Miachel Madhusudan Dutta (January 25, 1824—June 29, 1873) was born in Sagardari village in District Jessore, Bangladesh. His father Rajnarayan Dutta was a well-established barrister in the civil court headquarters. Madhusudan’s education started at home, under the tutelage of his mother Jahnavi Devi. At the age of seven, he came to Calcutta (now Kolkata). Here he studied in Khidirpur school for the first two years and in 1833 he was admitted in Hindu College. In 1834, he recited an essay in English, titled “Some Proposals about Dramas”, in the annual award ceremony of the school and garnered many praises. He was an exceptionally talented student, recognized by teachers and professors as being a precocious child with a gift of literary expression.

Even amongst many brilliant co-students like Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay, Rajendralal Mitra, Rajnarayan Basu, and Gauradas Basak in Hindu College, Madhusudan was considered the ‘brightest star’ of them all. He was awarded scholarships in college and won a gold medal for writing an essay about women’s education. During his stay in Hindu College, many of his early poems were published in Jnanasweshan (search of knowledge), Bengal Spectator, Literary Gleamer, Calcutta Library Gazette, Literary Blossom, Comet and other magazines.

From his young age, Madhusudan had dreamed of going to England. Early exposure to English education and European literature inspired him to emulate the English in taste, manners and intellect. An early influence was his teacher David Lester Richardson at Hindu College. Richardson was a poet and inspired in Madhusudan a love of English poetry, particularly Byron. Michael began writing English poetry from 17 years age, sending his works to publications in England, including Blackwood's Magazine and Bentley's Miscellany. They were, however, never published.

Madhusudan believed that he could become a renowned poet only if he studied abroad. Right at that time, however, his father was getting busy trying to get him married. To avoid matrimony and get a better chance of going abroad, on 9^th February 1843 Madhusudan changed his religion to Christianity in spite of the objections of his parents and relatives.

From that day on, the name Michael was added to his first name (other sources say it was not added till 1848 at his wedding). He is commonly referred to by Bengalis today as simply Michael or Michael Madhusudan.

Michael had to leave Hindu College on account of being a convert. In 1944, he was admitted in Bishop’s College and studied Greek, Latin and Sanskrit literature for three years. He was a gifted linguist and polyglot. He also studied Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit.

Michael was a spirited Bohemian and Romantic at heart. His exceptionally colorful personality and his unconventional, dramatic, and in many ways tragic life have added to the magnetism and glamour of his name. Generous in friendship, romantic and passionate by temperament, he was also fond of the good life, financially irresponsible, and an incorrigible spendthrift. Up to now his father had supported him financially but after his religious conversion this source of income was stopped, and Michael was forced to quit Bishop’s College.

Michael left Calcutta and went to Madras (now Chennai) sometime in the beginning of 1848 and stayed there till 1856. There he first tutored in Madras Male Orphan Asylum, later (1852-1856) he taught as a secondary teacher in the school associated with Madras University. During his stay in Madras, Michael became quite well known as a poet and a journalist. He was associated with magazines like Madras Circulator and General Chronicle and Athenaeum. He was also the co-editor of Spectator magazine. At some time, he also became the editor of Hindu Chronicle and Athenaeum. Under the pseudonym ‘Timothy Penpoem’ he published two books titled The Captive Ladie and Visions of the Past. The Captive Ladie was published in 1849 and The Anglo-Saxon and the Hindu in 1854. Michael also wrote wonderfully bombastic letters in English in which he declared that he "despises Ram and his rabble" or in which he compared himself to Milton, Kalidasa, Virgil, and Tasso, and concluded that all but Milton could be bested--by himself, of course! At this time Michael was writing exclusively in English but his appreciative friends in Calcutta urged him to start writing in Bengali, his mother tongue.

Michael had refused to enter into an arranged marriage which his father had decided for him. He had no respect for that tradition and wanted to break free from the confines of a caste-based endogamous marriage. His knowledge of the European tradition convinced him of the superiority of marriages made by mutual consent.

He was the first Indian to marry a European or Anglo-Indian woman. While in Madras he married Indo-Scottish-Britton, Rebecca Thompson McTavish in 1848 and had four children. However, this marriage did not last. When Michael returned from Madras to Calcutta in February 1856, after his father's death (in 1855), he apparently abandoned his wife and children in Madras. No records of his divorce from Rebecca or remarriage have been found. In 1858, he was joined by a 22-year-old Emelia Henrietta Sophie White of French extraction. This relationship lasted till the end of their lives. She and Michael do not seem to have been formally married, presumably because Rebecca had never granted him divorce. There is no record either of their marriage or of Michael obtaining a divorce from Rebecca. Although the British in India in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often married or lived with native women, the reverse situation, of Indian men marrying or living with white women, was very rare.

