Henry Derozio, the Eurasian, poet, teacher, and journalist/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I.
SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS.
IN the old European burying ground of Calcutta, on the south side of Park Street, amid obelisks, pyramids, pillars and tombs of various forms, all fast falling to pieces, and from many of which the inscriptions penned by loving and grateful hands, have been obliterated, while the very name and memory of those "who sleep below" have long passed into forgetfulness, there is a nameless grave at the western extremity "next to the monument of Major Maling on the south." Here was laid in the first flush of manhood, 54 years ago, all that was mortal of the highest gifted and most accomplished of Eurasians, HENRY LOUIS VIVIAN DEROZIO, poet, philosopher and free-thinker.
Since that day a new generation of men has arisen, to whom, though belonging to their own community, such men as Derozio, Ricketts, Kyd, Skinner, Kirkpatrick, Wale Byrne, Montague, Pote, Theobald, Dickens, and others, are names and little more. It seems to us, that if the memory of their worth and usefulness is to be rescued from that oblivion which the rapid course of time is fast accomplishing, some attempt, however imperfect, should be made to place on record something of their life and work, before the last of those who knew them as they walked the earth and played their part in life, have died out and made it impossible to recover facts and incidents that otherwise must perish.
Henry Louis Vivian Derozio was born on the 10th April 1809, in the house which stands to this day on the 24-Pergunnah side of Circular Road, at the head of Jaun Bazaar Street. The building is surrounded by a large compound in which there is a tank, and is a good specimen of the old-fashioned substantial houses of fifty years ago. Derozio's father who was descended from a respectable Portuguese family, named DeRozario, occupied a highly respectable position in the mercantile house of Messrs. J. Scott and Co., in Calcutta; and must have been a man of some means, for the house he dwelt in was his own property, and his children received the best education that could then be procured in Calcutta. He was twice married, and the subject of this biographical sketch was born to his first wife. Besides Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, there were other three children, an elder brother Frank, who seems to have led a worthless life, and ultimately went to the bad, a younger brother Claudius, of whom little or nothing seems to be known beyond the fact that he went to Scotland to be educated, and returned with a broad Scottish accent that stuck to him for many a day, a younger sister, Sophia, who died at the age of 17 on the 21st December 1827, and a sister, Amelia, between whom and Henry there was that warm enduring love which sometimes binds together, in a more than usual degree, a brother and sister. Amelia shared many of her brother's enjoyments, sympathised with him in his verse-making, encouraged him in all his undertakings, in short, believed in him and his power to influence thought and men, before any one else did. Of Amelia's future little is known. After death and ill-fortune had broken up the family, she seems to have gone to Serampore, where, it is believed, she married. One other relation it is needful to mention. Henry's aunt, his mother's sister, married a European gentleman, an Indigo Planter, at Bhaugulpore. Mr. Arthur Johnson, Derozio's uncle, was born at Ringwood in Hampshire in the year 1782. He served for some years in the Royal Navy; and at the age of 25, settled in India. For many years he was a highly prosperous man, but in the closing years of his life reverses of fortune overtook him, and he died, and was buried at Bhaugulpore in September 1847, after a residence in India of forty years. A monument to his memory records that "he won the respect and good-will of all around him, and secured the lasting friendship of many by his general worth and benevolence of heart." There is no one in Bhaugulpore to-day who knows anything about his great nephew. On frequent occasions visits were paid to the married aunt; and there, on a rock in the middle of the river, the boy Derozio saw the fakir, which was the first suggestion to his fertile imagination of the longest and most sustained flight of his muse, "The Fakir of Jungeerah," an eastern tale, which to this day stands unrivalled amongst indigenous Indian poems in excellence and truthfulness of delineation and in beauty and fertility of poetic imagery.
At an early age Derozio went to the school kept by David Drummond, in Dhurrumtollah, the site of which is now bounded by Goomghur on the north, Hospital Lane on the west, Dhurrumtollah on the south, and Hart's Livery Stables on the east, from each of which directions, gates entered the compound of the school. Here he received all the education that schools and schoolmasters ever gave him. Drummond was a Scotchman, a good example of the best type of the old Scotch Dominie, a scholar and a gentleman, equally versed and well read in the classics, mathematics and metaphysics of his day, and trained, as most Scotch students of the close of last century and beginning of this were, less in the grammatical niceties and distinctions of verbal criticism, though these were not neglected, than in the thought of the great writers of antiquity and in the power of independent thinking. This culture and power of independent thought, Drummond seems to have had the power of imparting in an unusual degree, and on none of his pupils did he more distinctly impress his own individuality than on the young Derozio.
