Poles of recovery: from Dutt to Chaudhuri

Articulations of modernity and a secular identity of the middle- class involve a trajectory of disowning and selectively recovering its 'Indianness'. This struggle is also the paradigm around which a substantial part of modern Indian literature and culture are structured. Noted writer AMIT CHAUDHURI traces the origins of such disquiets to the 19th-century Bengali poet. Michael Madhusudan Dutt, in the first of a three-part essay.

WHEN I was an undergraduate at University College, London in the early 1980s, cultivating a life of self-imposed loneliness, I would be pursued, intermittently, by a man of indeterminate nationality, who had, I thought, a Spanish accent. He could have been from Latin America; when I asked him, once, where he came from, he replied with a snort that put me in my place, "Let us say... from one of the industrialised nations." His interest in me wasn't amorous; his intention was, curiously - once he'd found out I was from India - to ask me probing questions and humiliate me in the way I've just mentioned. I think he was lonelier than I was; bearded, overcoated, smelly, his face raw with a skin disorder and his eyes framed by thick glasses, he had the air of a once-brilliant graduate student whose project was going nowhere. He lighted upon me on the steps of Senate House or the Students Union Building, or on one of the roads outside. It was in front of the Dillon's Bookshop that he asked me (he'd obviously discovered I was a student of English, and that I had ambitions as a writer, though I can't recall when I divulged this information to him) a question that caused me some discomfort: "Why don't you write in your own language?" I mumbled something in reply; I hoped he'd go away. It's not that I didn't have a reason: I, a Bengali, had grown up in Bombay, and, not having been taught Bengali in school, didn't know it well enough to write poetry or fiction in it. My literary models and aspirations belonged to the English language; yet, secretly, I'd been troubled by what my inquisitor implied: that you can't achieve anything worthwhile in literature unless you write in your "own" language.

It becomes easier to understand my particular disquiet, the reasons for my being in England, standing outside Dillon's, and my ambition to be a writer in the English language (although I still showed no signs of writing anything but rather derivative poems in it), if one looks back to Michael Madhusudan Dutt, the 19th-century Bengali poet, with whom, in India, such journeys and disquiets largely begin. I, indeed, found myself reacquainting myself with his life and, in a small way, his work, for the purposes of an anthology I was editing. He was, of course, already familiar to me as a mythological figure in my childhood.

Dutt was born in 1824 into a well-to-do middle-class family, and in a Bengal where a native bourgeoisie and intelligentsia had already come into being. Embedded in his life - and in the genesis of modernity in Bengal and India - is another narrative, to do with the secular, middle-class Indian self's struggle between disowning and recovering its "Indianness", a struggle that, as I was compiling material for the anthology, I discovered was also the paradigm around which a substantial part of modern Indian literature and culture was structured. Dutt studied at the Bishop's College and the Hindu College in Calcutta, where, not long before, the Anglo-Portuguese poet, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, had taught. The Hindu College was one of the first colleges to be attended by, and instrumental in producing, members of the native middle-class intelligentsia. By the time Dutt had arrived there, the major articulations of modernity by Indians, in the spheres of religious and social reform, were already marked by the seemingly conflicting currents of disowning and recovery. Raja Rammohun Roy had founded the reformist sect, the Brahmo Samaj, in 1828; it constituted, after Roy's contact with the culture and religion of the British coloniser (and owing not a little to the Islamic culture of the past), a rejection, or disowning, of the polytheistic, idolatrous aspects of Hinduism. But instead of completing this act of disowning, and converting to Christianity, Roy turned it into an act of recovery, by turning back to the Upanishads, and making the monotheistic deity in their passages the foundation for the transcendental protestantism of the Brahmo Samaj. The arc of this process, from distancing to recuperation, would become the definitive arc in the construction of the secular, middle-class self in India.

In the late 1820s, again, a radical movement called Young Bengal was formed, the subject of much satire and derision in its time, whose Westernised members ostentatiously defied dietary and religious taboos (by eating beef, for instance) while leading lives at home that adhered, more or less, to conventional Hindu and Victorian mores. For all its silliness, the radicalism of Young Bengal can be seen to prefigure the more serious forms of social reform (supporting, for instance, widow remarriage) instituted by men like Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, acts, thus, not only of rejection, but of reparation. Moreover, the very bourgeoisie of which Young Bengal was part would, increasingly, be at the heart of recovering the tradition that, at other times, it seemed intent on redefining or disowning.

