The Slaying of Meghanada C.B. Seely, 1/25/03

The Slaying of Meghanada Introduction C.B.
Seely, 1/25/03
Introduction
Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824-73 C.E.), exceptional as poet and playwright in
both English and Bangla (also known as Bengali), in many ways typified educated
Bengalis of his day when East and West met constantly in the administrative capital of
Britain's East Indian colony. His name itself, one part Christian-European (Michael) and
two parts Hindu-Indian (Madhusudan Datta),1 calls attention to the clash as well as the
accommodation of cultures that took place in South Asia at the height of the two hundred
years of her colonial period, a period that would end upon the stroke of midnight dividing
the 14th from the 15th of August, 1947, with the concomitant partitioning of British India
into the independent nation states of India and Pakistan. Datta's magnum opus, The
Slaying of Meghanada (Meghanadavadha kavya) (1861), needs be seen, very much like
its author, as simultaneously both extraordinary and representative. It is an extraordinary
piece of literature, a sophisticated verse narrative in nine cantos; it is utterly
representative of the cosmopolitan culture of mid-nineteenth-century India.
Bengali literary historians yet today mark with his text and its year of publication
the divide between the so-called pre-modern and modern eras in Bangla literature. From
the vantage point of the 21st century, it may seem strange to refer to a time in the 19th
century as modern. It remains, however, the way that moment is viewed from within
Bangla cultural history, and justifiably so, particularly today, when "modern" can imply
passé in a here-and-now world self-characterized as postmodern. But modern contrasts
with traditional, and it is this meaning of modern that pertains to Datta's poem. His
narrative does not deny, negate, or ignore the traditional. It does, though, contrast with
1
The Slaying of Meghanada Introduction C.B. Seely, 1/25/03
what preceded it. Datta's Meghanada marks a major shift in imaginative perspective, a
shift in the Bangla literary sensibilities of its day. Bengal during the 19th century and on
into the beginnings of the 20th century took the lead on many fronts. It was said then that
what Bengal thinks today, the rest of India thinks tomorrow. Similarly, what happened in
Bengal as exemplified in the works of Datta would happen later throughout India.
Modernity in the literatures of South Asia began in 1861, and began with Michael
Madhusudan Datta.
BACKGROUND
Call it a fluke of history, but Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta)—not Mumbai
(Bombay), not Chennai (Madras), not the Asian banking hub of Hong Kong—became the
Second City of the British Empire.2 Chartered in the year 1600 by Queen Elizabeth when
Shakespeare strode the English stage, the East India Company later that same century
chose the Bengal area of the Indian subcontinent for its commercial headquarters.
Calcutta did not exist before the British merchants, Job Chanock prominent among them,
set up shop along the banks of the Hooghly just north of the mouth of that river which
empties into the Bay of Bengal. In the year 1990, Calcutta officially and with panache
celebrated its 300th anniversary. Back in its infancy, business, as it is wont to do, turned
to politics. And after Robert Clive had defeated in 1757 the Nawab of Bengal,
Sirajuddaula, in the Battle of Plassey north of Calcutta, the Company sued for and got the
dewani or revenue-collecting authority for the region. The Company was, so to speak,
now really in business, seriously. It would remain so throughout the 18th century and
through much of the 19th, until the latter half of that century when following the Sepoy
2
Rebellion of 1857—seen from another perspective as the First Indian War of
Independence—the crown assumed authority, dissolving the East India Company and
taking unto itself India, figuratively its crown jewel.
The 19th century had begun in Calcutta with a hotly contested colonial debate
temporarily resolved, a debate that pitted Orientalists against Anglicists. Both
designations referred to the British colonial administrators, not to the indigenous Indian
population. The label Orientalist at the beginning of the 1800s meant something far
different from the connotations that same term has assumed since the publication of
Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). Said's book changed forever the way we look at other
cultures, other peoples. Orientalism, since Said's sea-change study, refers to the political
acts—whether intended by the actors as political or not is immaterial—by which the
West has defined and thereby created the Orient, and created it as its own other,
nowadays capitalized and nominalized into "the Other." Orientalism now refers to an
attitude, a view of the Orient held by the West, the Occident. Orientalism is expressed
through words as well as representation via other media, through books and reports,
through drawings and paintings, through museums of various sorts. Overt military
conquest and even economic conquest are quite another matter. Orientalism points to
what might best be called a narrative conquest, as opposed to a physical conquest.
Orientalism, in the post-Saidian sense, had deprived and still does deprive the non-
Western cultures of agency in the making of their own identity. That is to say, these
cultures were and are defined by the West for the West's own purpose, which is
fundamentally, in Saidian terms, imperialistic even today. From the Saidian perspective,
both the Orientalists and the Anglicists of 1800 were Orientalists. Both contributed to the
3
British colonial enterprise and particularly to the justification for colonialism. Both saw
India in need of British tutelage in order for the people of that land to become something
other than, better than, what they were. In Calcutta of the early 19th century, however,
the so-called Orientalists (in a pre-Saidian sense) were those who argued in favor of both
the classical as well as the vernacular languages of India. They were those who, in many
cases, studied these languages and valued the literatures written in them. The Anglicists,
on the other hand, tended to see little merit in the indigenous texts and indigenous
knowledge systems, though they would concede the utility of learning native tongues as a
means by which to rule the colony. Anglicists felt that the English language itself and the
literature and the culture and the knowledge conveyed through English were superior to
anything found in India.
At the start of the 19th century, the Orientalists among the British colonialists had
won the day temporarily. Lord Wellesley, then Governor-General, the chief executive
officer in India of the John Bull Company, as it was sometimes called—John Bull being
figuratively to Britain what, in some ways, Uncle Sam is to the United States—proved
sympathetic to the Orientalists' view of how to administer the colony and of what value to
place upon the languages of India. It was Wellesley who established in 1800 the College
at Fort William, said fort being the British military stronghold in Calcutta and the symbol
of colonial power. Fort William College, which began instruction the following year in
1801, came into being for the express purpose of training young British administrators so
that they could better perform their duties in the colony. The college provided instruction
in several of the languages of India, languages that would serve this new administrative
cadre well. It was an institution—the Asiatic Society of Bengal, established in1784 being
4
another—where the languages of India and at least some of the texts in those languages
were taken seriously. How seriously and in what sense the Orientalists took these South
Asian languages seriously can be glimpsed somewhat through the subjects for "Public
Disputations and Declamations" staged during the initial decade or so of the college's
existence. For the first of these public displays of the linguistic competence of the
Company servants, in 1802, topics were proposed for three of the languages taught at the
college: Persian, Hindustani, and Bengali. Bengali's topic, pejorative as well as
paternalistic in the extreme, was the following: "The Asiatics are capable of as high a
degree of civilization as the Europeans." And, two years later, the topic for disputation in
Bengali by the college's students reveals more clearly the Orientalists' position vis-à-vis
South Asian languages per se: "The translation of the best works in the Sanskrit into
popular languages of India would promote the extension of science and civilization."3
Orientalists would say yea; Anglicists would say nay, arguing that there was nothing in
those ancient texts that could advance science and civilization.
In 1813, the British parliament passed a renewal of the East India Company's
charter, reaffirming the Company's right to operate in India but at the same time
redefining and refining the Company's responsibilities in terms of Britain's then currently
envisioned colonial mission. The Charter of 1813 recognized education of the colonial
subjects as a major principle upon which the colonial enterprise should be based. Gauri
Viswanathan show how and how well this new commitment to the education of the
natives fit with the overarching efforts of the British to consolidate power in their
colony.4 The commitment to education, however, could hardly be considered one-sided
and the concern of the imperialists only. In 1816 a group of the leading Hindu gentlemen
5
of Calcutta established Hindoo (the older spelling of Hindu) College "to instruct the sons
of the Hindoos in the European and Asiatic languages and sciences."5 Hindoo College
survives today as Presidency College, the premier institution of its sort in the state of
West Bengal and undoubtedly one of the finest colleges in all of India. There were then
and had been long before the advent of the British the tol, a traditional school for the
learning of Sanskrit, and the madrasah, a school for Islamic education. The Company
had even financed the establishment of two educational institutions, the Hindu College in
Benaras and the Calcutta Madrassah, its version—albeit in imperial garb—of those more
traditional schools. But here was a college (the "junior division" of which being what is
now called a "school") that disseminated learning of both the European and Asiatic
sort—its curriculum and its medium of instruction eventually becoming decidedly more
European than Asiatic.
A decade after its founding, Hindoo College had increased considerably the
importance ascribed to English. Of Hindoo College, cultural historian Sushil Kumar De
writes:
The institution was meant to supply liberal education in English, but prominence
was given to the study of English language and literature, and from 1826 [carried
into effect in 1827] all lectures were delivered in English. For the first time
English language was cultivated in this college, not as done before to the slight
extent necessary to carry on business with Europeans, but as the most convenient
channel through which access was to be obtained to the literature of the West.6
6
At this very point in time, an amazingly charismatic and brilliant young man
joined the faculty of Hindoo College, in March of 1826, a month shy of his seventeenth
birthday. His name was Henry Louis Vivian Derozio. Though born in India, he had
Portuguese blood in his ancestry, as the name might indicate, Derozio took his schooling
at the Dhurmtollah Academy in Calcutta, run by a "free thinking" Scotsman. The young
Henry likewise developed into a free thinker, a questioner of religion. He was also a
poet, among the first Indians to write poetry in English, and quite patriotic Indian poetry
to boot. The most famous of his compositions, a sonnet, begins, "My country in the day
of glory past." Derozio's country was India, and he was proud of it.7
Hindoo College appointed the soon-to-be-seventeen Henry Derozio to teach
English literature and history, which he did passionately. His syllabus—strictly speaking,
the college's syllabus for "the first three classes"—from which he taught, in 1828, reads
like a course in Western Civilization: Oliver Goldsmith's histories of Rome and England;
William Robertson's The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V with a View of
the Progress of Society in Europe, from the Subversion of the Roman Empire, to the
Beginning of the Sixteenth Century; William Russell's The History of Modern Europe:
with an Account of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; and a View of the
Progress of Society, from the Rise of the Modern Kingdoms to the Peace of Paris in
1763; in a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to His Son; John Gay's fables; Alexander
Pope's translations of the Iliad and Odyssey; John Dryden's The Works of Virgil; John
Milton's Paradise Lost; and one of Shakespeare's tragedies.8 But Derozio did far more
than that just teach in the classroom. Around him gathered a coterie of Hindoo College
students, by upbringing Hindus, but nonetheless attracted to this smart, charming, young,
7
questioning, atheistically inclined teacher. Derozio's residence in Calcutta developed into
the gathering spot for many of these students, who collectively came to be known as
Young Bengal. These college-going intellectuals were eager to assimilate many of the
more progressive ideas to which they had been exposed, were equally eager (some of
them) to explore their own cultural past and willing (some of them) to speak out against
British abuses of power in India as well as to denounce what they viewed as superstitious,
obscurant practices among their fellow Hindus, including parents. Their outward acts of
defiance against orthodoxy included, most notably, eating beef and imbibing
alcohol—both taboo among good Hindus of the day.
