Name : Vora Kiran Shamaldas.Class: M.A SEM:1

Roll No. – 20Paper no. 4 Indian writing in English

Unit – 1Topic – Background of Fakeer of jungheera –

The emotional and social landscapeEmail id-

Kiranvora5196@gmail.comSubmitted to - Smt. S. B. Gardi department of

English M. K. Bhavnagar university

Presentation on ~Background of

Fakeer of JungheeraThe Emotional and Social landscape of

the poem.

FAKEER OF JUNGHEERA

BY HENRY DEROZIO

Henry Vivian Louis Derozio Born – 18th April, 1809 in Calcutta Died – 26th December, 1831 in Calcutta A poet and assistant headmaster at Hindu college in

Calcutta. He was influenced by English romantic poets, he

started publishing patriotic verses when he was 17 years old.

In 1826 he was appointed as instructor at Hindu college.

His brilliant teaching influenced the students and he won their loyalty.

Derozio criticized the social parties and religious beliefs of orthodox Hinduism.

He was forced to resins from college in 1831 by directors, because of the orthodox Hindu parents of his students.

But after his death, his influenced still lived on his former students, who came to known as young Bengal.

HENRY DEROZIO

Derozio has written on all kind of themes – from aesthetics, educational and social liberation to love, patriotism and rationalism.

Calcutta publishers has brought out some collections of this works that shed light on his literary and academic career.

But we remember him because of his long narrative and metrical poem “The Fakeer of Jungheera”.

This poem is in two cantos. The poem was published by Samuel Smith and

Company, in Harkuru Library in Calcutta. Now, How Derozio has made a character like the

Fakeer? It is difficult to say that by which influence he

made a personality of the Fakeer… Edwards suggests that Derozio’s early association

with Bhagalpur where his uncle lived, shaped his image of the Fakeer.

BACKGROUND OF FAKEER OF JUNGHEERA

In the character of Fakeer and his beloved, Derozio gives us a glimpse of life’s all different stages and its emotions.

The poem is plentiful in romantic fantasizing of away from religious categories, still there seems to be unlimited enthusiasm in creating a syncretistic tradition that includes the marginalization and outcast groups of Indian society.

By creating a hard and clear image of India imbuing with Christian and enlightenment ideas of love and freedom, Derozio gave an original identities to the Indian freedom movement and created an iconography that was successfully explode by Bollywood in the movie “Mother India” in 1957.

In Fakeer of Jungheera Derozio skillfully mixes the tantric, Hindu mythology, Islamic and Christian traditions to create a Composite whole that corresponds to the elegiac European tradition of the 19th century and syncretistic Sufi tradition of the 15th century.

The world of magic, resurrections and immortality that the tantric tradition provide was more suited to FAKEER – NULEENI’s tragic story, than the purist and idealized versions of Hindu, Christian or Islamic thoughts.

But because of the impurity and hybridity of the poem, many literary scholars of that time and literary historians have rejected it from inclusion in the Indian literary Canon.

Derozio works Around the poem, not Within. The entire story goes through imagined concern of

love relationship and the dreams of a happy future. There is no sensual fulfillment of love, no

expressions of a strong emotional bonding. The concern of the poem is appreciable from the

beginning to the end, shows the social era of mistrust and hostility of 19th century Bengal.

Early in 19th centaury Edwards wrote,

THE EMOTIONAL AND SOCIAL LANDSCAPE

“Derozio has felt and expressed, not only the close affinity of the varying moods and the life of man with the changeful phases of nature, but also the sympathy that links together all created things, that throws the beams of a warm human love around on all nature.”

The protagonist of the poem is a Fakeer or a mendicant, who belongs to some unidentified Muslim sect.

While the female lead, the widow Nuleeni comes from an upper caste Bengali Hindu family.

Derozio uses Christian imagery like heaven and angels, and juxtaposes it against the Hindu tradition of Sati, Muslim prayers, and tantric tale of Raja Vikram and Baital to create a different and romantic atmosphere.

Though this tantric seems to be a lengthy digression within a tragic tale of Hindu and Muslim love affair.

The pure and beautiful Nuleeni refuses to die on the funeral pyre of her husband and escapes with the Fakeer to his cave in Jungheera to a life of forbidden love.

But still frighten by violent social repercussions.

She believes that her lover’s courage and her unfailing love well finally make them victorious.

Her fair and beautiful face brightens the dark social setting of the poem and reduces the bold audacity of Fakeer who snatches her from the midst group of mourning upper caste Hindus at the Funeral.

But still they didn’t end up together, the story ends in the tragedy.

Derozio had a social purpose in mind when he wrote the poem in 1828. The poem got an important mark in the use of social themes and became quite popular in 19th century in Bengal.