The figure of Michael Madhusudan Dutt belongs to this context. In his personal and creative life, we see, again, the related impulses towards, on the one hand, the disowning of tradition, and its recovery as a creative constituent of the secular self on the other. Crucially, however, he translates the public acts of disowning and recovery that, so far, marked the spheres of religious and social reform, into the private sphere of art and writing. Dutt began his creative endeavour by writing poetry in the English language, and wrote a substantial work, "The Captive Ladie"; his ambition was to be a canonical "English" poet. As part of this programme, he sent a poem to Blackwood's magazine, dedicated to William Wordsworth, but received no response. When still a student, he converted to Christianity; this was his first great act of disowning. Whether he converted in reaction to the Hinduism he, like many of his generation, had come to feel impatient with, or in his desire to become more completely "English" (and thus further his career as an "English" poet), or in defiance of his father, it is not known. At any rate, he hardly seems to have led a conventional "Christian" life. If Dutt disowned his father and his religion, his father, in turn, disowned him, quite literally. The Freudian Oeidpal conflict between father and son is not always a useful way of looking at Indian culture, but in Dutt's life it would certainly seem to play a part; it would appear modernity entered Bengali culture and poetry, via Dutt, not by a slaying of the coloniser, but of the father.

Later, in Madras, he married an Englishwoman, an indigo planter's daughter, who bore him children. In 1855, he abandoned them, and returned to Calcutta, taking, in the meanwhile, a Frenchwoman, Henrietta, as his wife; they remained together for the rest of their lives. He now started from scratch; took up a series of jobs; wrote Bengali plays and translated two into English; gradually abandoned, it would appear, his ambition to be a great "English" poet.

Around the late 1850s, after the long process of disowning, began the process of recovery, the reappropriation, by Dutt, of the Bengali language and culture, culminating in his epic poem, "Meghnad Badha Kabya", arguably the first major modern work by a Bengali, and an Indian. Now, rejecting the language in which he had invested his literary ambitions, he turned to his mothertongue, not yet quite a respectable language as far as the Bengali middle-class was concerned. Already, before embarking on the epic, he had written the long Bengali poem, "Tilottama Sambhava", which came out in 1860; in one of his vivid letters in English, he had confessed to his friend Raj Narain in the same year:

I am afraid you think my style hard, but, believe me, I never study to be grandiloquent like the majority of the "barren rascals" that write books in these days of literary excitement. The words come unsought, floating in the stream of (I suppose I must call it) Inspiration? Good Blank Verse should be sonorous and the best writer of Blank Verse in English is the toughest of poets - I mean old John Milton!

Although nationalism was still a few decades away from finding a political programme and party, it had already, apparently, become, for Dutt, part of an artistic programme; for he goes on: "I began the poem ['Tilottama'] in a joke, and I see I have actually done something that ought to give our national Poetry a good lift..." By "national Poetry" he does not, of course, mean British poetry, although India had been formally annexed by the Crown in 1858. Yet, this nationalistic artistic programme is not incompatible, for Dutt, with the figure of his idol, Milton (who, for him, would increasingly become an avenue for recovering his Bengaliness), nor with the prosody of English verse.

On 15th May, 1860, he wrote to the same friend in a long letter: "I am going on with Meghnad by fits and starts. Perhaps the poem will be finished by the end of the year." Then, in a few flippant sentences, he delineates the nature of the recovery he is undertaking:

I am glad you like the opening lines. I must tell you, my dear fellow, that though, as a jolly Christian youth, I don't care a pin's head for Hinduism, I love the grand mythology of our ancestors. It is full of poetry. A fellow with an inventive head can manufacture the most beautiful things out of it.

There is then an excited exclamation, as if he were a Columbus who'd discovered a new world by accident: "What a vast field does our country now present for literary enterprise! I wish to God, I had time."