Hearing about his father’s death in February 1856, he returned to Calcutta with wife Henrietta. Here he first got a job as a clerk and interpreter in the police court. He also earned some money by writing essays. In 1862, he also acted as the editor of Hindoo Patriot for some time. This perhaps was the most successful and glorious period of his life. In 1858, while translating the play Ratnabali in English, Michael came in contact with the Belgachhia Theater group and started writing plays in Bengali, Sharmishtha (Michael’s first attempt at blank verse).

Praising Michael'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 vigor 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.

Over the years, Michael also wrote Ekei ki bole Sabhyata? (Is this what you call civilization?), Buro Shaliker Ghare Ro (Feathers on the neck of an old bird), Padmavati, Krishnakumari Play and many more. Padmavati was his first play where he used blank verse. After an argument with Jatindramohan Tagore, Michael composed Tilottama Sambhab Kavya and gradually went on to write Brajangana Kavya, Meghnad Badh Kavya and Birangana Kavya. He also translated Nil Darpan (by Dinbandhu Mitra) in English.

Intellectually, Michael Madhusudan Dutt was a rebel and a product of the Bengal Renaissance. He challenged much of the value system encoded in traditional literature of that time; a gifted linguist, he taught himself several Oriental and Occidental languages, and was well-read not only in English literature, but also in other European literatures, including the Greek and Latin classics. A naturally talented writer, he was thus in an excellent position to mediate many new foreign influences in Bengali literature. He became a major innovator and experimenter in formal matters, introducing blank verse (‘amitrakshara chhanda’) and the sonnet form into Bengali poetry; he was an important pioneer in dramatic writing; he wrote a grand heroic-tragic epic in nine cantos which is quite unique in the corpus of Bengali literature.

Michael was self-critical, as well as self-pitying, for he saw himself and his life as being not within his control. at least part of the sentiment of Michael's poems can be attributed to the colonialism induced split personality and the bifurcated world any educated Bengali in the 19^th century had to face.

"Lament of Myself" is not the only poem in which Michael expresses regret. We see it also in his first sonnet, composed exactly a year earlier, in 1860, and titled "The Poet's Mother Tongue" (Kavi-matribhasha), renamed "The Language of Bengal" (Bangabhasha). Michael introduced the sonnet, a most productive verse form still today, to the non-English literatures of South Asia. In this first-ever sonnet in Bangla, he chastised himself for having ignored Saraswati, the Indian Goddess of learning, and gone a begging to the West for his literary inspiration and sustenance. But Saraswati must have been kind to him as in the very next year, 1861, he compiled the famous epic Meghnadh Badh Kavya (translated into English by Clinton B. Seely as The Slaying of Meghanada.)

After a long legal battle, Michael won back his ancestral property in 1860. On 9^th June 1862 he went to England to study Law and graduated in 1865. During his stay in England, he also composed Bengali ‘Chaturdoshpodi’ (of 14 lines) poems in the style of English sonnets. His stay in England had left him disillusioned with European culture. he and his second family lived for some time in Versailles in France, because Michael thought it was cheaper to live there than in London. Much of his time abroad, especially in Versailles, was spent in abject poverty and deep in debt. He wrote to his friend from France: “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.”

On January 5, 1867, Michael returned to India, and after overcoming many obstacles, joined the Calcutta High Court. In spite of adequate income, Michael was riddled with many debts and had to quit working in the court to take up multiple other jobs to pay off the debts. But gifted as he was, he was also his own worst enemy, and he was not able to make much of a success of his legal career. His extravagant lifestyle, fecklessness in money matters, and reckless drinking to drown problems conspired to wreck his health and happiness, and likewise the health and happiness of his second partner, who had also succumbed to alcoholism during their days of poverty in Versailles. At the end, he fell ill and had to stay in the library of a landowner in Uttarpara. Exactly three days after his wife’s death, this greatest poet died penniless in a general hospital. At that time, his book publications numbered 12 in Bengali and 5 in English. This great poet helped usher in a new era in Bengali poetry.

Michael Madhusudan Dutt was largely ignored for 15 years after his death. The belated tribute was a tomb erected at his gravesite.

His epitaph, a verse of his own, reads:

Stop a while, traveler!
if you are born in Bengal,
Then wait awhile here…

Published February 2021

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