Derozio and the atmosphere of Hindoo College were not the only forces to
challenge Hindu orthodoxy. The Charter of 1813 had granted Christian missionaries,
long held at bay by official Company policy, greater access to India. But even prior to
that, the Bengali Hindu community felt the sting of sanctimonious Christian criticism. In
part in response to such criticism of, among other things, idolatry and the myriad gods
and goddesses of the Hindus, Ram Mohun Roy (1772-1833) and associates established in
1828 the Brahmo Sabha (The Assembly of Brahma), subsequently recast and renamed
the Brahmo Samaj (The Society of Brahma). Purified Hinduism, of Ram Mohun Roy's
creation, consisted of a monotheistic religion, devoid of any anthropomorphic deity. The
"Brahma" here is not the god that is part of what is sometimes referred to as the
triumvirate of Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva but instead the abstract principle of "brahman,"
ethereal divinity pure and simple. This re-envisioned Hinduism, grounded upon the
ancient Hindu sacred texts known as the Upanishads, formed the basis for the Brahmo
Samaj's theology. Brahmoism was still Hinduism, but it looked very much like a form of
8
Christianity without Christ. Though from one perspective still Hinduism, the Brahmo
Samaj became viewed by orthodox Hindus as apostasy. And Hindus, in many cases,
rejected Brahmos, even their own blood relatives, as outcastes.
During that same year of 1828 the tide had begun to turn within the colonial
administration against the Orientalists and in favor of the Anglicists. William Bentinck
took up the mantle of Governor-General in 1828. During his tenure, the College at Fort
William closed its doors.9 Other institutions of learning, catering to the cultivation of
South Asian languages and knowledge systems, suffered from a lack of official colonial
administrative support. Bentinck was the first of the truly anti-Orientalist, pro-Anglicist
Governors-General. And it was while he governed that the Orientalist-Anglicist
controversy solidified into just that, a real controversy. In the words of one of the
Anglicists, Charles Trevelyan, the Orientalists' objective "was to educate Europeans in
the languages and cultures of the East" while the Anglicists sought "to educate Asiatics in
the sciences of the West."10 Trevelyan's pronouncement came out in a publication
entitled A Series of Papers on the Application of the Roman Alphabet to All the Oriental
Languages, issued from Serampore's Mission Press in 1834. The title itself makes
evidently clear the thrust of the Anglicists. They even wanted to Anglicize the Bangla
alphabet. Serampore, a village north of but close to Calcutta, was headquarters for the
Baptist missionaries, William Carey prominent among them. Carey had been and
continued to be a champion of the Bangla language, not just for the language qua
language but also for its utility as a proselytizing vehicle. He had served as the first and
most prominent professor of Bangla in the Fort William College. But, as David Kopf
notes in his richly documented history of this period, even Serampore College, feeling the
9
pressure from the Anglicists during the Bentinck period, Anglicized its curriculum and
thereby "lost its attractiveness to Indians."11
The Indians' reaction, in general, to Anglicizing curricula may not have been as
obvious or as negative as Kopf's statement implies. It should be kept in mind that the
Hindu gentlemen who founded Hindoo College in 1816 intended its curriculum to
include prominently "European . . . languages and sciences." What did bother a number
of guardians of students who attended Hindoo College was not the curriculum per se but
the extracurricular activities and growing influence of the college's star instructor, Henry
Derozio. These Hindu parents and guardians feared this charismatic teacher might cause
their children—his students—to reject the Hinduism of their forefathers and convert to
Christianity or join the Brahmo Samaj, both equally sacrilegious moves.
Throughout the 19th century but particularly in the first half of it in the
intellectual crucible of Calcutta, Christianity represented not just a religion but also an
intellectual, even civilizational, tradition. Christianity stood for the European
Enlightenment. It stood for Western Civilization. Christianity subsumed within it the
literature of Milton, to be sure, but also that of Shakespeare and that of Virgil and
Homer—however incongruent with Christianity these latter pagans might seem—and all
the other texts included in the Hindoo College syllabus from which Derozio and his
colleagues taught. As Datta would put it in an essay written toward the middle of the
century in 1854, Christianity, the British, and the English language itself were all three
civilizing forces and should be brought to bear on India. Quite spectacularly, albeit
bombastically, Datta employs in that essay the Virgilian conceit of Aeneas approaching
Carthage, having left Troy behind on his destined journey to Italy and empire. India,
10
"this queenly Hindustan," as he puts it, is Dido. Britain, particularly the British imperial
advent into India, is a fair-haired, virile Aeneas. Datta begins this essay of his entitled
"The Anglo-Saxon and the Hindu" with an epigraph in Latin from the Aeneid, (Bk
IV)—Quis novus hic nostris successit sedibus hospes?"—which he translates: "Who is
the stranger that has come to our dwelling?" The answer: It is the Anglo-Saxon. It is the
Anglo-Saxon, who brings with him his language:
I acknowledge to you, and I need not blush to do so—that I love the language of
the Anglo-Saxon. Yes—I love the language,—the glorious language of the
Anglo-Saxon! My imagination visions forth before me the language of the
Anglo-Saxon in all its radiant beauty; and I feel silenced and abashed.12
And this Anglo-Saxon, in the course of Datta's essay, becomes transformed from Aeneas
into the Crusader. But unlike Aeneas—who leaves Dido, who in turn, distraught,
commits suicide—Datta's Crusader has a mission to perform in that land to which he
ventures. "It is the glorious mission, I repeat, of the Anglo-Saxon to renovate, to
regenerate, or—in one word, to Christianize the Hindu."13
Though Datta was himself a Christian convert, he was clearly less concerned with
the theological side of Christianity in this essay than with Christianity as a civilizing
force. Derozio, in many ways an atheist and accused of being such—he denied
it—represented and had preached that same civilizational Christianity to his students,
inside and outside the classroom. And some within the Hindu elite community were
sorely afraid for their sons. One of Derozio's students, Krishna Mohan Banerjee, who
11
would convert to Christianity and become the Reverend K.M. Banerjee, the most
prominent Bengali Christian cleric of his age, described the tenor of some of the
discourse associated with Derozio and his students, at Derozio's own quarters and at a
debating club known as the Academic Association:
The authority of the Hindu religion was questioned, its sanctions impeached, its
doctrines ridiculed, its philosophy despised, its ceremonies accounted fooleries,
its injunctions openly violated and its priesthood defied as an assembly of fools,
hypocrites and fanatics.14
Anxiety within the Hindu community ran high. Rumors circulated disparaging
Derozio, impugning his moral character. On April 23, 1831, Hindoo College's managing
committee called for Derozio's dismissal from the faculty, a decision taken by the Hindus
only, for the British members had recused themselves from this matter that concerned
Hindus and Hinduism fundamentally. In his letter of resignation dated April 25th,
solicited by and addressed to H.H. Wilson, who was officially known as the Visitor of the
College but was in fact the person in charge of the college administratively, Derozio
denied the allegations made against him and decried the managing committee's refusal to
allow him to testify in person before it. Wilson, feeling obliged to abide by the wishes of
the committee, accepted Derozio's resignation. By quirk of fate, eight months later, in
December of 1831, the twenty-two-old Henry Louis Vivian Derozio died of cholera. His
legacy, however, lived on palpably and profoundly, in those labeled Young Bengal.
Nearly six years after Derozio's death, Madhusudan Datta would be admitted to this
12
college's junior department (school), starting in 1837, when he was thirteen years old. He
would remain at Hindoo College, both junior and senior divisions, for the next five years,
five truly formative years of his life. If biographer Suresh Chandra Maitra is correct,
these five years were not just formative but literally transformative of Datta, who had
been, writes Maitra, a "tongue-tied" (mukhacora), shy youth.15 By the time he left that
college, Datta had become a boldly expressive, utterly confident young man.16
Two years earlier, in 1835, Thomas Babington Macaulay had issued his famous
(or infamous, depending upon one's perspective) minute on education. Macaulay, a
committed Benthamite Utilitarian, as were many in Britain at this time, had come to India
only the year before and had been made presiding officer of the Committee on Public
Instruction. The title itself calls attention to the importance placed upon education, a
desideratum-cum-justification of Britain's colonial enterprise. It was the committee's
charge to select, in the interest of improving the education of Indians, the language
through which Company-funded schools would give instruction. The question itself,
whether English or one of the South Asian languages should become the sanctioned
medium of instruction, formed the very crux of that ongoing Orientalist-Anglicist
controversy. From his minute, one can infer that the committee was unanimous in
rejecting any of the Indian vernaculars, Bangla among them. Even Persian seems not to
have been considered seriously. Only Sanskrit, Arabic, and English remained in
contention, and the committee split down the middle on Sanskrit and/or Arabic versus
English. Macaulay opted for English. In his minute he asserted:
13
I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I
could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the
most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed both here and at
home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am
quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists
themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single
shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India
and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully
admitted by those members of the committee who support the Oriental plan of
education.17
Hindoo College, already an English medium institution, was unaffected by the
pronouncement, but such a statement reaffirmed the correctness of their position for those
who attended the college or supported its educational philosophy. The essence of
Macaulay's decision had been urged by a number of the educated Bengali elite including
such a notable figure as Ram Mohun Roy. Roy had argued in a letter to the Governor-
General more than a decade earlier against Sanskrit both as a medium of instruction and
as a purveyor of (worthwhile) knowledge:
The Sanscrit language, so difficult that almost a lifetime is necessary for
its acquisition, is well known to have been for ages a lamentable check to the
diffusion of knowledge, and the learning concealed under this almost impervious
veil is far from sufficient to reward the labor of acquiring it.18
14
And no matter how insulting Macaulay's 1835 minute might appear to be, it was meant
less as a snub of India's cultural heritage than as an endorsement of English as a medium
through which all knowledge, of India's heritage as well as of European arts and sciences,
should be transmitted to the educable Indian population. The way Macaulay saw it,
Within the last hundred and twenty years, a nation which has previously been in a
state as barbarous as that in which our ancestors were before the Crusades, has
gradually emerged from the ignorance in which it was sunk, and has taken its
place among civilized communities. I speak of Russia. . . . The languages of
Western Europe civilized Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo
what they have done for the Tartar.19
But education, specifically education in and through English, was not for everyone,
Macaulay conceded. So what should be the goal of the Company's educational policy?