Dutt's comic but grandiose remarks about not caring "a pin's head for Hinduism", but loving, all the same, "the grand mythology of [his] ancestors" for its poetry contain a serious and, till then, unexpressed truth. For Dutt speaks not so much as a "jolly Christian youth" as a very early vehicle for the secular Indian sensibility, to which the rejection of indigenous culture and religion, relegating them to the realm of superstition and irrationality, would be an important act on the one hand; as would, on the other, its recovery of this very culture as a life- giving, if problematic, part of itself. The gods and goddesses would appear, henceforth, not as deities, as they would to a devotee, but as actors upon the stage of a secular consciousness, to which their meaning and power would no longer be hieratic or orthodoxly religious, but nevertheless profound, if slightly unfathomable. Dutt's remarks, and, indeed, the poem he was then working on, records the relocation of the mythic - which, till then, had been situated in the culture of a community - within the half-truths and subconscious of a new, colonial bourgeoisie. Dutt's comment that the "mythology of our ancestors" is "full of Poetry" itself presages Gandhi's admission that he saw the Bhagavad Gita less as a holy scripture than as a work of poetry. Gandhi, the Tolstoy- and Ruskin-loving barrister, a product of the petit bourgeoisie of colonial India, who reinvented himself in mid-life as an atavistic sage in a loin cloth, was himself marked intellectually by the tortuous negotiations of disowning and recovery. Dutt's ambivalence towards his cultural tradition points also to the Kashmiri Pandit, Nehru, whose mellifluous formulation of a secular India concealed an uneasy, but characteristic, tension between rejection and rehabilitation. In The Discovery of India, Nehru points out, on the one hand, that his "early approach to life's problems had been more or less scientific, with something of the easy optimism of the science of the nineteenth and early twentieth century... A kind of vague humanism appealed to me." Religion, he says, was "closely associated" for him "with superstitious practices and dogmatic beliefs"; yet admits, a page later, to be "affected" by Hindu metaphysics, by "the Karma theory of cause and effect"; and, astonishingly, notes that "there appears to be some logic also in the theory of incarnation."

Disowning and recovery are, indeed, inscribed into the very composition of "Meghnad Badha Kabya": Dutt's rejection of English in favour of Bengali for the purposes of writing his epic was itself an immensely significant act of cultural recovery. They are inscribed, too, into the subject matter, and Dutt's treatment of it; the subject of Dutt's epic is an episode from the Hindu epic, the Ramayana (which he'd heard from his mother as a child), except that Dutt made the son of Ravana, the hero Rama's traditional adversary, the tragic protagonist of his poem. Dutt used the Miltonic inversion of "Paradise Lost", where Satan is a contested but unforgettable protagonist, to make the transition from the certainties of a religious epic, and religion itself, to the ambivalences of a secular work, and the construction of a new secular self as reader and writer, caught between the simultaneous processes of disowning and recovery. "I hate Rama and all his rabble," said Dutt in another of his letters, speaking with the voice of a secular India that would find imaginative sustenance in its epics and religious texts while refusing to accept their orthodoxies; the secular, creative imagination in India, since Dutt, has not infrequently trod upon the thin line separating Art from heresy, culminating in the perceived transgression of The Satanic Verses. One wonders what the BJP would have made of Dutt's statement and his epic had he been writing at this historical moment, rather than a hundred and forty years ago.

In 1862, after his opus had been published, Dutt left for England, registering at Gray's Inn to study law; he was joined there, later, by his wife and children. Dutt's lonely arrival in the land where he'd once wished to be recognised as an "English" poet went unremarked; he was miserable, and soon short of funds. He moved to Versailles; here, he concentrated his efforts to introduce the sonnet (which itself had once travelled from Italy to England) to Bengali literature, calling it the chaturdashpadi, or the fourteen-line stanza.

The sonnet, used to express the sentiments of courtly love at its inception, had lent itself to darker meditations and more ambivalent sexual registers with Shakespeare; later, Wordsworth occasionally used it to propagate subliminally revolutionary messages. Yet the sonnet, even with Shakespeare, had always been a self-reflexive literary form; its subject, from the outset, had been itself. Dutt used the sonnet's self-reflexivity, and also its ability to address the political, to play out, explicitly, the drama of disowning and recovery, of exile and homecoming, that had shaped both his life and his artistic choices. One of his most celebrated sonnets is called "Bangabhasha" ("The Bengali Language"); an earlier version of this poem is included, with a different title, in a letter written in English in late 1860 in Calcutta, and is probably his first attempt at the poem. Dutt comments in the letter: "I want to introduce the sonnet into our language and some mornings ago, made the following..." The poet begins "Bangabhasha" with a complaint to his "mother", Bengal, of the miseries of exile:

O Bengal, there are many treasures in your 
keeping; - Yet (fool that I am!), neglecting these, 
Senseless with lust for others' possessions, 
I've travelled 
To a foreign country...

Then, in a dream, the goddess of my lineage proclaimed:
'O child, your mother's womb is profuse with jewels,
Why then are you in this state of destitution?
Go back, ignorant one, go back to your home!'

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