The Heart of a Rebel Poet: Letters of Michael Madhusudan Dutt

I have never read Michael Madhusudan Dutt's actual works, or more accurately, been able to read them. The difficulty of the Bengali he wrote got in the way. And though I kept sighting him when reading about the extraordinary historical period in which he lived and wrote, sometimes labeled as the Bengali Renaissance, with its passionate, bitter debates about religious orthodoxy and reform, he remained a distant figure. Well-known to all, sympathetic to the cause of reformers, but never in the actual fray. Perhaps it was because, as Amit Chaudhuri wrote in his essay 'Poles of recovery: from Dutt to Chaudhuri' on the construction of the Indian secular self, unlike others who also rebelled against Hindu tradition (a Ram Mohan Roy, for e.g.) but then 'recovered' their 'Indianness' in the public sphere of religious and social reform, Dutt's 'recovery' took place in the private sphere of art and writing.

And even though his letters are in English I never even got close to them, buried as they were in the collected volumes of Madhusudan Rachanabali. Not any more! In this volume edited by Gulam Murshid, an ex-academic from Rajshahi University who currently works for the BBC in London, one meets face-to-face the exuberant, vividly contradictory man and artist Bengalis have been fascinated by for over a hundred years: a Hindu who converted to Christianity, the man who was his own worst enemy, somebody born to a well-to-do family but who died a pauper, a poet and playwright who scorned Bengali culture and its books and yet radically transformed its literature, warm-hearted yet one who abandoned his wife and children, someone whose very name uneasily fused together two separate, unequal worlds: 'Michael' and 'Madhusudan.'

Reading through these riveting letters, it was amazing for me to see how accomplished, in terms of pure craft, Dutt was. Beneath the occasional bluster and foppish posturing, underneath the high-spirited witticisms and the scorn for pundits he called 'beggars, pretenders and barren rascals… fetter(ed) by a servile admiration for everything Sanscrit' lay a sure grasp of technique. His casually tossed-off lines on poetic meter and measure, on blank verse and Greek hexameters, on payar and jati are fascinating to read. But mere mastery of meter alone would never have produced Meghnadbad---added to the mix were an exquisite education, his beloved Milton, who provided a gorgeous Shaitan rebelling against the tyranny of heaven as a model to overthrow the traditional hierarchy of the Ramayana ('I despise Ram and his rabble' he wrote in a now-classic Dutt-ism), an absorption in Western classical literature, an astonishing linguistic ability, and a fierce sense of revolt against a sterile obeisance to the past--- all these combined in him, along with that mysterious thing called genius, to accomplish a literary revolution within the short span of five creative years.

It is all there, and much more, in his letters, laid bare on these pages, in text and subtext.

Gulam Murshid is eminently suited for the job of editing Dutt's letters. His biography of Dutt, Ashar Chhalance Bhuli, (translated into English by Gopi Majumdar and published as Lured by Hope: A Biography of Michael Madhusudan Dutt in 2003) was hailed by reviewers as 'a landmark in Bengali literary biography' (Ketaki K. Dyson). The same qualities of meticulous scholarship and a socio-historical framework are also evident in this book. The letters are arranged according to phases in Dutt's life (under headings such as 'Young Love and the Crisis of Identity: Letters written between 1841 and 1847,' and so on), which, when read in conjunction with the accompanying biographical notes (a veritable Who's Who of Bengal at that time), and copious footnotes explaining references to everything from Greek classics to the location of Bagerhat, makes this as complete a reading experience as any sentient reader would wish for.

My criticisms are minor. Dutt's wife Rebecca's mother's name is variously spelt as 'Kathleen,' or 'Catherine' Thompson. As is Jogindranath Basu's biography Michael Madhusudan Datter Jibancharit, spelt Mikail elsewhere. The exact differences between the titles 'barrister', 'lawyer' and 'attorney' in 19th century Bengal is not spelt out, leading to considerable confusion as to who was the first Bengali barrister, or lawyer, or attorney--a not insignificant point in the book. There are lapses, too, in Murshid's English--descriptions of Michael as a 'poor black fellow' or 'dark-skinned native' could perhaps have been phrased differently. As could lines like 'it seems that he (Dutt) had a complex mind with many compartments.' Well, yes, if we must belabor the obvious.

But these are quibbles. Without a doubt, Gulam Murshid has rendered a service to readers of Bengali literature. Rosinka Chaudhuri reported recently in The Hindu that rumour has it that a whole sheaf of previously unseen letters of Dutt have been discovered. If true, then one hopes that Gulam Murshid gets to lay his hands on them.

Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.