Macaulay is clear about his objectives:
In one point I fully agree with the gentlemen to whose general views I am
opposed. I feel with them, that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to
attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form
a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a
class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in
morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular
15
dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed
from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for
conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.20
As outrageous as Macaulay's statement on the goals of education might appear
("to form a class . . . of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in
opinions, in morals, and in intellect."), the Company's educational policy proved, to a
degree, successful. Hindoo College, in a sense, had preempted Macaulay's minute. It
was already producing those persons described by Macaulay. Michael Madhusudan
Datta epitomizes the perfect Macaulayan product, acculturated to English tastes, notably
in literature. Little wonder, then, that Datta began his literary career writing in English.
MICHAEL MADHUSUDAN DATTA
He was born January 25, 1824, of the Common Era—the year 1230 by the Bangla
calendar. His father Raj Narain and mother Jahnabi were then residents of the village of
Sagardari in the district of Jessore, which now lies within the borders of Bangladesh. At
the nama-karana or "name-giving" ceremony, his parents called him Madhusudan or
quite literally "the slaying of the demon Madhu," a feat accomplished by Vishnu and thus
one of that god's many epithets, besides being a rather common Hindu name at the time.
Madhusudan was the first issue of this couple. They had two other children, boys who
both died young leaving Madhusudan for all practical purposes an only child.
The family was not poor. Datta's father practiced law. As was necessary for
anyone in the legal profession in those days, Raj Narain spoke Persian, the language of
16
the law courts, a legacy from the Moghul empire perpetuated by the British East India
Company until the 1837 when English replaced Persian in the colonial legal system.
Calcutta, as opposed to a village in the hinterland, would naturally be the place to
practice law. It was to Kidderpore, a neighborhood (then little more than a village) near
Calcutta's harbor that he moved his wife and son, when Datta had reached the age of
eight. Raj Narain plied his profession in the colonial courts of Calcutta, the Sudder
Dewani Adalat (chief civil court), attaining considerable renown and the wealth that often
goes with reputation. He has been described as "one among the three best-known and
highest-paid lawyers" at this time.21 The other two, moreover, appear to have been
formidable rivals: Ramaprasad Roy, Ram Mohun Roy's son, and Prasanna Kumar
Tagore, a cousin of Rabindranath's grandfather, Dwarkanath Tagore.22 However, Datta's
most recent as well as thorough biographer, Ghulam Murshid, dismisses such statements
about the elevated status of lawyer Raj Narain as pure fabrication.23 Be that as it may, the
family seems to have lived quite comfortably, at least through Datta's student days.
Whether from his father or not, Datta had learned Persian, as is evident from his
ability to recite Persian ghazal verse, entertaining fellow Hindoo College students with
such recitations. His primary languages, though, were Bangla and English, Bangla being
his mother tongue. And from his mother, we are told by his biographers, he heard—in
Bangla, naturally—the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, Hindu India's two great epics.
English, not Bangla, may have been his first language, if not chronologically, at least
with respect to his command of it. By the time he became a young adult, he had attained
a phenomenal command of the Queen's English. He flourished and felt comfortable in an
English-medium environment. He read literature in English, much of it English literature
17
or European literature in English translation. An excerpt from the first essay that we have
of his, entitled "On Poetry Etc." and in English, shows his precocity:
It is the misfortune of the modern Muse to be loaded with ornaments which too
often veil her native charms:—To illustrate this, we need not go very far: The
works of a famous living poet—"Anacreon Moore" will serve our
purpose:—Beautiful as the poetry of this writer is, where is the reader who does
not feel a sort of sickening refinement in many passages—a collocation of
epithets and expressions which often prove destructive of that effect which naked
simplicity would produce—Tom Moore, lavish as he is in his similes of "flowers"
and "stars", "breezes" and "Zephyrs", has never written a better line of poetry or
given a sweeter description of a flower than Spenser. When the latter sweetly
warbles of the—
"Lily, ladie of the flowering field"
Fairy Queene.24
Another essay, written in 1842 after he had been at Hindoo College for a number of
years, garnered a prize, a gold medal, presented to him with great fanfare at a public
meeting. Following the simple title of "An Essay," that prose piece bore the lengthy
subtitle of "On the importance of educating Hindoo Females, with reference to the
improvement which it may be expected to produce on the education of children, in their
early years, and the happiness it would generally confer on domestic life."25 English was
clearly his forte.
18
Thanks to Gour Dass Bysack (also spelled a number of different ways, by Datta
himself, including Gour Dos Bysac), his best friend at Hindoo College and one to whom
he dedicated a number of his poems, we have examples of his college poesy, including an
acrostic based on Bysack's name:
AN ACROSTIC
G-o! simple lay! And tell that fair,
O-h! 'tis for her, her lover dies!
U-ndone by her, his heart sincere
R-esolves itself thus into sighs!
D-ear cruel maid! tho' ne'er doth she
O-nce think, for her thus breaks my heart
S-ad fate! oh! yet must I love thee,
B-e thou unkind, till life doth part!
Y-oung Peri of the East! thou maid divine!
S-weet one! oh! let me not thus die:
A-ll kind, to these fond arms of mine
C-ome! and let me no longer sigh!26
Poetry was his passion, but Hindoo College, as its charter declared, attended to
education in both the arts and the sciences. And Datta, through one of his poems,
acknowledges that other branch of a college education:
19
Oh! how my heart exulteth while I see
These future flow'rs, to deck my country's brow,
Thus kindly nurtured in this nursery!—
Perchance, unmark'd some here are budding now,
Whose temples shall with laureate-wreaths be crown'd
Twined by the Sisters Nine: whose angel-tongues
Shall charm the world with their enchanting songs.
And time shall waft the echo of each sound
To distant ages:—some, perchance, here are,
Who, with a Newton's glance, shall nobly trace
The course mysterious of each wandering star;
And, like a God, unveil the hidden face
Of many a planet to man's wondering eyes,
And give their names to immortality.27
The "future flowers" are, of course, his fellow students in the Hindoo College "nursery,"
some of whom would likely blossom into prominence in their adult careers. For those
successful in the arts, there will come fame, indicated here by the very European image
of the nine Greek muses and the laurel they twist into crowns. Nowhere is there
mentioned Sarasvati, the Hindu goddess of the arts and learning; Datta had yet to find his
Indian roots. And there are those among his colleagues who would make their mark in
the sciences, who would develop the perceptive eye of a Sir Isaac Newton, and go on to
reveal something of the mysteries of the heavenly bodies and by so doing become
20
famous. The arts—narratively speaking in this sonnet and in Datta's estimation
generally—come before the sciences in many ways. After all, he contended elsewhere,
Shakespeare, with some schooling, could learn what Newton knew, but Newton, without
the native talent of a Shakespeare, could never learn to write like him.28
Datta would introduce sonnets, of which the above is a somewhat idiosyncratic
example with its rhyme scheme of abab cddc efef gg, into Bangla literature when later in
his career he turned to writing in his mother tongue. There are precious few notable
Bengali poets from the time of Datta to the present who have not composed Bangla
sonnets. That poetic form remains to this day extremely productive in Bangla literature.
After its introduction into Bangla, it migrated to Marathi poetry and to various other
South Asian literatures. The history of the sonnet in South Asia, in languages other than
English, dates from 1860 when Datta wrote to a friend, "I want to introduce the sonnet
into our language," and then included his Bangla sonnet entitled "Kabi-matribhasha"
("The Poet's Mother Tongue"), subsequently revised and renamed "Bangabhasha" ("The
Language of Bengal").29 Beneath his poem he asked rhetorically, "What say you to this
my good friend!" And he adds, "In my humble opinion, if cultivated by men of genius,
our sonnet in time would rival the Italian."30 Five years later, in 1865 while living in
Versailles, France, Datta would send Victor Emanuel a sonnet on Dante, "a little oriental
flower," as he called it, composed in Bangla with both an Italian and a French translation
done by himself, on the occasion of that poet's 600th birth anniversary.31
True to his love and esteem of poetry, Datta aspired from his Hindoo College
days to become a poet. He ardently wished to be physically a part of England and
21
English-cum-European culture. That sentiment gets articulated again and again during
this time in his life.
I sigh for Albion's distant shore
Its valleys green, its mountains high;
Tho' friends, relations, I have none
In that far clime, yet, oh! I sigh
To cross the vast Atlantic wave
For glory, or a nameless grave!
My father, mother, sister, all
Do love me and I love them too,
Yet oft the tear-drops rush and fall
From my sad eyes like winter's dew,
And, oh! I sigh for Albion's stand
As if she were my native-land!32
No matter that he was an only child and had no sister, the sentiments expressed
were heart-felt. It was as if he had two native lands, England and Bengal, emotionally as
well as intellectually, though to date he had never left Bengal. Datta wrote the poem in
1841. It would take him a score of years and some dramatic changes in his life before he
would actually sail off to England in 1862 to study for the bar at Gray's Inn. But his
poetry could, and would, precede him. Possibly emboldened by his receipt of the gold
22
medal for that essay of his, as noted above, he sent off in October of 1842 some of his
poetry to a couple of British journals, informing his friend of this in a feigned offhanded
yet typically effervescent manner, in English, of course:
Good Heavens—what a thing have I forgotten to inform you of—I sent my poems
to the Editor of the Blackwood's Tuesday last: I haven't dedicated them to you as I
intended, but to William Wordsworth, the Poet. My dedication runs thus: 'These
Poems are most respectfully dedicated to William Wordsworth Esq, the Poet, by a
foreign admirer of his genius—the author.' Oh! to what a painful state have I
committed myself. Now, I think the Editor will receive them graciously, now I
think he will reject them.33
In that same month he wrote to the editor of Bentley's Miscellany, London:
It is not without much fear that I send you the accompanying productions of my
juvenile Muse, as contribution to your Periodical.
He identified himself thus:
I am a Hindoo—a native of Bengal—and study English at the Hindoo College in
Calcutta. I am now in my eighteenth year,—"a child"—to use the language of a
poet of your land, Cowley, "in learning but not in age."34
23
The Irish poet Thomas Moore had published in 1830 his biography of George
Gordon Lord Bryon (1788-1824), who, coincidentally, happens to have died the same
year Datta was born. We get a sense of the intellectual excitement felt by Hindoo
College students as we learn of Datta and Bysack reading that same biography, one
lending it to the other, and of Datta's exuberance upon reading it. And then he, in one of
his typically confident assertions, writes to Bysack in November of 1842,
I am reading Tom Moore's Life of my favourite Byron—a splendid book, upon
my word! Oh! how should I like to see you write my "Life" if I happen to be a
great poet—which am almost sure I shall be, if I can go to England.35
The poems mentioned in the letters above, though they got to England by post, were
never published. For the time being, he could "sigh for Albion's distant shore," and he
could revel in the intellectual ferment that went with being a student at Hindoo College.
