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Michael Madhusudan Dutt
‐
Bengali poet and playwright
Other names
Michael Madhusudan Datta
M. M. Dutt
M. M. S. Dutt
Place of birth
Date of arrival to Britain
Location(s)
WC1H 0DB
United Kingdom
Place of death
Calcutta, India
Date of time spent in Britain
July 1862 – April 1869
About
Born in 1824, Madhusudan Dutt was the son of a lawyer. In 1830 he moved to Calcutta and later studied at Hindu College where he began to write poetry in English and Bengali. In 1842 his poems began to be published in literary magazines in India. He sent some to the editors of Blackwood's Magazine and Bentley's Miscellany in Britain but they were not published. He greatly admired Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley and had a fierce ambition to visit England. Dutt began to consider conversion to Christianity when his father proposed an arranged marriage to a Hindu girl. In 1843 Dutt ran away from home and was baptized. He moved to Madras and married an orphan called Rebecca.
Having returned to Calcutta, Dutt published the epic historical poem Meghnad-Badh-Kabya in Bengali, for which he is most famous. Having found little success with his poetry written in English, Dutt's works in Bengali were more favourably received. Dutt's Bengali poetry and plays influenced and encouraged others like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and later Rabindranath Tagore.
He still had a strong desire to go to Britain and so raised enough money to leave in 1862. Initially he stayed with Manomohun Ghose and Satyendranath Tagore in London and was admitted to Gray's Inn. His second wife, Henrietta, and children joined him in 1863. Beset by financial difficulties and facing racial prejudice, they moved to Versailles. Dutt continued to return to London to attend the Bar dinners and lived in Shepherds Bush for a while. He was called to the Bar on 17 November 1866. Dutt sailed back to India in 1867 and tried to pursue a legal career. He died in 1873.
Manomohun Ghose (lawyer), Dr Theodore Goldstrucker (Professor of Sanskrit at UCL), Satyendranath Tagore, I. C. Vidyasagar.
Works include:
The Captive Ladie (1849)
Krishna Kumari (1861)
Meghnad-Badh-Kabya (1861)
Ratnavali (1858)
Sermista (1859)
Chaudhury, Rosinka, Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal: Emergent Nationalism and the Orientalist Project (Calcutta: Seagull, 2002)
Datta, Michael Madhusudan, The Slaying of Meghanada: A Ramayana from Colonial Bengal, trans. and with an introduction by Clinton B. Seely (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
Gupta, Kshetra (ed.) Madhusudan Rachanabali (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1993) [Collected Works in Bengali]
Murshid, Ghulam, Lured by Hope: A Biography of Michael Madhusudan Dutt (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003)
Murshid, Ghulam (ed.) The Heart of a Rebel Poet: Letters of Michael Madhusudan Dutt (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004)
Exam paper, Society for the Propagation of the Gospels Papers, Rhodes House Archives, Oxford
Image credit
Wikimedia Commons
