“Furnace-smoke ... wrapt him round”: Industrial Hinduism and Global Empire in The Curse of Kehama and Sir Thomas More

My essay claims that Robert Southey uses Hinduism to fashion a poetics ofRomantic-era technology in The Curse of Kehama (1810). In his neglected SirThomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829), Southeycompares the manufacturing system to Indian theology and ritual, a metaphor that relativizesreligion and technology while implying that the Industrial Revolution amounts to a new breedof religious network. Southey next likens the emergent world order made possible by suchtechnologies to the cosmic ambitions of Kehama, his own Indian tyrant-cum-demigod. TheColloquies thus suggests an allegorical reading of The Curse of Kehama ,whereby this tale of a king bent on cosmic rule simultaneously explores how technologicaland imperial networks intertwine. Accordingly, I draw from metaphor theory to read theearlier Kehama as a repository of veiled comparisons and displacements throughwhich Southey glimpses the magnitude of the Industrial Revolution. Just as Indian wealthpropels the techno-imperial enterprise described in the Colloquies ,Kehama ’s paganism supplies the raw discursive material through which Southeyfashions a poetics of manufacturing. Read alongside the Colloquies , Kehamaaestheticizes the connection between imperial and technological systems, expresses theimaginative significance of twinned manufacturing novelties—the steam engine and cokesmelting—and concretizes the opaque moral and poetic properties attaching to industrialpower by depicting it in reference to the minutiae of Hindu religion so far as Southeyunderstood it.