But that was about to change, dramatically.
Toward the end of 1842, Datta's father decided it was high time his eighteen-year-
old son wed. Datta reacted with abhorrence to the very idea of marriage at this moment
in his life, and specifically to the type of bride his father had chosen for him. A spate of
letters to Bysack, four in three days at the very end of November, reveals something of
Datta's state of mind at that moment.
I wish (Oh! I really wish) that somebody would hang me! At the
expiration of three months from hence I am to be married;—dreadful
24
thoughts! It harrows up my blood and makes my hair stand like quills on
the fretful porcupine! My betrothed is the daughter of a rich
zemindar;—poor girl! What a deal of misery is in store for her in the ever
inexplorable womb of Futurity! You know my desire for leaving this
country is too firmly rooted to be removed. The sun may forget to rise,
but I cannot remove it from my heart. Depend upon it—in the course of a
year or two more, I must either be in England or cease "to be" at all—one
of these must be done!36
"At the expiration of three months from hence I am to be married;—dreadful thoughts!"
So dreadful to him were those thoughts and so strong were his desires to go to England
that Datta made a momentous decision well before the expiration of that stated three-
month period. He opted to convert to Christianity. It might have been his father's plan to
get him married that precipitated Datta's conversion leading to, or so he fervently hoped,
a passage to England.
There were those Hindoo College students who had fallen away from Hinduism
and either joined the relatively new Brahmo Samaj or converted to some form of
Christianity. The Rev. K.M. Banerjee can be pointed to as just such a former Hindoo
College student, and Rev. Banerjee in 1842 was the most prominent Bengali Christian
convert in Calcutta, in all of British India, for that matter. And it was to Rev. Banerjee
that Datta went to discuss his contemplated conversion. In his reminiscences, Rev.
Banerjee confirms what the epistolary evidence has already hinted at: Datta evinced little
25
genuine interest of any sort in Christianity per se, certainly not the fervor of a committed
convert-to-be. Writes Rev. Banerjee,
. . . I was impressed with the belief that his desire of becoming a Christian, was,
scarcely, greater than his desire of a voyage to England. I was unwilling to mix
up the two questions; and while I conversed with him on the first, I candidly told
him that I could lend him no help as regarded the second question. He seemed
disheartened and came to me less frequently after that.37
Datta's father opposed his son's plan completely and seemed bent on thwarting
him. He hired lathials, professional toughs, enforcers who wielded sticks or lathis. To
ensure that their prize and future convert not be kidnapped by his own father and kept
from them, the Christian authorities housed Datta in Calcutta's Fort William. And these
same authorities allowed for but few visitors to see the illustrious Hindoo College student
who turned nineteen that January, 1843. Bysack did get permission to meet once with his
good friend, but the meeting was cut short by one of the British caretakers, "lest I should
be," as Bysack put it in his reminiscences, "tampering with his new faith." It was a faith
or "new light," Bysack recalled, the slightest glimmer of which had not been seen by any
of Datta college friends prior to that point.38 Whatever might have been Datta's real
reason for converting, the baptism took place, on February 9th.39 He recited his own
four-stanza poem, titled "Hymn," for the occasion.
Long sunk in Superstition's night,
26
By Sin and Satan driven,—
I saw not,—cared not for the light
That leads the blind to Heaven.
I sat in darkness,—Reason's eye
Was shut,—was closed in me;—
I hasten'd to Eternity
O'er Error's dreadful sea!
But now, at length thy grace, O Lord!
Bids all around me shine:
I drink thy sweet,—thy precious word,—
I kneel before thy shrine!—
I've broken Affection's tenderest ties
For my blest Savior's sake:—
All, all I love beneath the skies,
Lord, I for Thee forsake!40
The consequences of Datta's conversion were in some cases predictable, in others
not. The marriage his father had negotiated for him did not take place, a consequence
Datta desired. He had to withdraw from Hindoo College, a consequence not anticipated.
Some ten years later, he would have been allowed to stay enrolled there, even though not
27
a Hindu. In 1843, however, Hindoo College did not abide a convert.41 His newly
acquired Christian co-religionists, Europeans primarily, so eager to have him join the
church, on the whole cooled noticeably once he had become one of them. Nevertheless,
Datta, ever the good student, seems to have applied himself to the study of Christian
theology more conscientiously than anyone, Rev. Banerjee included, might have
predicted. But, probably the most coveted consequence of his conversion, a chance to go
to England, failed to materialize, though the desire stayed strong.
After a hiatus of nearly two years, Datta returned to college in November of 1844,
with financial help from his father, who though unhappy about the conversion had not
disowned his only son. This time it was Bishop's College, however, just across the river
from Calcutta and an institution, as the name implies, with a Christian orientation. He
was officially a lay student and neither European nor Anglo-Indian, which put him in the
minority on all counts. He remained a student there for three full years and took his
classes seriously, as both the brevity and in some cases the content of his letters to
Bysack indicated.
Bishop's College, 27th January 1845
My dear Friend,
It is a matter of regret to me that I haven't been able to answer your two
very kind letters ere this; but if you were to know how my time is engaged here, I
am sure you would excuse me. However, at anytime that is convenient to you, I
28
should be extremely happy to see you as well as the friends you intend to bring
with you. By the bye, you ought to address me in the following manner.
"M. Dutt Esqr. or Baboo" (if you please) Bishop's College; and nothing
more. I must beg pardon for this short letter, but upon my word, I can't afford a
minute more; so good-night.
Yours ever the same.42
The instructions on how to address him came after twice admonishing Bysack in
previous short notes. The postscript for one of those read: "You write on the back of
your letter 'To Christian M. S. Dutt from G. D. B.' I do not like it." The last line of
another declared: "I do not like 'My dear Christian Friend M. etc.'"43 To be noted here
and in the letter above are both his attitude and his name, or rather his initials.
Concerning his attitude: The aversion to being labeled "Christian," as though such a
rubric were an essential part of his identity, need not be taken to imply that Datta felt
himself somehow less than a committed Christian. He may have had ulterior motives for
converting, but, as Ghulam Murshid argues, he became a serious student and practitioner
of the religion. At one point, possibly due to the influence of another student who had
come to Bishop's College from Mauritius to prepare for a life of missionary work back
home, Datta even considered becoming a Christian missionary.44 Yet his Christianity
was probably always more intellectual than emotional, more cerebral than visceral. A
Christian he remained throughout his life, but his devotion would be first and foremost to
literature.
29
Concerning his name: Datta did not become "Michael" upon his conversion to
Christianity—was not given any new, baptismal or Christian name at all—but remained
simply Madhusudan. There is in fact no reason to expect a change of name or an
additional name to be bestowed at the time of conversion. The Reverend Krishna Mohun
Banerjee, Datta's senior and himself a Bengali convert to Christianity, took no Christian
or English name but remained Krishna Mohun (K.M.) Banerjee throughout his lifetime.
Murshid includes in his biography a photocopy of the pertinent page from a baptismal
registry where, under the column labeled "Child's Christian name," we find one word,
"Modoosoodan." The following year, after Datta had enrolled in Bishop's College, his
name appears on the college's registry as simply "Mudhoosooden Dutt," [sic] no
"Michael."45 Datta's admonitions to Bysack concerning the manner in which he should
be addressed are all made while Datta is at Bishop's College. The "M" in "M. Dutt
Esqr.," "Christian M.S. Dutt," and "My dear Christian Friend M." can only stand for
Madhusudan, not Michael, for "M.S." perforce must be the abbreviation of Madhu
Sudan. The name Michael becomes evident only after he has left Calcutta and is residing
in Madras. It appears in full on a page of a marriage registry (1848); it appears as an
initial only on the cover of Datta's first book, The Captive Ladie (1849), where the author
is given as "M.M.S. Dutt."46 The first "M" quite obviously stands for Michael.
"Michael," then, turns out not to be any official baptismal name but rather Datta's
assumed Christian-cum-Anglo-Indian moniker, adopted by him probably after his arrival
in Madras but definitely before his marriage some seven months into his stay there.
Precisely when and why he chose to prefix this particular English-Christian name to
his—and not Matthew or Mark or the name of one of the other archangels such as
30
Gabriel—we may never know, for he does not call attention to his new name or the
circumstances surrounding his choice of it in any of his letters that we have.47
It was in 1847 that the course of Datta's life had begun to change again. His
father, once one of Calcutta's most sought-after lawyers (he was what is known as a
"vakil"), had fallen on relatively hard times.48 Raj Narain's relationship with his only son
became strained, even more so, it would seem, than following Datta's conversion. The
specific causes and the depths of the emotional rift are hard to fathom with any certainty.
Quite probably the father's new and reduced economic status affected the way he viewed
his son, still a student in need of financial assistance at age twenty-three. Moreover, in
what would appear to be an effort to obtain a Hindu (as opposed to a Christian) son both
to perform his religiously sanctioned funeral rites and to carry on his lineage, the senior
Dutt took a second wife—then a third wife, for his second wife died almost immediately
after marriage. Datta's mother Jahnabi seems not to have been terribly upset with her
new domestic situation.49 For a Hindu gentleman of that day to have more than one wife
was not uncommon, though a segment of the Bengali intellectuals protested strongly
against polygamy. No issue, male or female, ever came of his father's other marriages.
Whether the father's marital situation exacerbated the problem between father and son
can merely be surmised.
The only direct evidence we have of his mental state around that time comes in
two forms: a short note to Bysack, the last such note to be written from Bishop's College,
and a statement in a subsequent letter to Bysack, written more than a year and a half later.
The initial sentence in the first of these, dated "Bp's Coll: 19th May, 47," reads: "Since I
31
last heard from you I have been almost half dead with all manner of troubles."50 The
second letter, the very next communication from Datta to Bysack, begins as follows:
Madras Male Orphan Asylum
Black Town, 14th February, 1849
My Dearest Friend,
By my truth you wrong me! It is impossible for me to forget you—and
you may rest assured that I have often and often thought of you with feelings of
deeper love than many whom I know. When I left Calcutta, I was half mad with
vexation and anxiety. Don't for a moment think that you alone did not receive a
valedictory visit from me. I never communicated my intentions to more than 2 or
3 persons.51
On December 29, 1847, Datta, "half mad with vexation and anxiety," had boarded
a ship for Madras, fleeing the city of his father, fleeing a father who quite possibly stood
in need of financial help or emotion support or both. The son knew well no one in
Madras, where his ship dropped anchor offshore in January 18th.52 It was through
Christian connections, first established at Bishop's College among fellow students who
hailed from Madras, that Datta found a place to live in the Black Town neighborhood,
and soon thereafter a job as a teacher (the official title was "usher") in the Madras Male
Orphan Asylum, also situated in Black Town. Calcutta likewise had its Black Town
32
neighborhood, though the Dutts of Calcutta did not live there; Black Towns, for better or
worse, formed part of the British colonial cityscape.
