Michael Madhusudan Dutt


Michael Madhusudan Dutt, or Michael Madhusudan Dutta ; 25 January 1824 – 29 June 1873) was a Bengali poet, writer and dramatist. He was a pioneer of Bengali drama. His famous work Meghnad Badh Kavya, is a tragic epic. It consists of nine cantos and is exceptional in Bengali literature both in terms of style and content. He also wrote poems about the sorrows and afflictions of love as spoken by women.

Early life and education

He was born in Sagordari, a village in Keshabpur Upazila, Jessore District of Undivided Bengal. His father was Rajnarayan Dutt, a pleader in the Sadar court, and his mother was Jahnvi Devi. He was an exceptionally talented student. Since his childhood, Dutt was recognised by his teachers and professors as being a precocious child with a gift of literary expression. He was very imaginative. Early exposure to English education and European literature at home and in Kolkata inspired him to emulate the English in taste, manners and intellect. An early influence was his teacher at Hindu College, Calcutta, David Lester Richardson. Richardson was a poet and inspired in Dutt a love of English poetry, particularly Byron.
Dutt began writing English poetry aged around 17 years, sending his works to publications in England, including Blackwood's Magazine and Bentley's Miscellany. They were, however, never published. It was also the time he began correspondence with his friend, Gour Das Bysack, which today form the bulk of the source on his life.

In his own words


"Where man in all his truest glory lives,
And nature's face is exquisitely sweet;
For those fair climes I heave impatient sigh,
There let me live and there let me die".

Madhusudan embraced Christianity at the Old Mission Church in spite of the objections of his parents and relatives on 9 February 1843. He did not take the name Michael until his marriage in 1848.
He describes the day as:

Long sunk in superstition's night,
By Sin and Satan driven,
I saw not, cared not for the light
That leads the blind to Heaven.
But now, at length thy grace, O Lord!
Birds all around me shine;
I drink thy sweet, thy precious word,
I kneel before thy shrine!

He had to leave Hindu College on account of being a convert. In 1844, he resumed his education at Bishop's College, where he stayed for three years.
In 1847, he moved to Madras due to severe family tensions and economic hardship, having been disinherited by his father. While in Madras, he stayed in the Black Town neighbourhood, and began working as an "usher" at the Madras Male Orphan Asylum. Four years later, in 1851, he became a Second Tutor in the Madras University High School. In addition, he edited and assisted in editing the periodicals, Madras Circulator and General Chronicle, Athenaeum, Spectator and Hindoo Chronicle.

Literary life

Early works (1849-1855)

Dutt wrote exclusively in English in his early writing years. The Captive Ladie was published in 1849 and like Derozio's The Fakeer of Jungheera this is a long narrative poem in which it is difficult to sustain one's interest. In The Anglo- Saxon and the Hindu, an essay in florid, even purple, prose which has references to and quotations from almost the whole of Macaulay's shelf of European books. He was greatly influenced by the works of William Wordsworth and John Milton. Dutt was a spirited bohemian and Romantic.
In the fakeer of Jungheera the priest glorifies the custom of Sati and praise the widow who is going to burn herself with her dead husband.However,if we consider the chorus in the context of the complete narrative this as well as the chorus is steeply.

Calcutta Years (1858-1862)

The period during which he worked as a head clerk and later as the Chief Interpreter in the court, marked his transition to writing in his native Bengali, following the advice of Bethune and Bysack. He wrote 5 plays: Sermista , Padmavati , Ekei Ki Boley Sabyata, Krishna Kumari and Buro Shaliker Ghare Ron. Then followed the narrative poems: Tilottama Sambhava Kavya, Meghnad Badh Kavya, Brajagana Kavya and Veerangana Kavya. He also translated three plays from Bangla to English, including his own Sermista.

Final years (1866-1873)

A volume of his Bangla sonnets was published in 1866. His final play, Maya Kannan, was written in 1872. The Slaying of Hector, his prose version of the Iliad remains incomplete.

Linguistic abilities

Madhusudan was a gifted linguist and polyglot. He studied Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit.

Work with the sonnet

He dedicated his first sonnet to his friend Rajnarayan Basu, which he accompanied with a letter: "What say you to this, my good friend? In my humble opinion, if cultivated by men of genius, our sonnet in time would rival the Italian." His most famous sonnet is Kapatakkha River.

