From Little London to Little Bengal : religion, print, and modernity in early British India, 1793-1835 / Daniel E. White.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Little London" : imperial publics, imperial spectacles -- Secret sharers and evangelical signs : the idol, the book, and the intense objectivism of Robert Southey -- "I would not have the day return" : Henry Derozio and Rammohun Roy in cosmopolitan Calcutta -- "Little Bengal" : returned exiles, Rammohun Roy, and imperial sociability.

This book traces the traffic in culture between Britain and India during the Romantic period. To some, Calcutta appeared to be a “Little London,” while in London itself an Indianized community of returned expatriates was emerging as “Little Bengal.” Circling between the two, this study reads British and Indian literary, religious, and historical sources alongside newspapers, panoramas, religious festivals, idols, and museum exhibitions. Together and apart, Britons and Bengalis waged a transcultural agon under the dynamic conditions of early nineteenth-century imperialism, struggling to claim cosmopolitan perspectives and, in the process, to define modernity. The author shows how an ambivalent Protestant contact with Hindu devotion shaped understandings of the imperial mission for Britons and Indians during the period.

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