A collection of the poems of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, whose 200th birth anniversary will be celebrated next year, was aptly titled: The Song of the Stormy Petrel. For the national poet of the early British period, who died before his genius could blossom at 22, had a large following among his students at Hindoo College and was himself the standard bearer of radical thinking.

As the youngest teacher in the college, Derozio, one of the few Anglo-Indians who left his mark on the city’s turbulent intellectual life, enjoyed the patronage of such stalwarts as David Hare, a pioneer of education in India, the celebrated Calcutta poet, Henry Meredith Parker, and Edward Ryan, chief justice of India. Youthful as he was himself, his students came to be known as Young Bengal, who were instrumental in ushering in the Bengal Renaissance.

Derozio’s grave is in South Park Street cemetery and there is a memorial outside the graveyard on the pavement on Park Street. Several books have been published on this 19th century youth icon, and the latest is a volume titled Derozio: His Background and Cultural Milieu, A Collection of Sources and Documents, compiled and edited by Sakti Sadhan Mukhopadhyay. Published by Kidderpore College in collaboration with the Netaji Institute for Asian Studies, it has a foreword by P. Thankappan Nair.

As its title suggests, Mukhopadhyay has collated a prodigious amount of material on Derozio from various sources, including some that he has himself ferreted out from St John’s Church and the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC). Mukhopadhyay has already brought out a collection of “unpublished” poems by Derozio culled from contemporary periodicals.

Mukhopadhyay claims that he has discovered in the church records that Michael Derozio, HLV’s grandfather, was twice married and had at least 11 children, instead of only four, as was earlier believed. As supporting evidence relevant pages from the parish register have been printed along with an elaborate and updated family tree of the Derozios, who were of Portuguese descent.

Mukhopadhyay also claims that he has chanced upon CMC documents that provide evidence of the Derozio ancestral house at 155 Lower Circular Road (now AJC Bose Road) never having been demolished. Historian Radha Raman Mitra’s claim to the contrary is carried in the same volume, littered with literals.