This article examines the profound yet often overlooked relationship between English Romanticism and the Indian subcontinent during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Challenging the conventional understanding of Romanticism as a purely European phenomenon, this paper argues that India functioned as both a physical destination and an imaginative landscape that fundamentally shaped Romantic aesthetic sensibilities. Through analysis of artistic representations, literary works, and colonial encounters, the article demonstrates how Indian subjects—from the sublime architecture of Elephanta to the picturesque banyan tree—provided Romantic artists and writers with new visual vocabularies for expressing wonder, terror, and beauty. Furthermore, it explores how this cultural exchange was not unidirectional, examining the emergence of an Indian Romantic consciousness that engaged with and adapted European Romantic tropes within the context of colonial modernity and nascent nationalism. The article ultimately contends that any comprehensive understanding of Romanticism must account for its Indian dimensions, where the movement found both its most exotic subject matter and its most troubling contradictions.
MD BARIUL ISLAM (Thu,) studied this question.