Summary Of Coleridge, Vishnu And The Infinite '

The quoted excerpt exhibits an access to Brahmanical knowledge and the endeavour of the late eighteenth century Orientalists to represent and translate for the West the Hindu myths and legends which would have an impact on Coleridge. Coleridge had begun making references to India and its mythologies comparatively late in his career as a poet. His approach to India had been that of a traditional Platonist, an attitude which experienced a renaissance through the work of these Orientalists in the 1790s. Although initially his reception of India had been one of “awe” and he had indeed tried to “disparage or dismantle the idealised view of India, invariably in the context of an apologia for Christianity and increasingly to the accompaniment of a …show more content…
Additional to these, Mazumdar in her essay, “Coleridge, Vishnu and the Infinite”, analyses, with fastidious detail, the three major sources, among a miscellany of other sources, for Coleridge’s fascination with India in general and the Hindu figure of Vishnu in particular, the discrepancies in these sources available to Coleridge, the utilisation of Vishnu’s trance-like journey through the cosmic ocean to become a metaphor and even a guiding principle of Coleridge’s poetic approach and aspirations, and a gradual decline in an awe of the India constructed from the translations of Indian texts by the Orientalists which led to the complaint filed in The Friend. Mazumdar specifies, besides Coleridge’s own reading of the Bhagavata Purana, the influence of Volume One of Thomas Maurice’s History of Hindostan: Its Arts, and its Sciences first published in 1795, John Zephaniah Holwell’s Interesting Historical Events relative to the Provinces of Bengal and the Empire of Indostan, published in 1767, and Edward Moor’s Hindu Pantheon, published in …show more content…
These images, as they reappear in Mazumdar’s essay, help assert the distorting tendencies that usually accompany any expedition of Oriental transliteration, and cultural and religious importation. In Maurice’s History of Hindostan, a plate depicts Vishnu reposing on a bed of the Anant-Sesha. This plate appears facing page 401 of History of Hindostan as an accompaniment to Maurice’s adaptation, for want of a more appropriate term, of passages from the Bhagavat Purana. Drew writes that the in the plate “Vishnu is used by way of illustration to verses (reproduced by Maurice) from the Bhagavata Purana describing the birth of Brahma out of the flower of the lotus.” However, the first volume of Maurice’s book did not show Brahma on the lotus flower but Vishnu on the hooded serpent. In the plate, the caption reads: “VEESHNU reposing during a CALPA, an astronomical period of a thousand Ages … copied from a sculptured rock in the Ganges”.