similar explanations to one Briton after another. It is, in any case, the first extant Indian attempt in English to explain an Indian practice and an Indian art form to Westerners.
* A short Account of the Dancing Girls, treating concisely on the general principles o Dancing and Singing, with the translation of two Hindoo Songs’ by P. Ragaviah Charry. The only extant copy o this pamphlet appears to be in the British Library, (all no C. 131. ff.11) and was acquired by them in 1979.
Journal of Indian Writing in English (Gulbarga, India) vol. 10, nos. 1 & 2, Jan-July 1982
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A Query an a Brief Note on the First Indian Publications in English