Michael Madhusudan
Dutt (Datta), (1824-1873), born Madhusudan
Dutt, is a famous 19th century Bengali poet
and dramatist. He was born in Sagardari,
a village in Jessore , East Bengal (now
in Bangladesh). He was a pioneer of Bengali
drama. His famous work Meghnadh Badh Kabya,
is a tragic epic. It consists of nine cantos
and is quite 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.
From an early age, Madhusudan desired to
be an Englishman in form and manner. Born
to a Hindu landed gentry family, he converted
to Christianity to the ire of his family
and adopted the first name, Michael. However,
he was to regret his desire for England
and the [[[Occident]] in later life when
he talked ardently of his homeland as is
seen in his poems and sonnets from this
period.
Madhusudan is widely considered to be one
of the greatest poets in Bengali literature
and the father of Bangla sonnet. He pioneered
what came to be called amitrakshar chhanda
(unrhyming rhythm). Dutt died in Kolkata,
India on 29 June 1873.
Major works
" Tillotama, 1860
" Meghnad Badh Kabya (Ballad of Meghnadh's
demise), 1861
" Ratnavali
Early life
His childhood education started from his
neibour village name Shekpura, There an
old mosque, where he went to learn Persian,
He was an exceptionally gifted student.
Ever since his childhood, young Madhusudan
was recognized by his teachers and professors
as being a precocious child with a gift
of literary expression. He was very imaginative
from his boyhood. Early exposure to English
education and European literature at home
and in Kolkata made him desire to emulate
the proverbially stiff upper-lip Englishman
in taste, manners and intellect. One of
the early impressions were that of his teacher,
Capt. D.L.Richardson at Hindu College. In
this respect, he was an early Macaulayite
without even knowing it. He dreamt of achieving
great fame the moment he landed abroad.
His adolescence, coupled with the spirit
of intellectual enquiry convinced him that
he was born on the wrong side of the planet,
and that conservative Hindu society in early
nineteenth century Bengal (and by extension
Indian society) had not yet developed the
spirit of rationalistic enquiry and appreciation
of greater intellectual sophistry to appreciate
his myriad talents. He espoused the view
that free thinking and post Enlightenment
West would be more receptive to his intellectual
acumen and creative genius. In this, perhaps
he forgot the colour of his skin, as he
was to realize later on in life, much to
his consternation and disgust. He composed
his early works--poetry and drama--almost
entirely in English. Plays like Sermista,
Ratnavali and translations like Neel Durpan
and poems like Captive Ladie which was written
on the mother of his close friend Sri Bhudev
Mukhopadhyay, indicate a high level of intellectual
sophistication.
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
church of Fort William in spite of the objections
of his parents and relatives on February
9, 1843. Later, he escaped to Madras to
escape persecution. 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! "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. "(Translated
from the original Bengali by the poet.)
Later life Influences
Dutt was particularly inspired by both the
life and work of the English Romantic poet
Lord Byron. The life of Dutt closely parallels
the life of Lord Byron in many respects.
Like Byron, Dutt was a spirited bohemian
and like Byron, Dutt was a Romantic, albeit
being born on the other side of the world,
and as a recipient subject of the British
imperialist enterprise. However, the lives
of the two can be summed up in one word:
audacity. These two mighty poets at once
remind us of the saying of Georges Danton,
the French revolutionist: "L'audace,
encore l'audace, toujours l'audace!"
If Lord Byron won over the British literary
establishment with Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,
a comparative analogy may be made for Dutt's
heroic epic Meghnadh Badh Kabya, although
the journey was far from smooth. However,
with its publication, the Indian poet distinguished
himself as a serious composer of an entirely
new genre of heroic poetry, that was Homeric
and Dantesque in technique and style, and
yet so fundamentally Indian in theme. To
cite the poet himself: "I awoke one
morning and found myself famous." Nevertheless,
it took a few years for this epic to win
recognition all over the country.
Linguistic Abilities
Madhusudan was a gifted linguist and polyglot.
Besides Indian languages like Bengali, Sanskrit
and Tamil, he was well versed in classical
languages like Greek and Latin. He also
had a fluent understanding of modern European
languages like Italian and French and could
read and write the last two with perfect
grace and ease.[citation needed]
Work with the Sonnet
He dedicated his first sonnet to his friend
Rajnarayan Basu, along with a letter which
in which he wrote:
"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."
When Madhusudan later stayed in Versailles,
France, the third centenary of the Italian
poet Dante Alighieri was being celebrated
all over the Europe. He composed a poem
in memory of the immortal poet and translated
it into French and Italian and sent it to
court of the king of Italy. Victor Emmanuel
II, the then monarch, was so enamored by
the poem and wrote back to the poet:
"It will be a ring which will connect
the Orient with the Occident."
