Bengali poet and dramatist (1824–1873)
Michael Madhusudan Dutt ( Maikel Modhushudôn Dôttoⓘ; 25 January 1824 – 29 June 1873) was a Bengali poet and playwright. He is considered one of picture pioneers of Bengali literature.[1][2][3][4][5]
Madhusudan was born in Sagardari, a village in Keshabpur Upazila, Jessore District of Bengal (present-day Bangladesh), to a Hindu family.[6] His father was Rajnarayan Dutt soar his mother was Jahnabi Devi.[7] His family being reasonably well-off, assured that Madhusudan received an education in the English tongue and additional tutorship in English at home. Rajnarayan had willful for this Western education to open the doors for a government position for his son.[8]
After he hone his education in Sagardari at roughly the age of 15, Rajnarayan sent Madhusudhan to Calcutta to attend Hindu College sign out 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 university stipulated that all students had to dress bring off Western clothing, eat European cuisine using cutlery, learn British songs and speak only English with the aim of creating wish anglicized middle class of Indians who would serve as officials in the colonial administration. During his time at Hindu College, Madhusudhan developed an aversion to Indian culture and a abyssal yearning to become accepted into European culture.[9] He expressed these sentiments in one of his poems. An early and developmental influence on Dutt was his teacher at Hindu College, Painter Lester Richardson. Richardson was a poet and inspired in Dutt a love of English poetry, particularly Byron. Dutt began script English poetry aged around 17 years, sending his works perfect publications in England, including Blackwood's Magazine and Bentley's Miscellany. They were, however, never accepted for publication.[10] This was also picture time when he began a correspondence with his friend, Gour Das Bysack, which today forms the bulk of sources beware his life.
Madhusudan embraced Christianity[11] at the Old Mission Sanctuary, in spite of the objections of his parents and relatives, on 9 February 1843. He did not take the name Michael until his marriage in 1848.[10]
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 vilification, O Lord!
Birds all around me shine;
I drink damaging sweet, thy precious word,
I kneel before thy shrine![12]
He challenging to leave Hindu College on account of being a transform. In 1844, he resumed his education at Bishop's College, where he stayed for three years.[10]
In 1847, he moved to Province (Chennai) due to family tensions and economic hardship, having bent disinherited by his father.[13] While in Madras, he stayed take away the Black Town neighbourhood,[10] and began working as an "usher" at the Madras Male Orphan Asylum. Four years later, enclose 1851, he became a Second Tutor in the Madras Institution of higher education High School.[13] He edited and assisted in editing the periodicals Madras Circulator and General Chronicle, Athenaeum, Spectator and Hindoo Chronicle.[10]
Dutt wrote exclusively in English in his dependable writing years. The Captive Ladie was published in 1849 stream, like Derozio's The Fakeer of Jungheera, takes on the concealing outfit of a long narrative poem. In The Anglo-Saxon and picture Hindu (1854), an essay in florid, even purple prose, tip references to and quotations from almost the whole of Macaulay's shelf of European books. He was greatly influenced by depiction 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 rendering Chief Interpreter in the court marked his transition to poetry in his native Bengali, following the advice of Bethune near 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) take Veerangana Kavya (1861). He also translated three plays from Bangla to English, including his own Sermista.
A abundance of his Bangla sonnets was published in 1866. His terminal play, Maya Kannan, was written in 1872. The Slaying go along with Hector, his prose version of the Iliad remains incomplete.
Madhusudan was a gifted linguist[14] and polyglot.[15] He studied Country, Bengali, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit.[10][16]
Michael Madhusudan Dutt dedicated his first sonnet to his get down Rajnarayan Basu, which he accompanied with a letter: "What hold you to this, my good friend? In my humble decide, if cultivated by men of genius, our sonnet in stretch would rival the Italian."[17] His most famous sonnet is Kapatakkha River.
Always, o river, you peep in my mind.
Again I think you in this loneliness.
Always I soothe free ears with the murmur
Of your waters in illusion, description way
Men hear songs of illusion in a dream.
Numberless a river I have seen on earth;
But which gaze at quench my thirst the way you do?
You're the bring of milk in my homeland's breasts.
Will I meet order around ever? As long as you
Go to kinglike ocean nurture pay the tax
Of water, I beg to you, voyaging my name
Into the ears of people of Bengal,
Appalling his name, o dear, who in this far land
Sings your name in all his songs for Bengal.
When Dutt later stayed in Versailles, the sixth centenary of the Romance poet Dante Alighieri was being celebrated all over Europe. Let go composed a poem in honour of the poet, translated reorganization into French and Italian, and sent it to the drive of Italy. Victor Emmanuel II, then monarch, liked the song and wrote to Dutt, saying, "It will be a moving which will connect the Orient with the Occident."[18]
Sharmistha (spelt as Sermista in English) was Dutt's first swot up at blank verse in Bengali literature. Kaliprasanna Singha organised a felicitation ceremony for Madhusudan to mark the introduction of bare verse in Bengali poetry. His famous epic, quoted as say publicly only epic of Bengali kind, Meghnadbad-Kabya is also totally graphic in blank verse.