In the East India Company's India at this time, orphanages served the children of
the Europeans. Just how European the child had to be was not necessarily relevant. The
father would certainly be a European of some sort, for there has not been found a single
recorded marriage between an Indian man and a European woman until that between
Michael Moodiu Sooden Dutt [sic] and Rebecca Thompson McTavish, on July 31,
1848.53 When Datta joined the orphan asylum staff, two months after landing in Madras,
Rebecca was a student in the counterpart institution for girls, the Madras Female Orphan
Asylum. Four months later, Michael, 24, and Rebecca, 17, wed in a church-solemnized
ceremony, following the procedure known as the reading of the banns.54 In the letter
cited partially above, the return address for which is the orphanage, Datta continues to
Bysack:
Since my arrival here, I have had much to do in the way of procuring a standing
place for myself,—no easy matter, I assure you,—especially, for a friendless
stranger. However, thank God, my trials are, in a certain measure, at an end, and I
now begin to look about me very much like a commander of a barque, just having
dropped his anchors in a comparatively safe place, after a fearful gale!—Here's a
smile for you, my boy!
Your information with regard to my matrimonial doings is quite correct.
Mrs. D. is of English parentage. Her father was an indigo-planter of this
Presidency [Madras Presidency, one of three such administrative units in British
33
India at this time—Calcutta Presidency and Bombay Presidency being the others];
I had great trouble in getting her. Her friends as you may imagine, were very
much against the match. However, "all is well, that ends well!"55
Of Rebecca's "English parentage," we have learned, thanks to the diligent work of
Ghulam Murshid, that her father Robert Thompson, whose occupation according to
Rebecca's baptismal records was "horse artillery brigade gunner," had married Catherine
Dyson, identified in those same records as "Indo-Britton" or, translated into other
nomenclature, Anglo-Indian. Catherine's father had been English (accounting for the
surname Dyson) and her mother South Asian, a father-mother combination possibly
analogous to that of Rudyard Kipling's famous Kim, a lad born in India who could blend
into the "native" population when he wanted to, a lad whose Irish father, Kimball O'Hara,
had served with a military unit and later the railway in India and whose mother is,
curiously, never mentioned by name.56 Rebecca's father's name shows up as Dugald
McTavish and hers as Rebecca Thompson McTavish in the Archdeaconry of Madras'
marriage registry. Robert Thompson dies in 1844, orphaning Rebecca and her siblings.
Dugald McTavish, an employee on an indigo plantation but not the plantation owner,
despite what Datta implies in his letter to Bysack, seems to have given refuge to the
widow Catherine Thompson and possibly some of her children. In 1848, however,
Rebecca is living in the Madras Female Orphan Asylum. Dugald McTavish plays the
role of her guardian. She pays her respects to him by using his surname as hers in the
registry.57
34
In that same letter—it is a lengthy one, making up for better than a year of
silence—Datta tells Bysack of the first book he is about to publish, at his own expense.
Preceding that is almost an aside, responding to the announcement by Bysack of the
death of his father. Datta's gesture at condolences represents the sum total of statements
from him reflecting his religious self at this point in time. "I am sorry to hear of your
severe loss, but, I trust, you have sense enough not to murmur against One whose wisdom
is infinite and who is—merciful God!" There is Datta, the Christian, and his
Christianity—understated, matter-of-fact, and almost perfunctory. He shows much more
enthusiasm for his impending publication:
You will, I am sure, be surprised to hear that, though beset by all manner
of troubles, I have managed to prepare a volume for the press. This will
be my first regular effort as an author. The volume will consist of a tale in
two cantos, yclept the "Captive Ladie" and a short poem or two. I must
give you a description of my "Captive." It contains about twelve hundred
lines of good, bad and indifferent octo-syllabic verse and (truth, 'pon my
honour!) was written in less than three weeks.58
The slim book, entitled The Captive Ladie, contained the title poem and a lesser
verse narrative named "Visions of the Past." Those two, juxtaposed as they are, can be
seen as indicative of things to come. The visions in "Visions of the Past" are Christian
ones, of Adam and Eve and the Fall and the hope for divine grace, all presented in a very
Miltonic meter:
35
They wept—but not in dark despair—they wept
As Guilt—all penitent—when, Mercy! thou
Dost plead—nor plead in vain—in gentle strains
To justice stern to win redeeming grace! (from "Visions of the Past")59
"The Captive Ladie," on the other hand, takes as its subject the elopement of
Prithviraja, the raja of the Delhi region, and the princess of Kanauj, who is the captive of
the first canto. The second and final canto concludes with the defeat, toward the end of
the 12th century, of Prithviraja at the hands of Muslim forces that had invaded
Hindusthan from the west, led by Muhammad Ghuri. It is historical; it is heroic; and it is
Indian.60 The meter of "Captive" is Byronic, octosyllabic, as Datta declares in his letter,
but an octosyllabic that avoids as well as any of the English Romantics the "fatal facility"
of saccharine singsong, which Bryon had warned against in his introduction to his poem
"The Corsair." The events—couched in Byronic sensibilities also, somber and lush at the
same time, tragic and romantic in tone—mark symbolically the fall of Hindu hegemony
over north India.
'Tis morn:—along the Moslem line,
Ten thousand spears all brightly shine,
And many a flashing blade is bare,
And voice of triumph on the air,
As column'd warrior's onward press,
36
With all the haste of eagerness,
When Vengeance sternly wings the feet,
To rush where falchion'd foe-men meet;
On—on they press,—'tis idlesse all,
There stirs no foe on yonder wall,
And wide the portals gape and far,—
Deserted—lone—as if no War
Rag'd round to crush—destroy and mar!—
'Tis noon—and from his car on high,
The sun looks down, his burning eye,
Now sees the Crescent's blood-red wave,
Gild fall'n Husteena's lowly grave, (from "The Captive Ladie")61
Of significance in this pairing of two poems in Datta's first published book is the
contrast in thematic focus between Eden, the Levant, and Christian concerns, in
"Visions," and India and a South Asian setting in "The Captive Ladie"—Husteena
(Hastina) being the name for the capital city associated with present-day Delhi. He had
used Indian material before in his poetry. But the prominence given here to the South
Asian thematic matter hints at a comparable change of priorities taking place in Datta
himself, from aspiring to become a noted poet in English to that of devoting his creative
energies to writing in his South Asian mother tongue. He is by no means turning his back
on English literature. He is, though, looking more favorably toward Bangla at this point
in his life. In February of 1849 prior to the publication of "Captive," Datta penned a
37
letter to Bysack requesting copies of the Bangla retellings of both the Ramayana and the
Mahabharata.62 Later that same year, in August, he writes his college friend again,
setting down his daily regimen of language study, which begins at 6 a.m. with Hebrew,
ends at 10 p.m. with English, and includes Latin and Greek, as well as Tamil, Telegu [sic,
Telugu], and Sanskrit. Datta asks rhetorically, self-assuredly: "Am I not preparing for the
great object of embellishing the tongue of my fathers?"63
In the spring of 1849, Datta had copies of his "Captive" sent to Calcutta—to
Bishop's College, to friends and respected Bengali acquaintances, to John Elliot
Drinkwater Bethune, who was president of the Council of Education at the time, and to
the most prominent periodical publication, the Hurkaru, in hopes of a favorable review.
He tells Bysack toward the end of April that his book "is rising into popularity here
[Madras]."64 To Bhoodeb Mukherjee, a former Hindoo College classmate and someone
who became a leading Bengali intellectual of his day, Datta writes in May: "The Captive
has met with a pretty fair reception here," prefacing that with "I have some intention of
republishing it in London with my new Poem."65 By June, however, the tide had turned.
The Hurkaru deprecated the book. Datta tried to appear undaunted in a letter to Bysack
at the beginning of that month:
I find that your "Hurkaru" has been somewhat severe with me. Curse that
rascal, his article reached me like a shaft which has spent its force in its progress.
Know, O thou noble youth, that I have girt my loins to do battle manfully, even as
a gallant knight, who seeks the loftiest guerdon on this earth—the Poet's crown of
38
laurel-leaf! Methinks, that after the praises I have received from some whose
claims to bestow them are indubitable, I can afford to stand a little abuse.66
Bysack himself was less than enthusiastic. Datta counters, "You seem to consider the
'Captive' a failure, but I don't. For look you, it has opened the most splendid prospects
for me, and has procured me the friendship of some whom it is an honour to know." In
that same letter he adds, "Remember, my friend, that I published it for the sake of
attracting some notice, in order to better my prospects and not exactly for Fame." And,
he reasserts, "I tell you the 'Captive' has produced a favourable sensation here."67
Then came Bethune's patronizing appraisal of The Captive Ladie, sent not to
Datta but to Bysack, who had presented Bethune with a copy of the book:
He might employ his time to better advantage than in writing English poetry. As
an occasional exercise and proof of his proficiency in the language, such
specimens may be allowed. But he could render far greater service to his country
and have a better chance of achieving a lasting reputation for himself, if he will
employ the taste and talents, which he has cultivated by the study of English, in
improving the standard and adding to the stock of the poems of his own language,
if poetry, at all events, he must write.68
Bysack agreed completely with Bethune. In his letter to his friend, in which he
paraphrased Bethune's letter to him, Bysack admonished Datta to do what the
Englishman urged:
39
His advice is the best you can adopt. It is an advice that I have always given you
and will din into your ears all my life. . . . We do not want another Byron or
another Shelley in English; what we lack in a Byron or a Shelley in Bengali
literature.69
Bethune would become a founding member of the Vernacular Literature Society
the following year.70 In a way, such a society might seem to be antithetical to the
Anglicists' and Macaulay's desideratum in his minute of 1835 of producing "persons,
Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect."
But times had changed, and so had the Company's educational goals. The colonial
enterprise needed less the educated, sophisticated brown-skinned "Englishman" and more
the capable bureaucrat, competent to function in offices throughout the colony, fit to
handle the quotidian minutia of empire.71 Datta, in many ways, epitomized the absolute
success of Macaulay's and the Anglicists' original project. He was the equal of the
English in taste and intellect. He and his kind may have become, in a certain sense, a
threat, or at least credible competition. What better way to neutralize that competition
than for Englishmen like Bethune to support a vernacular literary society?
