Author: GHOSH, Kasiprasad
Biography:
GHOSH, Kasiprasad (1809-73: Gibson)
A contemporary of Derozio (q.v.), Ghosh was born in Kidderpore, near Calcutta (Kolkota), to a high caste Bengali family. In 1821 he entered the Hindu College which was supervised by Horace Hayman Wilson to whom Ghosh dedicated the first canto of his poem “The Sháïr.” At the college he was first introduced to English poetry and began writing and publishing verse in newspapers. His first collection, the work listed in this bibliography, was issued when he was just twenty-one. Ghosh was a skilled linguist and proud of being the first Hindu to write a book of English poems. In an 1834 autobiographical essay he stated that he was married at 25 and became a father and widower at 28. He married again but his second wife died in childbirth. In 1834 he was living with his third wife. He published essays and reviews before becoming the publisher and editor of a weekly newspaper, the Hindu Intelligencer. Letitia Landon (q.v.) included a note on Ghosh with his portrait and one of his poems, “The Boatman’s Song to Ganga,” in Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book in 1835. Ghosh died in 1873. (Mary Ellen Gibson, Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780-1913 [2011]; L.E.L., Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book [1835]) SR