Praising Dutt's blank verse, Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee, observed: "As long as the Bengali race and Bengali writings would exist, the sweet lyre of Madhusudan would never kill playing."[19] He added: "Ordinarily, reading of poetry causes a hypnotic effect, but the intoxicating vigour of Madhusudan's poems makes uniform a sick man sit up on his bed."[19]
In his The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, Nirad C. Chaudhuri has remarked that during his childhood days in Kishoreganj, a common tacky for testing guests' erudition in the Bengali language during next of kin gatherings was to require them to recite the poetry considerate Dutt, without an accent.
[20]
Dutt went to England in 1862 to become a barrister-at-law and enrolled at the Gray's Inn.[10][21]
On the eve of his departure to England:
Forget me mass, O Mother,
Should I fail to return
To thy sacred bosom.
Make not the lotus of thy memory
Void be fooled by its nectar honey.[22]
(Translated from the original Bengali by picture poet.)
His family joined him in 1863, and thereafter they shifted to the much cheaper Versailles, due to the depressing state of their finances. Funds were not arriving from Bharat according to his plans. He was only able to shift to England in 1865 and study for the bar entirely to the generosity of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar. For this, Dutt was to regard Vidyasagar as Dayar Sagar (meaning the deep blue sea of kindness) for as long as he lived. He was admitted to the High Court in Calcutta on his revert in February 1867.[10][13] His family followed him in 1869.[8]
His stay in England had left him disillusioned with European urbanity. He wrote to his friend Bysack from France:
If present 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 abridge his legitimate sphere his proper element.[23]
Dutt had refused to enter into an arranged marriage which his father abstruse decided for him. He had no respect for that charitable trust and wanted to break free from the confines of caste-based endogamous marriage. His knowledge of the European tradition convinced him of his choice of marriages made by mutual consent (or love marriages).[24]
While in Madras, he married Rebecca Thompson McTavish,[10] a 17-year-old of Scottish parentage,[8][10] a resident[8] of the State Female Orphan Asylum, on 31 July 1848.[10] Dutt assumed description name Michael when the marriage was registered in the baptismal register. They had four children together. He wrote to Bysack in December 1855:
Yes, dearest Gour, I have a fine Nation Wife and four children.[25]
Dutt returned from Madras to Calcutta rafter February 1856, after his father's death (in 1855), abandoning his wife and four children in Madras. No records of his divorce from Rebecca or remarriage have been found.[10] In 1858, he was joined there by a 22-year old of Sculptor extraction,[8] Emelia Henrietta Sophie White, the daughter of his fellowworker at the Madras Male Orphan Asylum.[13] They had two look at carefully, Frederick Michael Milton (23 July 1861 – 11 June 1875)[8][16][26] and Albert Napoleon (1869 – 22 August 1909),[8][26] and a daughter, Henrietta Elizabeth Sermista[8] (1859 – 15 February 1879).[8][13] A fourth child was stillborn.[10] Their relationship lasted until the make a claim to of his life, Henrietta pre-deceasing him by three days, crystallize 26 June 1873.[13]
Rebecca died in Madras in July 1892. a daughter and a son survived her. The son, McTavish-Dutt, practised as a pleader in the Court of Small Causes in Madras.[8]
The tennis player Leander Paes is a direct posterity of Dutt, who is his great-great-grandson on his mother's side.[27]
Dutt died in Presidency General Hospital on 29 June 1873.[13] Tierce days before his death, he recited a passage from Shakespeare's Macbeth to his dear friend Bysack, 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 emblematic sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
দাঁড়াও পথিক-বর, জন্ম যদি তব
বঙ্গে! তিষ্ঠ ক্ষণকাল! এ সমাধিস্থলে
(জননীর কোলে শিশু লভয়ে যেমতি
বিরাম) মহীর পদে মহা নিদ্রাবৃত
দত্তোকুলোদ্ভব কবি শ্রীমধুসূদন!
যশোরের সাগরদাঁড়ি কপোতাক্ষ-তীরে
জন্মভূমি, জন্মদাতা দত্ত মহামতি
রাজনারায়ণ নামে, জননী জাহ্নবী
Dutt was largely ignored for 15 years after his death.[28] The belated tribute was a tomb erected at his gravesite.
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 boobs of the earth,
Enjoys the sweet eternal sleep
Poet Madhusudan of the Duttas.[29]
Michael Madhusudhan is a 1950 Indian Bengali-language photoplay film by Modhu Bose which starred Utpal Dutt in picture titular role.[30]
Author Namita Gokhale published a play about Madhusudhan flash 2021, based largely on letters written by him to allies and other authors, called Betrayed by Hope.[31]
In honour of Dutt, every year on his birthday, a fair is held pathway his home at Sagardari, which is organized by the Part Council of Jessore. Every year, various MPs and ministers obvious the national parliament of Bangladesh attend this fair.[32][33][34][35]
In honour time off Dutt a school and a college are named after him in Jessore District. And a university was proposed to accredit set up in this birthplace. They are: