Colonial Realism Rewritten as Neo-Victorian Poetry: The Case of Daljit Nagra’s ‘The Legend of Lispeth’

Daljit Nagra’s poetry, which often confronts the difficult legacies of British colonialism in the twenty-first century, appropriates Victorian literature and culture in various ways. Thus far, however, when commenting upon this aspect of the intertextual poetics of Daljit Nagra’s writing, reviewers and critics have predominantly concentrated on the titular poem of the collection ‘Look We Have Coming to Dover!’ (2007), which reworks Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ (1867). In this paper, I aim to bring Nagra’s persistent engagement with Victorian literary culture into sharper focus by foregrounding his relationship with Rudyard Kipling, who, in Bonamy Dobrée’s words, was the ‘master’ of an ‘extraordinary amalgam of realism and fable’ (Dobrée 1967, 53; see also D’Indinosante 2024). In my proposed contribution, I intend to focus on ‘The Legend of Lispeth’ (2011) and read Nagra’s poetic rewrite of Kipling’s short story ‘Lispeth’ (1886) as an instance of ‘neo-Victorian poetry’ (Morton 2024). Understanding ‘neo-Victorianism’ broadly as a set of appropriative strategies whereby Nagra’s poems ‘both mimic and challenge the discourses of the nineteenth century’ to ‘(co-)articulate today’s concerns’ (Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss 2014, 2 and 5), I set out to discuss ‘The Legend of Lispeth’ both as a reflection on and a response to Kipling’s ‘colonial realism’ (Spillman 2012). As Deborah Shapple Spillman suggests, nineteenth-century colonial realist literature seeks to render colonial subjects intelligible within a Eurocentric framework while reinforcing imperial hierarchies. Showing how Nagra’s poem both embraces and distances itself from the aesthetic mode of representation of its source text to ‘write back’ to nineteenth-century colonialist discourse, I will suggest that his is an attempt to assert new imaginative possibilities for representing historical voices in the present while simultaneously interrogating the colonial past