I've been happy to collaborate with Professor Manu Samriti Chander on a digital edition of the poems of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, the first Indian poet to write in English.
It is essentially finished, though some additional copy-editing and proofreading probably remains to be done (if you see any typos or other errors, please contact me!). I edited it and built the collection, so any glitches you find are my doing. It's completely appropriate that Manu wrote the Preface to the project, for reasons I'll explain.
Derozio published two books of poems in 1827 and 1828, and had an intense, impactful, but brief career as a professor at Hindu College in Calcutta. He died of cholera in 1831.
I learned about Derozio through reading Chander's Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century. Among other things, Chander's account of Derozio convinced me of his importance both as a Romantic poet -- and Derozio was intensely interested in and engaged with the writings of British and Irish poets of the 1810s and 20s -- and as a key figure in the emergence of modern Anglophone South Asian literature.
Derozio was criticized by English reviewers even during his life of "imitating" English Romantic poets. And while there is no doubt that he did borrow heavily from the form and style of writers like Byron, Thomas Moore, and others, he also applied his own, distinctly Indian sensibility in his writing. As Chander puts it in his preface to the Digital Edition:
Far from simply following in the footsteps of such popular figures as Lord Byron, Thomas Campbell, and Thomas Moore, Derozio uses their work often as a point of departure or as a signpost on his own poetic journey. Indeed, Derozio inaugurated his own tradition in India, inspiring his students to form the Young Bengal Movement. These liberal thinkers and activists were sometimes referred to as “Derozians,” and they carried their teacher’s ideas forward even after his death in 1831. (link)
For more on Derozio's relationship to Romanticism, I would recommend readers to Chander's book, or the books and essays of Professor Rosinka Chaudhuri, who has also edited the Oxford University Press scholarly edition of Derozio's works.
This digital edition is not meant to supplant Chaudhuri's volume, but rather to provide a convenient point of access to Derozio's works for a broad readership. Among other things, I hope people teaching literature courses -- including specialist courses on Romantic poetry, but also literature surveys, courses on South Asian literature, and others -- will consider assigning Derozio. To faciliate that, I've put together a "Teaching Resource" page on the Scalar site, along with a downloadable PDF with some suggested selections from Derozio's poetry (this might make for a lively one-day unit on Derozio).