[In the following excerpt, Ray discusses Dutt's status as an alienated Bengali writer and his influence on later writers of the region.]

I

Generalizations on the literature and society of any country are always hazardous, much more so when the country is India where even the recognized major languages are far too many to be acquired by a single individual, and where competent translations of literary works from one living language into another are unfortunately still rather few.¹ I have, therefore, chosen to limit the present inquiry to the modern literature of one living language with which I am most familiar. Even here I propose to focus on three major writers who belong to different generations and are as different from one another as three highly creative individuals can be, but who strikingly illustrate the phenomenon of alienation which is one aspect of the general theme of this colloquium.

The language selected is Bengali which is a member of the Indo-Aryan family and is currently spoken by over one hundred and twenty million people in the South Asian subcontinent.² Its earliest extant literary specimens are about a thousand years old; the language went through certain transformations, until by the early fifteenth century, a standard literary Bengali was established which gave to the people of this region a definition and identity.³ However, within this identity there is also considerable heterogeneity. The original inhabitants who spoke Austro-Asiatic dialects and the groups of Dravidian speakers who followed them have left their impress on the language, social organization and religious beliefs and practices of the people.⁴ Before the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 Bengal's population was almost equally divided between two religious communities, the Hindus and the Muslims.⁵ Among the Hindus there are several sects, the two most important being the Sāktas or worshippers of the mother goddess and the Vaishnavas or worshippers of the divine lovers, Rādhā and Krishna. Bengali Hindu society has more than forty different castes, but traditionally the dominant ones have been the Brāhmans, the Kāyasthas and the Vaidyas.⁶ The majority of the Bengali Muslims are converts to Islam from the Hindu lower castes, but the Muslim elites claim descent from erstwhile rulers and immigrants whose original homes were in the countries of western Asia.⁷

During the first eight hundred years or so of its history, Bengali literature was almost exclusively composed in verse, and its themes were mainly, though not exclusively, religious and devotional. The modern phase began several decades after the conquest of Bengal by the British; its principal centre was the new capital city, Calcutta, and its chief instrument was English education. Its beneficiaries were in the main members of the three traditional Hindu high castes to which was added during the nineteenth century another Hindu caste-cluster, the Nabasāks.⁸ The Muslims, by and large, were for a long time losers in the process; and the overwhelming majority, whether Hindus or Muslims, who lived in the villages, continued to suffer, their occasional protests producing very little tangible results.⁹ On the whole, the impact of modernization under colonial auspices was remarkably limited; the economy remained predominantly agricultural, and the society tradition-bound. There were certain attempts at social and religious reform among sections of the urban Hindu intelligentsia, but these had little influence on the general community. The general trend was one of cautious adaptation, and the radical challenge to tradition which was made by a small group of Hindoo College Students in the 1830s proved to be altogether superficial and short-lived.¹⁰

However, in Bengali literature the impact of modernization was much more fruitful. During the first half of the nineteenth century a prose literature was evolved for the first time in Bengali, a literature which was primarily polemical and journalistic, but which nonetheless reflected new ideas and perceptions which were coming into India from post-Renaissance Europe.¹¹ In the process the language was enriched and its literature developed new possibilities, but the realization of these possibilities in creative writing did not take place until the spectacular emergence of Michael Madhusudan Datta as the first great poet of modern India.

II

Madhusudan was born on 25 January 1824, in the village of Sāgarāri in Jessore.¹² When he was seven his father Rajnarayan, an enterprising Kāyastha, moved to Calcutta where he established himself as a successful and wealthy lawyer. From 1833 to 1842 Madhu was a student at Hindoo College where he developed his two consuming ambitions, ‘to be a great poet’ and to ‘go to England’.¹³ In 1843 he embraced Christianity and was given the name Michael; this caused a big stir since such conversions were extremely rare among high caste Hindus; but neither then nor during the rest of his life did he show any religious interest in Christianity. He wanted to avoid an early marriage arranged by his father and to escape to England, and these seem to have been his main reasons for choosing conversion.¹⁴ From 1844 to 1847 he studied at Bishop's College where he acquired proficiency in Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Sanskrit. When his father discontinued payment of his college charges he left for Madras where he worked as a teacher and journalist from 1848 to early 1856. In Madras he married an English girl, Rebecca, but the marriage broke up in late 1855; and when he returned to Calcutta in February 1856, he was accompanied by Amelia Henrietta Sophia, a French girl. It is not known if they were ever formally married, but they lived as husband and wife until their deaths in 1873.¹⁵