As noted above, Datta had shown interest in Bangla texts, the Hindu epics of his
childhood, even prior to the publication of his first book of poetry in English. Poor
notices in the English-language press for The Captive Ladie combined with Bethune's
and Bysack's frank directives may have encouraged Datta's move away from English and
into the field of Bangla literature. It took ten more years, however, before the first of his
40
Bangla pieces, a five-act play based upon an episode from the Mahabharata, appeared.
Meanwhile, he continued to write in English. Besides carrying out his duties as a
schoolteacher, Datta edited or assisted in the editing of several English-language journals:
Madras Circulator and General Chronicle, Athenaeum, Spectator, and Hindoo
Chronicle. Under the pseudonym of Timothy Penpoem, he also published a number of
his own poems in these periodicals. And his reading of literature, in a number of
languages including English, never ceased. The breadth of that reading cannot but
impress. In his essay, "The Anglo-Saxon and the Hindu," which he wrote and delivered
as a public lecture in 1854 or possibly somewhat before that time, he makes reference to
Eva and Topsy from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, employing the
disparity between the two of them to reinforce the disparity between the glorious Anglo-
Saxon and, in Datta's colorful rhetoric, the degraded Hindu.
You now see before you, as it were, on a stage, two actors—the Anglo-
Saxon and the Hindu. One of them is indeed well-graced, ravishing the eyes of
the audience with his manly beauty—enchanting the ears of the audience with the
dulcet tones of his voice! The other, I fear, is ill favoured, worn out by the
ceaseless waves of time, hoarse and dissonant as an untuned harp, as an unstrung
lute. . . .
And then the parallel pairings, Octavius vs. Brutus, Eva vs. Topsy, to emphasize the
nature of the central pair, the Anglo-Saxon vs. the Hindu:
41
Octavius feasting in the tent of the luxurious Antony, the golden goblet blushing
and sparkly with the delicious blood of the vine of sunny Italy in his hand, the
chaplet of dewy roses on his head; Brutus sternly watches the purple current of
life, ebbing out from the ghastly wound inflicted by his own suicidal hands! Eva,
with the transplanted rose of the West, blooming on her cheek, the blue heaven of
her eyes beaming with cloudless sunlight; and poor Topsy—the degraded
daughter of a degraded race, standing before her like a ghastly phantom, an
unearthly vision! Flowering Youth, decaying age; radiant beauty, hideous
deformity; exulting valour, pallid fear; sparkling diamond, dim crystal;—but why
should I multiply such images? The contrast is indeed very great!72
Stowe's book came out in 1852. A mere year or so later, in far-off Madras, Datta had
obtained a copy of the book and already read it.
Datta's father died in 1855. His mother had passed away several years before
that. Bysack wrote his friend to inform him of his father's death and to tell him to return
to Calcutta to ensure his inheritance. Datta replied in late December that year, saying,
among other things, "Yes, dearest Gour, I have a fine English wife and four children."73
He arrived in Calcutta in February 1856, alone. Rebecca and their four children never
joined him. Instead, he took up with another European lady, Henrietta Sophia White,
someone he had known in Madras who followed in to Calcutta. Michael Madhusudan
Datta seems to have had no further contact with Rebecca. Henrietta would bear him a
daughter and two sons—a fourth child was still born—and remain his lifelong
companion, whether legal wife or not is to this day unconfirmed. No records of divorce
42
or remarriage have yet been discovered. In 1862 he realized his dream, his overriding
fixation, when he finally journeyed to England, to study law. Henrietta would eventually
join him, but in Versailles to where he had repaired, for it was cheaper to live there than
in London. Still then, in France they and their children passed their days in virtual
penury. After having been called to the bar in London, he returned home to Calcutta in
1867. That same year, though not immediately, Datta got accepted as a barrister by
Calcutta's High Court, but only after overcoming serious opposition to him on personal
grounds from some of the local legal establishment who knew the flamboyant poet by
reputation. Henrietta and children followed him back to India. There he practiced law
intermittently and with limited success.
Though he continued to write, Datta's productive days as poet and playwright, for
all intents and purposes, had come to an end. A volume of his Bangla sonnets appeared
in 1866, while he and the family were still in Europe. In 1873, the year of his death, he
managed to complete a play, though never got the chance to polish it to his satisfaction.
His prose version of the Iliad, entitled "The Slaying of Hector," remained half completed.
Michael and Henrietta died within three days of each other in June of1873 in Calcutta,
suffering from what would appear to have been consumption, the quintessential
Romantic's disease of the 19th century, though the cause of their deaths was never
specifically identified as such. Bysack observed Datta during his last days, "gasping
under the excruciating effects of his disease, blood oozing from his mouth, his wife lying
in high fever on the floor."74 Biographers have listed liver, spleen, and throat ailments,
and also dropsy (edema) due to cirrhosis of the liver. Ghulam Murshid, the latest of those
43
biographers, adds to that list heart disease.75 Michael Madhusudan Datta was but forty-
nine when he succumbed, and Henrietta, thirty-seven.
The period between 1858 and 1862—two years after he had returned form Madras
and right up to when he went to England—was a time characterized by the editor of
Datta's collected works as a veritable "festival of creativity." In this span of five years,
Datta published five plays, three narrative poems (one of four cantos, one of nine, and the
other eleven cantos long), and a sizeable collection of lyrics organized around the Radha-
Krishna theme, all in Bangla. Along with all of this, he found time to translate three
plays from Bangla into English—one, a Bangla rendition of a Sanskrit drama,
"Ratnavali"; another, his own original play, "Sermista," based upon an episode from the
Mahabharata; and a third translation, that of "Nil Darpan" by Dinabandhu Mitra, the
politically controversial piece depicting cruelties inflicted upon the peasantry by British
indigo planters in Bengal.
The first of these English translations, along with the Bangla version from which
he did the translation, served as the impetus for Datta to begin his own career as a
playwright and poet in Bangla. The incident concerning how Datta came to pen his very
first piece of literature in Bangla—the Bangla original of his play "Sermista"—is related
by Bysack in his essay of reminiscences. He had taken Datta to a rehearsal of
Ramnarayan Tarkaratna's Bangla rendition of "Ratnavali," the drama originally
composed in Sanskrit by Harsavardhana (606-647 C.E.). Tarkaratna, an accomplished
Sanskrit scholar and also one of the earliest playwrights in Bangla, had translated the
Sanskrit drama into Bangla. Tarkaratna's Bangla play was to be performed on the stage
of the short-lived but highly influential Belgachia Theatre, a theater founded and
44
supported by the brothers Pratap Chandra and Isvar Chandra Singh. As per the custom at
the time, the local British elite would be invited to attend, and for their sake an English
translation needed to be prepared. Bysack had persuaded the Singhs, who were known as
the rajas of Paikpara, to engage Datta to do the translation, for Datta, Bysack well knew,
was a master craftsman with the English language. After attending the first rehearsal and
even before he had embarked upon the translation, Datta, according to Bysack, said to
him, "What a pity the rajas should have spent such a lot of money on such a miserable
play. I wish I had known of it before, as I could have given you a piece worthy of your
theater."76 Bysack writes that he laughed at the very idea of his friend, who had never
before composed anything in Bangla, now implying that he could produce a play in
Bangla. A week later Datta handed Bysack a draft of the first act of what would be a
five-act play, utterly Shakespearean in formal characteristics, about the triangular
relationship involving the king Yayati, his wife Devayani, and Sermista, daughter of the
Asuras' monarch but also both servant to Devayani and mother, illicitly, of children by
Yayati.
The first staging of "Sermista" took place in September of 1859. Even before
that, the rajas of Paikpara had urged Datta to turn his hand to drama of another sort, the
domestic farce, "just to show the public that we can act the sublime and the ridiculous
both at the same time and the same actors."77 Midway through the l9th century, the
originally high ideals of the Derozio-inspired Young Bengal group—an earnest,
enlightened quest for knowledge coupled with a rejection of what they viewed as
demeaning superstition—had been misinterpreted by some to mean aping the British and
flouting social norms. In particular, patronizing dancing girls, eating meat, and drinking
45
alcohol, along with speaking a modicum of English, came to symbolize, for some, their
"enlightenment." One of two farces Datta penned during this period—commissioned for
the Belgachia Theatre in 1859 but suppressed by the proprietors out of fear of protests
coming from Young Bengal types—held these misguided libidinous, carnivorous,
brandy-quaffing "liberals" up to ridicule by depicting members of a bogus "River of
Knowledge Society" [jnanatarangini sabha] as carousing with queans, all the while
spewing catch phrases of social reform interlarded with pretentious exhortations to be
free and enjoy oneself.78 Such societies—real societies—had been a prominent feature of
the Calcutta scene in the second quarter of the 19th century. Datta himself, if we have
the right Modoosooden [sic] Dutt, had become a member of just such an organization, the
Society for the Acquisition of Knowledge, while still a student at Hindoo College.79 The
subsequent pseudo Young Bengal mimic-men, however, whom Datta now satirized,
convinced the rajas not to stage Datta's drama. The Belgachia Theatre, begun in 1858
with the performance of "Ratnavali," for which Datta had made a translation into English,
closed its doors for good in 1859, after staging "Sermista," but without bringing Datta's
satires to the boards.80
Failure to get his most recent plays performed did not curtail Datta's creative
exuberance, though he later expressed some regret: "Mind you, you broke my wings once
about the farces; if you play a similar trick this time, I shall forswear Bengali and write
books in Hebrew and Chinese!"81 The two farces were published in 1860, thanks to the
financial support of the rajas, who felt, no doubt, embarrassment at having to scrap the
actual staging. Datta had in 1859 already started a fourth drama, even before finishing
the first. And he cast "Padmavati," name of both the play and its heroine, entirely in
46
Indian settings and with Indian characters, though its inspiration came from Greek
mythology. This sort of incorporation of other traditions, of "Indianizing," of literary
cross-fertilization set the pattern firmly for things to come. "The Slaying of Meghanada"
is a riot of such incorporations, from Milton, Tasso, Homer, Virgil, and Dante, cross-
fertilized with the Hindu epics and much, much more from the Hindu tradition, all very
Indianized. He had, in fact, prepared himself, as he wrote from Madras to Bysack,
prepared himself "for the great object of embellishing the tongue of [his] fathers."
