Michael Madhusudan Dutt (Bengali: মাইকেল মধুসূদন দত্ত, pronounced [mai̯kel mod̪ʱuʃud̪ɔn d̪ɔt̪ːo] ; 25 January 1824 – 29 June 1873) was a Bengali poet and playwright. He is considered one of the pioneers of Bengali literature.
Madhusudan was born in Sagardari, a village in Keshabpur Upazila, Jessore District of Bengal (present-day Bangladesh), to a Hindu family. His father was Rajnarayan Dutta, who was a lawyer and his mother was Jahnabi Devi. His family, being reasonably well-off, ensured that Madhusudan received an education in the English language and additional tutorship in English at home. Rajnarayan had intended for this Western education to open the doors for a government position for his son.
College and religious conversion
After he finished his education in Sagardari at roughly the age of fifteen, Rajnarayan sent Madhusudhan to Calcutta to attend Hindu College with the eventual aim of becoming a barrister. At Hindu College, Michael studied under a westernized curriculum in a university which had been expressly founded for the "uplift of the natives". The college required all students to wear Western clothing, eat European cuisine with cutlery, learn British songs, and speak exclusively in English—with the aim of creating an anglicized Indian middle class to serve as officials in the colonial administration.
During his time at Hindu College, Madhusudhan developed an aversion to Indian culture and a deep yearning to be accepted into European culture. He expressed these sentiments in one of his poems. An early and formative influence on Dutt was his teacher at Hindu College, David Lester Richardson. Richardson was a poet and inspired in Dutt a love of English poetry, particularly by that of 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 accepted for publication. This was also when he began a correspondence with his friend, Gour Das Bysack, which today forms the bulk of sources on his life.
On 9 February 1843, Madhusudan embraced Christianity at the Old Mission Church, in spite of the objections of his parents and relatives. He did not take the name Michael until his marriage in 1848.
He had to leave Hindu College on account of converting to Christianity. In 1844, he resumed his education at Bishop's College, where he stayed for three years.
In 1847, he moved to Madras (Chennai) due to 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. He edited and assisted in editing the periodicals Madras Circulator and General Chronicle, Athenaeum, Spectator and Hindoo Chronicle.
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, takes on the form of a long narrative poem. In The Anglo-Saxon and the Hindu (1854), an essay in florid, even purple prose, are 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.
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 (1859), Padmavati (1859), Ekei Ki Boley Sabyata (1860), Krishna Kumari (1860) and Buro Shaliker Ghare Ron (1860). Then followed the narrative poems: Tilottama Sambhava Kavya (1861), Meghnad Badh Kavya (1861), Brajagana Kavya (1861) and Veerangana Kavya (1861). He also translated three plays from Bangla to English, including his own Sermista.
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.
Madhusudan was a gifted linguist and polyglot. He studied English, Bengali, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Tamil, Telugu and Sanskrit.
He pioneered the Bengali sonnet and introduced European-style blank verse into Bengali poetry, revolutionizing its metrical structure.
Michael Madhusudan Dutt 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.
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."
Sharmistha (spelt as Sermista in English) was Dutt's first attempt at blank verse in Bengali literature. Kaliprasanna Singha organised a felicitation ceremony for Madhusudan to mark the introduction of blank verse in Bengali poetry. His famous epic, quoted as the only epic of Bengali kind, Meghnadbad-Kabya is also totally written in blank verse.
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.