During his years in Madras, Michael wrote exclusively in English both verse and prose, but his writings of this period are of indifferent quality. However, they show his command of a foreign language and the influence of Scott and Byron. Shortly after his return to Calcutta he was commissioned by the Rajas of Paikpara to translate a Bengali play into English. He did the translation, but finding the original to be of a very poor standard, he offered to write one himself in Bengali. His friends laughed at the idea since Michael had never written in Bengali before.¹⁶ The challenge was immediately taken up, and his first Bengali play, Sarmishthā, which he also translated into English, was published in January 1859. During the next three years he was phenomenally creative; 1860 saw the publication of two farces, Ekei Ki Bale Sabhyatā and Buro Sāliker Ghāre Ro, another major play in five acts, Padmāvati, and the first Bengali epic in blank verse, Tilottamā Sambhav Kāvya. They were followed in 1861 by his magnum opus, Menghanādvadh Kāvya, the greatest blank verse epic in the Bengali language; another five act play, this time a tragedy, Krishnakumāri; and a volume of lyrics on love and separation, Vrajānganā Kāvya. In 1862 he then published a collection of eleven heroic epistles in blank verse, Virānganā Kāvya, each epistle addressed by a different woman to her respective husband or lover. But he already knew that his ‘poetical career’ was ‘drawing to a close’.¹⁷ In June 1862 he left for England where he was joined next year by Henrietta and their children; the five years spent in England and France were a period of extreme penury and hardship. But during these years he mastered French, Italian and German; more important, he wrote over a hundred Bengali sonnets during his stay at Versailles which together with other poems were published under the title Chaturdaspadi Kavitāvali in August 1866.¹⁸ In November he was called to the Bar; the following year he returned to Calcutta where he was admitted as an advocate of the High Court. But his tastes and habits were expensive. Excessive drinking ruined his health and the Muses deserted him. During his last years he wrote one more play, Māyā Kānan (posthumously published in 1874), and an incomplete Bengali adaptation of Iliad under the title Hector-Vadh (1871). He was a pauper and ‘a complete wreck of his old self’ by the time he died on 29 June 1873; Henrietta had already died three days earlier on 26 June.

Michael confronts us with a startling paradox and several questions connected with it. He was a totally alienated individual, and yet his alienation proved to be, at least for a period of seven years, exceptionally creative. He was himself fully aware of his alienation from the Hindu tradition, and of his historic role as a literary innovator. This awareness is repeatedly expressed in his extensive correspondence with his friends. ‘I am aware, my dear fellow’, he wrote to Gourdas Basak, ‘that there will, in all likelihood, be something of a foreign air about my drama; but … what care you if there be a foreign air about the thing … it is my intention to throw off the fetters forged for us by a servile admiration of everything Sanskrit. … This Sharmista has very nearly put me at the head of all Bengali writers’.¹⁹ And to Raj Narayan: ‘I would sooner reform the Poetry of my country than wear the imperial diadem of all the Russias’. ‘I shall not allow myself to be bound down by the dicta of Mr Viswanath of the Sahitya Darpan. I shall look to the great dramatists of Europe for models’. ‘I don't care a pin's head for Hinduism, I love the grand mythology of our ancestors.’ ‘I am “smit with the love of sacred song”. There never was a fellow more madly after the Muses than your poor friend! … I have thrown down the gauntlet, and proudly denounced those whom our countrymen have worshipped for years, as imposters, and unworthy of the honours heaped upon them! I ought to rise higher with each poem.’ ‘In the present poem [Meghanādvadh] I mean to give free scope to my inventing powers … and to borrow as little as I can from Valmiki … I shall not borrow Greek stories but write … as a Greek would have done.’ ‘These men, my dear Raj, little understand the heart of a proud, silent, lonely man of song! They regret his want of popularity, while, perhaps, his heart swells within him in visions of glory, such as they can form no conception of.’ ‘It was a struggle whether Meghanad will finish me or I finish him. Thank Heaven, I have triumphed … 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. I don't think it is impossible to equal Virgil, Kalidasa and Tasso.’²⁰

Michael's paradox is that although language is a social product, and that it be rooted in tradition is important to literature, in his case the depth of his alienation is matched by the height and range of his creative achievements. He rejected not only Hinduism but also the literary traditions of both Sanskrit and Bengali poetry; he chose the heroic and the tragic in conscious preference to the erotic and the devotional; his models were European and his temper highly individualistic, secular and rebellious. He often used well-known Hindu tales and legends, but he gave them a radically unorthodox perspective and significance. The most impressive example of this is his epic Meghanādvadh. The story is taken from Rāmāyana in which the hero Rāma is an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu who destroys Rāvana, the king of the Rākshasas. Michael did not change the plot, but in his treatment ‘the glorious son of Ravana’ became the hero; he is ‘a noble fellow, and, but for that scoundrel Bivishan, would have kicked the monkey army into the sea’.²¹ As he himself admitted, ‘the heart of the Poet in Meghanad is with the Rakshasas … I despise Ram and his rabble; but the idea of Ravan elevates and kindles my imagination; he was a grand fellow’.²² Similarly, in Virānganā, one of the epistle-writing heroines is Surpanakhā, the traditionally much-despised sister of Rāvana; in fact, in choosing from the old Purānic legends certain women as protagonists of this series of dramatic monologues and in presenting them as highly spirited and articulate individuals who declare their passions and frustrations in the first person singular, he again gave evidence of his alienation as he had done in the case of Meghanād.²³

But his alienation is beyond question so are his literary achievements. His daring experiments in prosody and verse forms (which included blank verse, odes, epistles, and sonnets) opened new vistas in Bengali poetry; he wrote the first tragedy in the language, and gave expression to a spirit which was secular, individualist, adventurous and cosmopolitan, and which was strikingly akin to the spirit of the European Renaissance. Even his critics (and they have been many) can not but recognize that with Michael Bengali came out of its prolonged parochial age and entered what Goethe had envisioned as the age of world literature.

Nonetheless, there are questions raised by the paradox that was Michael. What were the sources of his alienation? Explanations in terms of caste, class, or English education are altogether inadequate; other Bengali Hindu bhadralok (‘gentleman’)²⁴ of his time or even later proved themselves readily adaptable to traditional mores and values; even contemporary poets like Rangalal (1826-86), Hemchandra (1838-1903), Navinchandra (1846-1909) and Viharilal (1834-94) show none of his imaginative intransigence or originality. Was it a matter of his individual temperament? Was it due to the ideology of individualist cosmopolitanism which he adopted from Europe and made very uniquely his own? Was he in any meaningful sense a literary spokesman of the urban Hindu middle class of nineteenth century Calcutta? Although he introduced the modern age in Bengali poetry, why is it that except for one major poet in the 1930s (Sudhindranath Datta), no other has followed him successfully in his poetic style and temper? And did the Muses eventually abandon him because he was so very alienated from his community?²⁵ These questions, I presume, are relevant to any inquiry into the relation between literature and social change, but they are also likely to be of interest to those who value literature for its own sake. …

Notes

1. Sir George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, originally published 1903-28, since reprinted, Delhi 1967-68, in 19 volumes, still remains the only detailed and comprehensive survey of India's living languages. Grierson listed and described a total of 179 languages and 544 dialects. According to the census of 1961, India has a total of 1,652 mother tongues.

2. The most detailed study is S. K. Chatterji, The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language, originally published 1926, since reprinted, London, 1970, in 2 volumes.