THE POEM
The Slaying of Meghanada (Meghanadavadha Kavya)—a poem (kavya) on the
slaying (vadha) of Meghanada, the eldest son of Ravana, Rakshasa monarch—tells of
Meghanada's third and final fight in defense of the Rakshasa clan, his demise, and finally
his obsequies. Meghanada and the Rakshasas are characters drawn from the larger tale,
the Ramayana. That epic—the name itself means the wanderings (ayana) of
Rama—recounts the adventures of prince Rama while away from the kingdom of
Ayodhya in a self-imposed fourteen-year exile in the forests to the south. During those
wanderings, Ravana kidnaps Rama's wife Sita, who accompanied her husband into exile.
It is this act that brings about the present war on the island of Lanka, the central event of
the entire epic. Rama and his brother Lakshmana, together with an allied army of
"southerners"—identified as monkeys and bears in most texts—have invaded the island
kingdom, there to confront the Rakshasa forces.
47
With respect to epic literature, the South Asian situation differs markedly from
the European. Although Homeric tales are many, there is but one Iliad and one Odyssey.
And if we look to the modern European languages—say, English, French, and
German—we find various epics but not standard English, French, or German versions of
the classical epic narratives. There is no English Iliad, with an identifiable English poet
or author. There are any number of English translations of Homer's Iliad—Chapman's,
Pope's, Lattimore's, Graves', Fagles', and Lombardo's to name a few. But these are
translations and are so identified. In India, on the other hand, a number of modern
languages have within their literary traditions a Ramayana or, in most cases, several
Ramayanas that tell Rama's tale following basically the Valmiki text but, at the same
time, are in many ways original compositions in and of themselves, not translations from
Valmiki. In Hindi literature, for instance, there is the Rama epic composed in the l6th
century by Tulsidasa known as the Ram Carit Manas (the holy lake [Manasa] of the
acts/character [carita] of Rama). Hindus in the Hindi-speaking areas of India look with
pride to Tulsidasa's narrative as the authoritative Ramayana. I do not mean to say that
Valmiki's Sanskrit version is unknown in that language area. But by and large it is
through Tulsidasa's telling of the tale that the Hindi-speaking populace knows Rama's
story. The situation is similar in other modern Indian languages, including Bangla.
Bangla literature possesses a most popular—again, one could say authoritative or
standard—Bangla Ramayana composed by the poet Krittivasa, thought to have lived
during the 14th/l5th century. Here too Krittivasa's Ramayana is viewed with pride as a
Bangla original, not a Bangla rendering of the Sanskrit epic.82
48
Certainly the greatest difference, other than the language itself, between Valmiki's
Ramayana and the later epics by Krittivasa and Tulsidasa is found in a particular aspect
of the characterization of Rama. Rama in the older text was essentially a mortal prince, a
young warrior. The first and last books of Valmiki—considered by scholars to be later
additions to the text—speak of Rama as one of the incarnations of Vishnu. In contrast,
Krittivasa's and Tulsidasa's Rama has become inextricably the god Vishnu. No longer is
the fight between Ravana and Prince Rama a fight between mighty warriors with god-
given weapons and extraordinary powers. It has changed radically, changed into a fight
between good god and bad demon. The demons become even further transformed, in
these vernacular Rama tales, into devotees of sorts of Vishnu, the very god whom they
battle. A transformation—transformations can be seen as part and parcel of the
Ramayana tradition—takes place in Datta's Rama tale as well, but in the opposite
direction. Rama, the apotheosized prince of Krittivasa's pre-modern text, returns to his
mortal—mostly mortal—persona. He is, however, still Rama, a nineteenth-century
Rama, a creation of the colonial encounter.
The Slaying of Meghanada starts, in medias res, with a knowing nod to the
opening lines of Milton's Paradise Lost. It ends by evoking the cremation scene from the
final book of the Iliad wherein are performed the obsequies for Troy's greatest warrior.
The eighth canto of Meghanada has Rama, Datta's antagonist, proceeding to the
netherworld—and these are Datta's own words—"like another Aeneas."83 In this land-
beyond-the-living, Rama passes through a gate emblazoned with the Dantean
admonition: "By this path sinners go / to suffer constant sorrow in the realm of
sorrows—you / who enter, give up all hope as you step inside this land!" (8:207-9) Such
49
palpable presences of Milton-Homer-Virgil-Dante notwithstanding, Datta's epic remains
throughout, and through and through, a partial embodiment of the Ramayana. In
narrating this episode from the Ramayana—the slaying of Meghanada (resonant with,
intentionally, the slaying of Priam's son Hector)—Datta shows sympathy for the
traditionally opposing side, that of Lanka's king Ravana and his Rakshasa clan, in much
the way Milton makes sympathetic his Satan. Meghanada is a text wherein East meets
West quite obviously, where literary traditions blend in the adept hands of Datta to
become the epitome of the cultural assimilation, selective as it was, taking place in the
elite Bengali population of Calcutta during the 19th century. The period has been labeled
the Bengal Renaissance for its reinvigoration and reconfiguration of the Hindu past and
for the florescence of the literary arts. (Muslim Bengali literary historians are apt to refer
to the same period as the Hindu Renaissance rather than the Bengal Renaissance, for it
had a very Hindu tone to much of it.) Meghanada and its author are, each in his own
way, perfect metonyms for their times.
Literary sleight of hand—
The Slaying of Meghanada has much to do with deception, an artful and literary
sleight of hand. It is a slice of the Ramayana, but it is more than that, and different from
that. Furthermore, the deception is not always concealed but trotted out boldly,
proclaimed proudly. Datta writes in a letter to a friend, "People here grumble that the
sympathy of the Poet in Meghanad is with the Rakshasas. And that is the real truth. I
despise Ram and his rabble while the idea of Ravan elevates and kindles my imagination;
he was a grand fellow."84 There is no doubt that the poem itself conveys precisely those
50
sentiments. Yet, when examined closely and contrasted with its most proximate and
prominent literary source, the Bangla Ramayana of Krittivasa (15th century C.E.), and
even with the more distant but more pervasively influential text, the Sanskrit Ramayana
of Valmiki, it becomes crystal clear that Datta has not altered the characters of Rama and
Ravana. They are in Meghanada what they are in the more traditional Ramayanas. But
the deception—and quite obviously Datta enjoys deceiving his reader—works.
Any number of critics could be cited who insist that Datta's Rama and Ravana
become something other than what they are in the mainstream Hindu tradition. For
instance, Rabindranath Tagore wrote that Datta created a Rama who was "more timid
than a woman."85 Ashis Nandy tells us, "As is well known, Meghnadvadh retells the
Ramayana, turning the traditionally sacred figures of Rama and Lakshmana into weak-
kneed, passive-aggressive, feminine villains and the demons Ravana and his son
Meghnad into majestic, masculine, modern heroes."86 But a comparison of the
characterizations of Rama and Ravana in both Datta's text and Krittivasa's Ramayana
calls Nandy's statement into question. Consider the following pairs of passages, when
Rama takes the fallen Lakshmana upon his lap and weeps uncontrollably. First, from
Krittivasa's older text:
Having won the battle, Raghunatha [Rama] withdrew;
Holding Lakshmana upon his lap, he cried profusely.
"At what star-crossed moment did I leave Ayodhya?
My father, Dasharatha, ruler of the realm, succumbed.
Sita, daughter of king Janaka, the stunning beauty of my life,
51
In broad daylight, Ravana kidnapped her, whisking her away.
Now I've lost my fondest sibling, you, young brother Lakshmana;
What need have you of kingdom's comforts? Let's back to the forest.
Oh Lakshmana, the treasured son, the darling of Sumitra,
What shall I say to her to stem the gushing of her tears?
I brought away with me the treasure she'd held tied to her sari;
Then upon the ocean's shore, Providence turned foul for me.
At my misfortunes, Lakshmana, it's you who always sympathized,
Why then now so heartless that you do not respond to me?
Everyone will ask for news, if now I were to go back home,
Where would I find the nerve to speak of your demise?
For my sake, brother, do not die;
I shall take you with me, go begging in some distant land.
I have no need of royal wealth, nor have I need for Sita;
I shall cast myself into the sea, grief-stricken over you.
From dawn to dusk, throughout the whole wide world,
Am I to be notorious, remembered for your death?
Get up, brother Lakshmana, before you drown in blood,
Why oh why did you accompany me to banishment?
It is on account of Sita that you have lost your life,
But you, my Lakshmana, I hold as equal to my life.
While bartering for gold, I used a gemstone as inducement;
Complicit in your death, I've stained our Raghu family name.
52
Why did I enter into warfare with the likes of Ravana?
What being stole the treasure-trove containing my life's breath?
The greatest among warriors, that Arjuna of the Pandavas,
Compared with him, you, Lakshmana, are an ocean of more skill.
Such a Lakshmana like this of mine that Rakshasa slew;
I can never more return back home, to the land of Ayodhya.
It was my father's orders that I obtain the royal parasol and sceptre;
But in this matter, stepmother Kaikeyi intervened amorally.
To keep my father honest, I went off into exile,
To which responded Providence, "Ah, all is lost, ruination!"
Then from the heavens came the call, from the assembled gods,
"Don't cry, weep not, O Rama, you'll have Lakshmana back again."
Rama heaved a heavy sigh, intoning, "Brother, O my brother."
And thus wrote Krittivasa of Rama's lamentation.87
Compare that passage from Krittivasa with the comparable scene in Meghanada
where Rama laments the seeming loss (he will be miraculously revived) of his brother
Lakshmana:
Once their lord regained consciousness, he, grief-stricken, chided—
"When I renounced the kingdom and went to live in exile
in the forest, Lakµma≥a, as night set in, O expert
archer, bow in hand, you, at the door of our hut would stand
53
alert to guard me. Yet here today in the R≠kµasas'
enclave—this day, this very city of the R≠kµasas!—
I, among foes, here founder in these perilous waters.#
Still then, O great-armed one, you forsake me seeking respite
upon the ground? Who will rescue me today, please tell me?
Stand up, brave one! Since when do you not heed your brother's words?
But if by some ill luck of mine—I who am unlucky
always—if you have indeed abandoned me, then tell me
honestly, you who are to me much more than life, for I
must hear. What misdeed is hapless J≠nakÆ at fault for,
in your opinion? Day and night she weeps as she, confined
by R≠kµasas, thinks of Lakµma≥a, her husband's brother.
How did you forget—Brother, how could you ever forget
this day the one who like a mother always cared for you
so warmly. O pinnacle of Raghu's clan, she, a clan
wife, shall she remain incarcerated by Paulastya?