Amongst many of the orthodox inhabitants of Calcutta the Scotch Schoolmaster was looked on as, if not an open disciple of David Hume, nevertheless, a very doubtful person in whose hands to place their children, lest some of the independence of thought which characterised the master should imbue the pupil, and lead him to reason on subjects which they had been taught to accept with implicit faith. We do not mean to imply that Drummond was charged with open atheism; but the feeling amongst many parents was that, on the whole, there was some danger of the faith, implict, unreasoned faith, of their fathers being unsettled by the fearless and independent thinking for themselves which characterised some of Drummond's pupils. In a house in the Chitpore Road, near what is now the Adi Brahmo Samaj, Mr. Sherbourne, a Eurasian, the son of a Brahmin mother, conducted one of the most successful schools in Calcutta. Sherbourne was proud of this parentage, and received from his pupils, the yearly offering, puja burik , made to Brahmins. At his school nearly every distinguished native of a former generation received the rudiments of an English education before passing to the Hindu College. Among the number of Sherbourne's pupils were Prosono Coomar Tagore and his brother Huro Coomar Tagore. There was another famous school in Boitakhanah, presided over by a most estimable and orthodox pedagogue, a distinguished member of the Old Mission Church, Mr. Hutteman. Round him the faithful gathered; but those who cared less for orthodoxy and more for a thorough education, sent their sons to Drummond of Dhurrumtollah. Hutteman was a good classic, and turned out some fine scholars, but if thought and the power of thinking, and not grammatical niceties and the power to be unintelligible and a bore in half-a-dozen languages, are the true aim of education, then the countryman of Hume was the better educator. The naturally imaginative, impulsive and powerful mind of Derozio was quickened and spurred into action under the clear, incisive, logical guidance of David Drummond, the crooked-backed, broad-minded Scotchman, who for eight years, from the day Derozio entered his school a child of six, till he left it a lad of fourteen, watched him with interest, and aided the rapid development of his splendid powers of intellect and imagination; and before the age of twenty, six years after he left school and entered on the work of his short life, his acquaintance with the literature and thought of England, and so far as these could be attained through the medium of an English translation, his knowledge of the best thinkers and writers of European celebrity, was of such a character as to mark him off, at that early age, as a man not in any degree inferior to, and in some respects far in advance of, any of his contemporaries of any nationality in India. Derozio was little of a classic scholar. It is even very doubtful if he ever got much beyond the Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres which marked the infant classic steps of the scholar of his day; but there was no poet, or dramatic writer, or thinker of English lineage with whose works Derozio was not familiar — familiar in a sense which the examination driven, high pressure students of to-day might well envy. In mathematics he did little more than cross the "asses' bridge." His chief delight, his sole pursuit outside of the cricketing, the amateur theatricals, and other sports natural to boys of his years, was the literature and the thought of England, as he found these embodied in the poets, novelists, dramatists, and philosophers of that country. Till the latest day of his short life, poetry and philosophy were the chief charm of his existence. There were two places in India where the most recent works issued from the press of Britain could be found. These were the shelves of the most enterprising booksellers, and the library of Derozio, frequently the latter alone. The boy-companions of Derozio were, almost without exception, in after-life note-worthy men. Lawrence Augustus DeSouza has shown by his large-hearted, open-handed, benefactions to the Eurasian community, in his care for the widow and the orphan, and the struggling scholar, a kingly example of philanthropy and the wise use of wealth, which will embalm his name, a precious memory, in the hearts of Eurasians. W. Kirkpatrick was one of a band of earnest men, among whom were J. W. Ricketts, Robert J. Rose, Wale Byrne, Henry Andrews, R. H. Hollingberry, and others, who labored incessantly in after-life for the social, moral, religious and intellectual advancement of men of their own blood. Kirkpatrick, M. Crowe, R. Fenwick and other East Indians were the chief leader writers of the old East Indian, a newspaper planned, edited and successfully carried on by Derozio till his death. Kirkpatrick also edited and wrote for the Orient Pearl, an annual something after the style of the Republic of Letters, and which contains many articles that are interesting reading to this day. J. W. Ricketts contributed to the Orient Pearl, as well as other leading members of the community. Charles Pote, the "Eurasian Artist," another boy-companion of Derozio, whose portrait of Lord Metcalfe adorns the Town Hall of Calcutta, along with Derozio and David Hare, gave that impetus to enquiry among higher class Hindoos which made the work of Duff and his successors a matter of easy accomplishment. As lads, DeSouza, DaCosta, Pote, W. Kirkpatrick, McLeod, Galloway and others, were members, with Derozio, of the same Cricket Club, that played on autumn evenings on the maidan that took part in school theatricals for which Derozio wrote prologues before the age of 14, and that swam and sported together in early summer mornings in the Bamon Bustee, the great tank now filled up, which once stood at the end of what is now Wood Street, with Camac Street on the west, Theatre Road on the north, and native villages stretching out to the south and east.
At the age of 14, Derozio, as we have said, ended his school life; but David Drummond, the grim, Scottish, hunch-backed schoolmaster, and Henry Derozio, the sprightly, clean-limbed, brilliant Eurasian boy, admired and loved each other as rarely master and pupil do. None watched with greater interest his short career, and there were few sadder hearts in Calcutta, that followed Derozio to his early grave that wintry afternoon, than David Drummond of Dhurrumtollah.