This Be the Pukka Variorum

Abstract

Introducing “This Be the Pukka Verse,” Daljit Nagra has called it “a poem celebrating the joys of a certain type of English gentleman who did rather well out of the British Empire during the Victorian period.” But what kind of English gentleman is the poem really depicting — and which poem is Nagra really talking about? After all, the version he recites with great gusto following his introduction is not the one included in the London Review of Books (2009), nor the one featured in an expanded online special issue of World Literature Today (2010), nor yet the one printed in his second Faber collection Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!! (2011). Counting audio and video recordings, at least five distinct versions of “This Be the Pukka Verse” were published over the course of four years.

This article argues that an analysis of the poem’s multiple versions allows us to trace both its formal development and Nagra’s changing attitudes toward the Victorian gentleman who is its speaker. Much like transitional fossils illustrate the workings of evolution, the intermediary forms offer an unusual glimpse into a contemporary poet’s writing and thinking process. While the different versions remain consistent in their liberal use Anglo-Indian argot, what begins as a light-hearted exercise in Nagra’s trademark linguistic acrobatics eventually turns into a far angrier indictment of the exploitative ideologies and practices that underpinned the Raj, and thus ultimately also of just the Hobson-Jobson English the poem paradoxically seeks to resurrect.