Always, o river, you peep in my mind.
Always I think you in this loneliness.
Always I soothe my ears with the murmur
Of your waters in illusion, the way
Men hear songs of illusion in a dream.
Many a river I have seen on earth;
But which can quench my thirst the way you do?
You’re the flow of milk in my homeland’s breasts.
Will I meet you ever? As long as you
Go to kinglike ocean to pay the tax
Of water, I beg to you, sing my name
Into the ears of people of Bengal,
Sing his name, o dear, who in this far land
Sings your name in all his songs for Bengal.

When Dutt later stayed in Versailles, the sixth centenary of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri was being celebrated all over Europe. He composed a poem in honour of the poet, translated it into French and Italian, and sent it to the king of Italy. Victor Emmanuel II, then monarch, liked the poem and wrote to Dutt, saying, "It will be a ring which will connect the Orient with the Occident."

Work in blank verse

Sharmistha was Dutt's first attempt at blank verse in Bengali literature. Kaliprasanna Singha organised a felicitation ceremony to Madhusudan to mark the introduction of blank verse in Bengali poetry.
Praising Dutt's blank verse, Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee, observed: "As long as the Bengali race and Bengali literature would exist, the sweet lyre of Madhusudan would never cease playing." He added: "Ordinarily, reading of poetry causes a soporific effect, but the intoxicating vigour of Madhusudan's poems makes even a sick man sit up on his bed."
In his The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, Nirad C. Chaudhuri has remarked that during his childhood days in Kishoreganj, a common standard for testing guests' erudition in the Bengali language during family gatherings was to require them to recite the poetry of Dutt, without an accent.

Barrister-at-Law

Dutt went to England in 1862 to become a Barrister-at-Law, and enrolled at the Gray's Inn.
On the eve of his departure to England:
Forget me not, O Mother,
Should I fail to return
To thy hallowed bosom.
Make not the lotus of thy memory
Void of its nectar Madhu.

His family joined him in 1863, and thereafter they shifted to the much cheaper Versailles, due to the miserable state of their finances. Funds were not arriving from India according to his plans. He was only able to relocate to England in 1865 and study for the bar due to the munificent generosity of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar. For this, Dutt was to regard Vidyasagar as Dayar Sagar for as long as he lived. He was admitted to the High Court in Calcutta on his return in February 1867. His family followed him in 1869.
His stay in England had left him disillusioned with European culture. He wrote to his friend Bysack from France:

Marriage and family

Dutt had refused to enter into an arranged marriage which his father had decided for him. He had no respect for that tradition and wanted to break free from the confines of caste-based endogamous marriage. His so-called knowledge of the European tradition convinced him of the so-called superiority of marriages made by mutual consent.
He was the first Indian to marry a European or Anglo-Indian woman. While in Madras he married Indo-Scottish-Britton, Rebecca Thompson McTavish, a 17-year-old resident of the Madras Female Orphan Asylum, on 31 July 1848. Dutt assumed the name Michael when the marriage was registered in the baptismal register. They had four children together. He wrote to Bysack in December 1855:
Dutt returned from Madras to Calcutta in February 1856, after his father's death, abandoning his wife and four children in Madras. No records of his divorce from Rebecca or remarriage have been found. In 1858, he was joined there by a 22 year old of French extraction, Emelia Henrietta Sophie White, the daughter of his colleague at the Madras Male Orphan Asylum. They had two sons, Frederick Michael Milton and Albert Napoleon, and a daughter, Henrietta Elizabeth Sermista. A fourth child was stillborn. Their relationship lasted until the end of his life, Henrietta pre-deceasing him by three days, on 26 June 1873.
Rebecca died in Madras in July 1892. Only a daughter and a son survived her. The son, McTavish-Dutt, practised as a pleader in the Court of Small Causes in Madras.
The tennis player Leander Paes is a direct descendant of his- Dutt is his great great grandfather on his mother's side.

Death

Madhusudan died in Calcutta General Hospital on 29 June 1873. Just three days prior to his death, Madhusudan recited a passage from Shakespeare's Macbeth to his dear friend Bysack, to express his deepest conviction of life:

...out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale Told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

Legacy and honours

Dutt was largely ignored for 15 years after his death. The belated tribute was a tomb erected at his gravesite.
His epitaph, a verse of his own, reads:

Stop a while, traveller!
Should Mother Bengal claim thee for her son.
As a child takes repose on his mother's elysian lap,
Even so here in the Long Home,
On the bosom of the earth,
Enjoys the sweet eternal sleep
Poet Madhusudan of the Duttas.

Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar said:
In the words of Sri Aurobindo:

Major works