ABSTRACT
James Ross Hutchinson was born in Scotland; his date of birth is variously given as 1796 or 1800. He retained his Scottish identity throughout his long career in India: his first book of poems, the Sunyassee, is dedicated to the people of Scotland, and the dedication signed ‘your countryman’. Having spent seventeen years in India, Hutchinson went on medical leave to South Africa in 1836–1837; there he purchased a sheep farm near Caledon, in the Western Cape, and renamed it Dunghye Park after the Indian mountain pass described in the ‘Sunyassee’. An extract from the Calcutta Courier refers to the ‘ridicule’ heaped upon ‘The Sunyassee’, and goes on to express the reviewer’s opinion that it was, on the contrary, the best Poem that has ever been born in Calcutta, and entitled to follow close after the best descriptive poems in our language’.