Work in Blank Verse
Sharmistha (spelt as Sermista in English)
was Madhusudan's first attempt at blank
verse in Bengali literature. Sir Ashutosh
Mukherjee, while paying a glowing tribute
to Madhusudan's blank verse, observed:
"As long as the Bengali race and Bengali
literature would exist, the sweet lyre of
Madhusudan would never cease playing."
He further 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 the level of erudition
in the Bengali language during family gatherings
(like for example, testing the vocabulary
stock of a would-be bridegroom as a way
of teasing him) was the ability to pronounce
and recite the poetry of Dutt, without the
trace of an accent.
In France
In his trip to Versailles, France during
the 1860s, Madhusudan had to suffer the
ignominy of penury and destitution. His
friends back home, who had inspired him
to cross the ocean in search of recognition,
started ignoring him altogether. Perhaps
his choice of a lavish lifestyle, coupled
with a big ego that was openly hostile to
native tradition, was partly to blame for
his financial ruin. Except for a very few
well-wishers, he had to remain satisfied
with many fair-weather friends. It may be
argued, not without some obvious irony that
during those days, his life oscillated,
as it were, between the Scylla of stark
poverty and the Charybdis of innumerable
loans. He was head over heels in debt. As
he was not in a position to clear off his
debts, he was very often threatened by imprisonment.
Dutt was able to return home only due to
the munificent generosity of Ishwar Chandra
Vidyasagar. For this, Dutt was to regard
Vidyasagar as Dayar Sagar (meaning the ocean
of kindness) for as long as he lived. For
it should not be forgotten here, that Madhusudan
had cut off all connections with his parents,
relatives and at times even with his closest
friends, who more often than not were wont
to regard him as an iconoclast and an outcast.
It was during the course of his sojourn
in Europe that Madhusudan then realized
his true identity. Perhaps for the first
time in his life, he became aware of the
colour of his skin and his native language.
What he wrote to his friend Gour Bysack
from France neatly sums up his eternal dilemma:
" If there be any one among us anxious
to leave a name behind him, and not pass
away into oblivion like a brute, let him
devote himself to his mother-tongue. That
is his legitimate sphere his proper element.
"
Marriage and Relationships
One of the reasons for his decision to leave
the religion of his family was his refusal
to enter into an arranged marriage that
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 knowledge of the
European tradition convinced him of the
superiority of marriages made by mutual
consent (or love marriages).
Madhusudan married twice. When he was in
Madras, he married Rebecca Mactavys. Later,
that marriage ended, and Michael married
a French woman named Henrietta. His second
marriage was to last till the end of his
life. From his second marriage, he had four
children. The tennis player Leander Paes
is a direct descendant.
Death
Tomb of Michael Madhusudan Dutt
Madhusudan died in Calcutta General Hospital
on 27 June 1873. Just three days prior to
his death, Madhusudan recited a passage
from Shakespeare's Macbeth to his dear friend
Gour, 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.
"(Macbeth)
Gour responded with a passage from Longfellow:
" Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal. "After
Dutt's death, he was not paid a proper tribute
for fifteen years. The belated tribute took
the form of a shabby makeshift tomb. Madhusudan's
life was a mixture of joy and sorrow. Although
it could be argued that the loss of self-control
was largely responsible for his pitiable
fate, his over-flowing poetic originality
for joy was to become forever immortalized
in his oeuvre.
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. "it
can be argued that michael Madhusudan's
popularit was widely influenced by the west
where is writing style and much of his life
originated. whether he is the greatest modern
poet of Bengal is debatable. It is more
truthful to say that he introduced Bengali
ideas to western writing styles. whether
he himself can be considered an idol of
Bengali poetry is unlikely because of his
rejection to much of Bengali culture and
preference to western materialism.
Legacy
In the words of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee,
the father of modern Bengali prose, the
poet of Meghnad Badh Kabya thus:
"...to Homer and Milton, as well as
to Valmiki, he is largely indebted, and
his poem is on the whole the most valuable
work in modern Bengali literature."
In word of Tagore:
"The Epic Meghnad-Badh is really a
rare treasure in Bengali literature. Through
his writings, the richness of Bengali literature
has been proclaimed to the wide world."
Vidyasagar's lofty praise runs:
"Meghnad Badh is a supreme poem."
Rabindranath Tagore would later declare:
"It was a momentous day for Bengali
literature to proclaim the message of the
universal muse and not exclusively its own
parochial note. The genius of Bengal secured
a place in the wide world overpassing the
length and breadth of Bengal. And Bengali
poetry reached the highest status."
In Byron's dramatic poem Manfred what the
Abbot of St. Maurice spoke of Manfred can
equally be applied to the life of Madhusudan:
" This should have been a noble creature:
he
Hath all the energy which should have made
A goodly frame of glorious elements,
Had they been wisely mingled, as it is,
It is an awful chaos light and darkness
And mind and dust and passion and pure thoughts
Mixed and contending without end or order,
All dormant or destructive. "In the
words of Sri Aurobindo:
"All the stormiest passions of man's
soul he [Madhusudan] expressed in gigantic
language."
Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/
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