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Literary Review
LETTERS
A life on the edge
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`It is Murshid's endeavour to present to us a reliable, fuller, and more accurate version of Michael Madhusudan Dutt's letters in a manner accessible to the non-Bengali reader.'
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SEARCHING the catalogue at the National Library, Kolkata, for works on the Bengali poet Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay, a contemporary of Madhusudan's who annotated the first reprint of the immortal Meghnad Badh Kabya and was a well-known poet in his own right, I chanced upon an exchange of letters between Hemchandra and Bhudev Mukherjee, renowned scholar, novelist and essay writer, appended to a volume of Hemchandra's poems. Erudite, witty, and philosophical, these letters had been translated from their original English and attached to this 1950s reprint by Basumati Sahitya Mandir, Kolkata. Sensing the possibility of greater riches in store, I have, since then, fully investigated the possibility of finding the letters of this renowned and now forgotten poet and have finally given up, realising that none of his letters have been preserved for posterity. Like the buildings in which these once famous architects of modern Bengali literature lived, most of their letters too have been lost to the incredible neglect and apathy with which we treat our literary history in this country. Fortunately, the one notable exception to this state of affairs has been the case of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, called "the father of modern Bengali poetry and drama" by Ghulam Murshid in the very first line of his introduction to this collection.
Dutt's letters, written in English (as indeed almost every letter written by an educated Bengali in the 19th Century was, until the Tagore family changed the norm), were mainly to be found, for any interested reader, buried in the middle of his collected works, Madhusudan Rachanabali, published by Sahitya Sansad, alongside his English poems and the rest of his oeuvre in Bengali. However, we now learn that this compilation had been both inaccurate and incomplete, and it is Murshid's endeavour to present to us a reliable, fuller, and more accurate version of his letters in a manner accessible to the non-Bengali reader. With a first ever English translation of Dutt's Meghnad Badh Kabya just published in America by Clinton Seely, this then seems to be the season for rediscovering the great poet through some of his best productions. For, the letters are indeed among the greatest things that this maverick 19th Century genius produced; even in their earlier version, they stand out by virtue of their exuberance, faultless English prose, and genuine portrayal of both the heights of enthusiasm and the depths of despair in the extraordinary life of this bohemian artist in an age before the concept of the bohemian artist came into vogue.
Divided into sections, the letters published here are arranged around years of Dutt's life that are given, slightly unimaginatively, titles such as "Young Love And The Crisis of Identity" or "An Outburst of Creativity". Each section is preceded by a valuable biographical note that corrects many of the false impressions readers have had of his life; for instance, that his first wife, Rebecca, whom he married in Madras, was pure English, or that his second partner Henrietta (never his wife) was French. The letters themselves endure for their humour, pathos, energy and vitality, and perfectly reflect the passage of his life. Thus, while still only 18, he sends his poems to the famous Blackwood's Magazine, and writes to his dear friend, Gour Das Basak — "Good heavens — what a thing have I forgotten to inform you of! — I have sent my poems to the Editor of the Blackwood's Tuesday last. I haven't dedicated them to you as I intended, but to William Wordsworth, the Poet." His first English poems were published, however, in the Madras papers, and in 1849, Captive Ladie, his first volume in press, received a favourable response there. Heavily influenced by the vogue among Orientalist scholars for "Hindu Antiquities", he described it as "a thorough Indian work, full of Rishis — Calis — Lutchmee — Camas — Rudras and all the Devils incarnate, whom our orthodox fathers worshipped."
Leaving Madras for Calcutta in 1856, he spent the following years creating, literally, a new literature for Bengal. He imported both blank verse and the sonnet form into Bengali language in stages, and the resounding success of Meghnad Badh Kabya led to typically grandiose comments: after this, "sub blank verse ho jaga", and again: "The poem is rising into splendid popularity. Some say it is better than Milton — but that is all bosh — nothing can be better than Milton; many say it licks Kalidasa; I have no objection to that." A welter of poems, plays, epics and narrative poetry came into existence all at once, altering the landscape of literary activity in Bengal forever. Still, hankering for a better material life, the poet chose to leave for England in 1862 to turn himself, as he put it, from "Madhu, the kabi [poet]" to "Michael M.S. Dutt Esquire of the Inner Temple, Barrister-at-Law!! Ha! Ha!! Isn't that grand?"
Absolute misery visited him in England and then Versailles, where the living was cheaper — from this point onwards the downward spiral was relentless and steep, not pausing with his return to Calcutta in 1867 and only worsening with his subsequent failure as a barrister and slide into penury. Desperate appeals to Iswarchandra Vidyasagar (whom he described as a man with "the wisdom of an ancient sage, the energy of an Englishman and the heart of a Bengali mother") contain catalogues of debt, descriptions of a suicidal state of affairs and repeated thanks for the occasional cheque. Even this benefactor failed him, however, towards the end, and he was in a dreadful state by the time he was admitted to hospital, "gasping under the excruciating effects of his disease, blood oozing from his mouth". He died four days after the death of his lifelong companion, Henrietta, scorned even in death by the Church, which opposed his funeral and burial.
Undoubtedly, Murshid provides here an absorbing account of an astonishing life, leaving the reader, in the end, with a realisation of just how extreme its vicissitudes had been for a genuine poet who lived always at the razor's edge. Academic rumour in Kolkata, however, adds another surprising twist at the end of the tale; apparently a few days ago the Bangiya Sahitya Parishat has stumbled upon a trunk full of the papers of Dutt's first biographer, Jogindranath Basu, among which are a whole sheaf of letters hitherto unseen and unpublished. Whether there are any more letters to be uncovered will now have to be investigated afresh by Murshid — perhaps a second edition of these letters will then tell a fuller story.
The Heart of a Rebel Poet: Letters of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, edited by Ghulam Murshid, Oxford University Press, Rs. 625.
ROSINKA CHAUDHURI
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