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“Who is Kailyal, what is she?” Subcontinental and Metropolitan Reader Responses to The Curse of Kehama and its Heroine

This article attempts to consider the responses of readers both in the metropole and within the subcontinent to a poem of which Jane Welsh Carlyle wrote: “I should like well to have conceived ‘The curse of Kehama’ – But I would not have written it for a thousand guineas.” Opening with an Elephanta picnic, it examines a wide array of critical and scholarly reactions which testify to the imaginative power and accuracy of Southey's poetic representation of Hindostan. Its detailed attention to “costume” led many, including seasoned India hands, to measure or recall their subcontinental experiences by the light of Southey's epic, which convinced some of its most informed readers that he had actually made the passage to India. It focuses upon reactions to the physical and moral attractions of the poem's heroine Kailyal, a character whom the young Percy Shelley thought “divine”, rendering Kehama “my most favourite poem.” The inspiration for Kailyal is viewed not only in the obvious subcontinental shapes of Śrī Lakshmī and Śakuntalā, but also in terms of Biblical Orientalism and the influence of Klopstock's Messiah. The significance of “Cidli” in both Klopstock's epic and Klopstock's life, as the name he chose to give his beloved avant la lettre epipsyche Margaretha, is considered in respect to the influence upon Southey of their love conceived as predestined and indivisible through all time.