3. Several scholarly works are available in English, among them, D. C. Sen, History of Bengali Language and Literature, Calcutta, 1954 reprint; J. C. Ghosh, Bengali Literature, London, 1948; S. Sen, History of Bengali Literature, New Delhi, 1960; D. Zbavitel, Bengali Literature, Wiesbaden, 1976.

4. S. K. Chatterji, op. cit.; also R. C. Majumdar, ed. History of Bengal, vol. 1, Dacca reprint.

5. Already, according to the census of 1881, Muslim and Hindu percentages of Bengal Proper were respectively 50·16 and 48·45.

6. N. K. Dutt, Origin and Growth of Caste in India, vol. 2, Castes in Bengal, Calcutta, 1965 reprint.

7. That the majority of the Bengali Muslims were native converts was stated in the census of 1872. This was disputed by K. F. Rubbee in his Haqiqat-i-Musalmān-i-Bāngālā (1895), but the census view is accepted by most scholars.

8. A. Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism, Cambridge, 1968.

9. For conditions of peasants and early protests and struggles, C. Palit, Tensions in Bengal Rural Society 1830-1860, Calcutta, 1975; B. Kling, The Blue Mutiny, Philadelphia, 1966; N. K. Sinha, ed., The History of Bengal 1757-1905, Calcutta, 1967; S. Fuchs, Rebellious Prophets, Bombay, 1965.

10. G. Chattopadhyaya, ed., Awakening in Bengal, Calcutta, 1965; S. Sastri, A History of the Renaissance in Bengal, tr. R. Lethbridge, Calcutta, 1972 reprint.

11. J. C. Ghosh, op. cit.; S. K. Dey, Bengali Literature in the 19th Century, Calcutta, 1962.

12. The best biographical studies are all in Bengali: J. N. Basu, Michael Madhusudan Datter Jivancharit; N. N. Som, Madhusmriti, repr., Calcutta, 1954; B. Banerji, Madhusudan Datta, Calcutta, 1955.

13. Letter to Gourdas Basak, 25 November 1842. Michael's letters are included in Madhusudan Rachanāvali, ed. A. K. Ghosh, Calcutta, 1973.

14. Letter to Basak, 27 November 1842. Also Rev. K. M. Banarjea's recollections, quoted in B. Banerji, op. cit., pp. 14-15.

15. In his letter to Basak, 20 December 1855, from Madras, Michael referred to his ‘fine English wife and four children’; but when he reached Calcutta on 2 February 1856 Henrietta was already his de facto wife.

16. For details, N. N. Som, op. cit., pp. 82-83, 104-105; B. Banerji, op. cit., pp. 32-38. The Captive Ladie (1849) and other English writings of Michael are included in Ghosh, ed., Madhusudan Rachanāvali.

17. Letter to Raj Narayan Bose, undated, probably written in January 1862. Text in Som, Madhusmriti, pp. 622-623.

18. Besides the Ghosh edition, Michael's collected works in Bengali are available in other editions, e.g., B. Banerji and S. Das, eds., Madhusudan Granthāvali, Calcutta; K. Gupta, ed., Calcutta, 1967.

19. Som, Madhusmriti, pp. 595-596.

20. Ghosh, ed., Madhusudan Rachanāvali, pp. 306, 307, 309-310, 312.

21. Letter to Raj Narayan Bose, 14 July 1860.

22. Ghosh, ed., Madhusudan Rachanāvali, p. 331.

23. Significantly the volume was dedicated to Vidyāsāgar. Of the eleven women, one is a teacher's wife who declares her love to a student of her husband; another invites the person she loves to rescue her from the King to whom she is pledged to marriage by her guardian; another forfeits heaven for love's sake; another is a wife who leaves her husband because he lacks courage and self-respect. The stories are old—the newness is in the poet's selection and approach.

24. The bhadralok constituted the dominant social and cultural elite in nineteenth century Bengal. For a critical analysis of the bhadralok, see J. H. Broomfield, Elite Conflict in a Plural Society, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968.

25. For a discussion of this point see my essay ‘Michael Madhusudun Datta’ in Sibnarayan Ray, Apartheid in Shakespeare and other Reflections, Calcutta, 1977, pp. 79-96.