This chapter examines the goals and activities of the Calcutta-based Greater India Society (GIS). Building on Kalidas Nag and P.C. Bagchi’s study-sojourn in Paris and research trips to Leiden, the GIS became, in the mid-1920s, the South Asian node in the transimperial knowledge network of ‘Greater India’. The GIS set new terms for the writing of Indian history and popularized the notion of India as Asia’s civilizational fount and cultural linchpin, not only in Bengal but across the subcontinent. The Greater India movement endorsed a pedagogical mission to rectify the ‘splendid isolation’ myth, an important trope in British colonial histories of the subcontinent, and postulated India as a shaper of world history no less than the West and a prominent trading power, colonizer and civilizer in the Asian sphere. When the European powers gradually started losing grip on their colonies, the notion of ‘Greater India’ allowed Indian intellectuals to imagine an empire of their own. Although it was located in the distant past, it served the purposes of the present and the research paradigm of Greater India energized, in the Indian context, anti-colonial and nationalist agendas.

My proposals for decolonizing romanticism are threefold. First, and most obviously, transforming the romantic canon by including BAME writers such as Phyllis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, James Wedderburn, Mary Prince, Mirza Abu Talib Khan, Ramohun Roy, Henry Derozio. But decolonizing the curriculum must do more than just “add BAME writers and stir.” My second proposal would accordingly remap the established narrative of British romanticism in relation to the wider world of empire; both in relation to canonical figures like Blake and Austen, and to lesser-known writers like Southey and Hemans. My third proposal locates colonial travel accounts alongside poetry, drama, and the novel, given its role in establishing European “planetary consciousness.” Selecting writing by Mungo Park, James Bruce, Humboldt, Maria Graham, Belzoni, Reginald Heber, students can explore the contingency (and sometimes confusion) determining the “cultural entanglements” of European travelers on the colonial frontier. Travel texts restore a sense of the global interconnectivity of Britain’s and Scotland’s colonial and imperial history, allowing citizens of our multicultural society to recognize themselves in it.