A Reading of Emma Roberts’ ‘The Rajah’s Obsequies’
‘The Rajah’s Obsequies’ by Emma Roberts belongs to her only volume of verse, Oriental Scenes, Sketches and Tales (1832). Not a lot is known about Roberts, a 19th-century British woman who shares her name with the contemporary American actress.
In Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913: A Critical Anthology, Mary Ellis Gibson records that Roberts came to India in 1828 and entered the Calcutta literary scene at a time when both Indian and British-born poets had created a lively, if small, literary culture. Roberts established and supported herself as a professional writer; she saw the importance of marketing her work and managed to make poetry pay.
‘The Rajah’s Obsequies’ gives an account of the ritual of sati being performed in the city of Benares (present-day Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India).
The poem is a product of 18th and 19th century ‘Orientalist discourse’ as defined by Edward Said in Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978). Said describes the late 18th century as a period of unparalleled European expansion that coincided with an advancement in the discursive creation of the ‘Orient’ — the East — as the ‘other’ of the ‘Occident’ — the West.
This led to a vast body of works that described the ‘Orient’ as “a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences” (Said, Introduction, Orientalism). Roberts’ poem falls into this very framework.
The Romanticising Impulse
The first few stanzas of Roberts’ poem give a panoramic view of the beautiful and holy city of Benares with its ‘green luxuriance’ and ‘lofty minarets’. The romanticising impulse of the Western poet cannot be overlooked — the romanticisation of the ‘Orient’ was common in such narratives. The poet writes,
“The holy city’s temples glow
Reflected in the stream below, —
A mass of cupolas and towers,
Arches, and pillared colonnades,
And flat-roofed palaces, where flowers
Are clust’ring round the balustrades.”
The lines remind one of P. B. Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1819). Shelley writes,
“And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them…”
The Gaze, Knowledge, and Truth
At two points in Roberts’ poem, there is a shift in the scene from the external to the internal environment. One, when the poet describes the zenanas or the women’s quarters. Two, when she describes the ‘frugal meal’ of the ‘Hindoo’. This is a shift in the gaze from the public/outer world to the private/inner world of the ‘native’. The gaze is necessarily that of an outsider as the native would hardly look at his own everyday surroundings with ‘spell-bound eyes’.
The extent of the gaze defines the exhaustive nature of it; it can not only ‘observe’ the outer but also ‘survey’ the inner world of the native. In other words, the West does not only claim to know the public environment but also the private sphere and both exist as the West knows them to exist.
Knowledge and the discursive creation of the ‘Orient’ are two of Said’s most important concerns. Knowledge for the empire, writes Said, is the ability to survey a civilization from its origin to its prime, to its decline. The object of this knowledge, the ‘Orient’, is vulnerable to scrutiny and represented by narratives such as this poem. In this representation, the West also creates the ‘Orient’ through discourse — a concept given by Michel Foucault and used by Said.
By using a specific vocabulary and rhetoric to describe the ‘Orient’, the West also produces it. Discourse is proliferated through language and dominant discourse often assumes the power of validating a Truth that appears absolute, scientific, and unquestionable.
Darkness, Degeneration, and Empire
The grand descriptions of Benares in Roberts’ poem are soon undercut by the following lines,
“Yet here the river’s crystal flood
With living victims is profaned,
And here with streams of human blood
The temple’s reeking courts are stained.”
From this point onwards, the poem acquires dark overtones. What follows these lines is a description of the ritual of sati or the immolation of the Rajah’s wives on his funeral pyre. Sati was considered a ‘backward’ and ‘barbaric’ practice by the British administration in India, though one cannot deny the fascination it held for ‘Orientalist’ writers, proof of which can be found in the numerous narrative accounts of it.
Roberts’ poem suggests that the ‘bright’ city of Benares is ‘eclipsed’ by this ‘backward’ tradition. Connected to this is the idea that the greatness of the ‘Orient’ lies in the past; in the modern day, it has degenerated. The mission of the West was to rescue the East from this degenerated state and ‘civilise’ it.
The poem ends with the speech of the Rajah’s elder wife, Mitala. The limited number of critical analyses that exist around the poem, see the speech as prophetic; Mitala foresees the conquest of India by the ‘Persian Satrap’, the ‘Tartar King’, and eventually by the ‘west’s pale warriors’. The references are to the Mughal Empire and to colonisation by the British.
It is known that the West considered the Mughal period in India to be synonymous with the Middle Ages in Europe. The Middle Ages were described as dark periods marked by political, economic, and social decline.
However, the reference to the Mughal Empire in the poem is juxtaposed with the British conquest giving rise to an ambiguity. Is the poet, through Mitala, saying that the two conquests would enslave the country and bring further decline? Or alternatively, that they would ‘rescue’ the country from darkness?
Gender in the Poem
The speeches by the Rajah’s elder and younger wife form the larger parts of the poem. The two speeches, along with their speakers, can be seen in contrast to one another. The younger and more passive wife speaks of her love for her ‘native vales’ and presents a romanticised vision of a ‘heavenly home’.
The elder wife, on the other hand, is like an ‘offended goddess’ who is ‘revolting’ at the sacrifice. She calls the ritual ‘unholy’ and refers to the King as a ‘tyrant’. In both speeches, there is the sustained voice of the Western poet romanticising the future of India under British rule and critiquing ‘backward’ practices.
However, one must not forget that the two speakers in the poem are women and the poem itself is written by a woman. In order to discuss gender within ‘Orientalist’ discourse, one would need to go beyond the Saidian framework.
One would need to question the position of a British woman poet in Western society in India at this point in history: what were the opportunities and avenues available to her? How were her works received and how widely were they read? For the sake of this analysis, one has limited the argument within the framework given by Said.
