Thoughts Written in India.

Thoughts Written in India by A.W. Crown is a small collection of poems printed in Calcutta, and represents a characteristic example of the privately printed Anglo-Indian verse pamphlet produced during the years of the British Raj — a category of literary production that the University of Chicago Library has described as largely invisible to standard bibliographic databases, circulated among a limited colonial readership and seldom preserved in institutional collections. The Mercantile Stationers Syndicate of Ripon Lane, Calcutta was a commercial printer and stationer serving the British community in the city rather than a literary press, suggesting that Crown was almost certainly a British civil servant, military officer, or commercial resident who arranged for private publication of verses composed during his Indian posting. As a survivor of a category of publication produced in tiny runs and almost never preserved, the pamphlet in its original wrappers represents a genuinely rare primary document of colonial literary culture.