GUIDING QUESTIONS

How are different racial, ethnic or cultural groups portrayed? Are characters from particular groups portrayed positively or negatively?
How does language, imagery, symbolism reveal social constructions of a racial group?
Who is the Other in the poem? How is the Other portrayed?
How does this work present power and/or domination? Are there clear lines drawn between conquerors and conquered people?
How is the author speaking from his or her racial, ethnic or cultural experience? Where do you see evidence of beliefs of the time period during which the poem was written?
Can you discern any agendas at work in the text? Is the author making an argument about racial relations, ethnic identity, or political oppression?

DOCUMENT- "Indian Superstition," by Ralph Waldo Emerson

EXCERPT FROM BIOGRAPHY (Poetry Foundation)

Like other Anglo-American readers of his period, Emerson relied heavily on British colonial agents for his knowledge of India. As a consequence, Emerson’s writing about South Asia (as well as China, Persia, and Arabia) often traffics in the menagerie of nineteenth-century Euro-American stereotypes and misconceptions. Examples can be found in Emerson’s “Indian Superstition,” a densely allusive poem that he composed for Harvard College’s graduation ceremonies in 1822. In the 156-line poem, Emerson describes how “Superstition,” the personification of religious tyranny in Asia, has enslaved “[D]ishonored India.” Not only does Superstition drive “maddened” mothers to hurl their children into the Ganges River; it also seduces people to throw themselves under the “car of fiends.” Emerson’s reference to the “car of fiends” is an allusion to the “juggernaut,” or the massive wagon bearing a likeness of the diety Jagannatha. Like most Westerners at this time, Emerson wrongly believed that religious adherents crushed themselves under its wheels in an act of suicidal devotion. Emerson also laments how the Brahmin class, who are at the top of the Hindu caste system, crush with a “daemon’s yelling storm” any “vain ambition” by lower-caste Indians to rise in social status. With its Romantic primitivism and bombastic imagery, “Indian Superstition” is perhaps closer to caricature than considered literary art. Yet, for all its excess, Emerson’s poem is notable for departing from a common formula of the period according to which a debased India could only be redeemed through Western colonialism. Instead, Emerson urges Indians to resist the shackles of the British Empire as forcefully as they should resist the mental chains of religious superstition. He exhorts ordinary Indians to look upon the example of post-revolution America, embodied by the laureled figure of Columbia, as an emblem of what a modern democratic nation could achieve.