Is it right that you should rest before you first destroy in
combat such a wicked thief—you who are invincible
in battle, bold as omnivorous fire? Arise, my fierce-
armed one, victory pennant of the Raghu clan! Minus
you I am helpless, a charioteer whose chariot
is missing wheels. With you supine on this bed, O hero,
Hanum≠n is powerless, a bow without its bowstring.
54
A≈gada wails pitifully; friend SugrÆva, noble-
minded, is heartsick; good charioteer VibhÆµa≥a,
KarbØra supreme, he too mourns; a host of heroes grieve.
Get up, console these eyes, my brother, by the gaze of yours.
"If, however, you have tired of this awful war, then,
O archer, let us go back to our forest home. SÆt≠'s
rescue, fondest one, is not to be—that luckless woman.
It is not for us to vanquish R≠kµasas. But if you
do not accompany me, how shall I, Lakµma≥a, show
my face upon the SarayØ's far shore where Sumitr≠,
your mother who so loves her son, laments? What shall I say
when she asks me, 'Where, O R≠mabhadra, is the object
of my love, your little brother?' How shall I answer to
your wife, ªrmil≠, and to the people of the city?
Stand up, dear child. Why do you turn a deaf ear today toward
this plea your brother makes, for love of whom you quit the realm
with its amenities and took to the forest? Out of
sympathy, you always used to cry whenever you would
see these eyes of mine moist with tears. Tenderly you dabbed those
teary rivulets. Now I am drenched with water from my
eyes, yet you, who are to me much more than life, will you not
so much as glance my way? Lakµma≥a, does such behavior
ever suit you, brother (you who are renowned throughout the
55
world as one devoted to his brother!), you who are my
everlasting joy. All my life I held firm to dharma
and worshipped the gods—and is it this the gods have given
in return? O Night, compassion-filled, you who nightly make
the flowers, withered by the summer's heart, succulent with
drops of dew, revive this blossom. You who are a fount of
nectar, god of nectar rays, pour down your life-bestowing
juices, save Lakµma≥a—save beggar R≠ghava, kind one."
The foe of R≠kµasas, forlorn, wailed upon the field of
battle cradling his dearest younger brother. All about
the warrior throng howled with sadness, just as howls a stand of
stately trees at midnight when winds blow deep in the forest. (Canto 8: 17-78)
If expressing one's emotions outwardly can be characterized as "weak-kneed" and
"feminine," in Nandy's words, then Rama is that. But he is that both in Krittivasa's
Ramayana and in Datta's poem. There has been no fundamental alteration of Rama's
character. Ravana, like Rama, expresses human emotions when confronted with the loss
of his sons and does so in both the fifteenth-century sacred Ramayana and in the
nineteenth-century secular The Slaying of Meghanada. How does one account for
Nandy's and others' reading of Datta's text and their conclusion that Datta changed Rama
into a weak-kneed, effeminate character? How does one account for the more general
claim that Datta turned traditional heroes into villains and villains into heroes? A major
part of the answer lies in the strategic deployment by Datta of subversive similes. Such
56
similes embellish, as all similes do, but at the same time link incongruous actors or
objects, thereby inviting homologation of characters where no similarity formerly existed.
Take, for instance, the scene early in Meghanda's first canto, the sumptuous
assembly hall in which Rakshasa monarch Ravana sits:
The umbrella-bearer held the parasol;
ah, just as K≠ma might have stood in Hara's anger's flame,
unburned, so he stood on the floor of that assembly hall,
as bearer of the royal parasol. Before its doors
paced the guard, a redoubtable figure, like god Rudra,
trident clutched, before the P≠≥≤avas' encampment's gateway!
Constant spring breezes delicately wafted scents, gaily
transporting waves of chirping, ah yes! enchanting as the
flute's melodic undulations in the pleasure groves of
Gokula! Compared to such an edifice, O Maya,
D≠nava lord, how paltry was that jeweled court built at
Indraprastha with your own hands to please the Pauravas!
With this set of four similes, subversion has begun. Datta does not say that the
umbrella-bearer is Kama, which would imply that Ravana is god Shiva; nor that the
assembly hall is either the Pandavas' camp or their Indraprastha assembly hall, which
would imply that Ravana is Yudhisthira, eldest brother among the five Pandavas; nor that
the surrounding gardens are the pleasure groves of Gokula wherein god Krishna acts out
57
his divine love-play. He says that the assembly room is wonderful, and uses similes
ostensibly to make more vivid the scene depicted. But the implications, however
tenuous, are there. Juxtaposition of actors in the simile and main narrative invites
homologation, or the indirect linking of Ravana with gods Shiva and Krishna and with
the Pandavas, winners, after a fashion, and sympathetic heroes of the Mahabharata war.
Were this the only time such an association occurs between Ravana and the
heroes of Hinduism, one might assume the connection inadvertent or even just an overly
ambitious reading of a poetic conceit. However, these sorts of similes occur again and
again and are built round three clusters of Hindu mythology: the Mahabharata epic
(concerning the war between the Pandavas and their cousins, the Kauravas), Vaishnavism
(concerning Krishna and the Gopis), and Shaktism (concerning the mother-goddess and
Shiva). Another of the many examples is found in the seventh canto, containing Ravana's
retribution for the slaying of Meghanada. Once Ravana has learned of his son's death, he
summons the Rakshasa troops and readies himself for battle. A series of conceits
describes the mustered army:
As the D≠nava-quelling Ca≥≤Æ, born from the power
of the gods, laughed jauntily while she, SatÆ, armed herself
with godly weaponry, so in La≈k≠ armed the corps of
fearsome R≠kµasa—in war a wrathful Ugraca≥≤≠.
After much fighting, Ravana fells Lakshmana. With his son's death avenged, Ravana
retires with his army from the battlefield back to the walled city:
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The R≠kµasa
legion marched into the city—as ferocious goddess
C≠mu≥≤≠, victorious in battle, having vanquished
RaktabÆja, returned shouting, dancing wildly, a smile
upon her bloody lips, her body drenched in streams of gore!
As the gods en masse sang SatÆ's praises, so the bards with
joy extolled in victory songs the R≠kµasas' army!
Candi is not just a powerful, awesome being. She is THE Hindu goddess. That the
Rakshasas should be compared to her is ironic as well as subversive, for according to one
myth the goddess was created from the combined power of the gods for the express
purpose of destroying such god- and man-harassers.
Without question, one of the most intriguing features of Datta's epic continues to
be his characterization of Rama (along with brother Lakshmana) and the Rakshasas,
much of which lies under the surface in those wily subversive similes that are both
traditional—use traditional mythic material—and modern. Such similes act subliminally,
and the variety of reactions to Datta's achievement reveals how well he hid his
persuaders. The final canto of Meghanada ends, somewhat as the entire work began,
with intimations of Ravana's defeat by Rama—in keeping with the traditional Ramayana.
But, the subversive similes, among other narrative strategies, have skewed the reader's
usual response to the tale such that we are now not quite sure whether to anticipate
Ravana's death with culturally sanctioned joy or with disquieting, guilty sorrow.
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Filial piety—
The Slaying of Meghanada has much to do with the father-son relationship. From
the very inception of the story, we find Meghanada, Ravana's eldest son—and only
remaining son, all the others having been killed in the war—enjoying a well-deserved
retreat for rest and recreation. He had not merely overcome but actually killed in combat
the main aggressor against his father and their insular kingdom of Lanka. As he lounges
with his wife and her many fawning handmaidens, word comes to him through a goddess
disguised as his childhood wet nurse that his father's supposedly slain nemesis, Rama, has
somehow revived and threatens once again the island's walled city, also referred to as
Lanka. The gods have intervened, justifying such action by a certain mythic logic:
Inevitably, according to the Ramayana and Hindu mythology generally, Ravana must be
destroyed by Rama, and Ravana cannot be destroyed—according to the logic here—until
all of his able-bodied warrior sons have been defeated. It is unseemly, by Hindu social
etiquette and therefore by the etiquette of the gods, also, that a father should be put in
jeopardy when he has an adult son to fend for him. Upon being notified by the goddess-
cum-wet-nurse, Meghanada immediately ceases his sensual indulgences and rebukes
himself for failing his father in this moment of great need. The scene with its fulsome
luxury owes much to Torquato Tasso's Geruselema Liberato, a text Datta had been
reading with delight at this precise time. (While working on the third canto, he wrote to a
friend, "I am just now reading Tasso in the original—an Italian gentleman having
presented me with a copy. Oh! what luscious poetry. If God spares me for some years
yet, I shall write a poem, a Romantic one in the Ottava Rima or stanzas of eight lines like
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his."88) But Meghanada is no Rinaldo, the hedonistic, arrogant Christian Crusader, who
needs to be coaxed back into the fray. Nor is Meghanada an Achilles, proud but pouting
over the poaching of his female companion by a fellow Achaian. Meghanada's emotions
and motivation at this point—love of and duty toward father—have less in common with
either Rinaldo of Tasso's tale or even the Iliad's Achilles than with Rama, his father's
adversary and hero of the Ramayana.
Two very human and very male features drive the Ramayana: libido and filial
piety. Rama is not forcibly exiled for fourteen years from his paternal kingdom of
Ayodhya. Quite the contrary. His father, Dasharatha, begs him not to go. Dasharatha, in
fact, dies of a broken heart, following the departure of his eldest son Rama. It is Rama
who chooses exile, in order to preserve the integrity of his father, as Rama notes in the
Krittivasa-composed lament cited above: "To keep my father honest, I went off into
exile." Years earlier, Dasharatha, overcome by passion for his youngest of three wives,
had promised Kaikeyi that their son, Bharata—as opposed to Rama, Dasharatha's eldest
son by his first wife—would be installed upon the throne when he, Dasharatha, chose
finally to abdicate. In addition, before allowing her husband to engage in sex with her,
Kaikeyi demanded a second boon, which required her husband's eldest son to be sent into
exile for fourteen years, thereby physically removing him from the kingdom and making
less likely any challenge to her own son's rule. Dasharatha, at the moment addled by lust,
assented. When it came time for Dasharatha to step down from the throne, he dearly
wanted to install in his place his virtuous eldest son—not that the other three sons were
unvirtuous. It was Rama who insisted that he go into exile and by so doing kept his
father true to his promises. Bharata, son of Dasharatha by Kaikeyi and himself a paragon
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of virtue, refused to ascend the throne, instead agreeing only to care-take it in Rama's
absence. He placed a pair of Rama's sandals on the throne in his stead.
Like Rama, Meghanada is his father's eldest son. Like Dasharatha, Ravana,
motivated by sexual desire for a woman, has placed his son (and his entire kingdom) in
jeopardy. Again like Rama, Meghanada comes to his father's aid willingly. Again like
Dasharatha, Ravana, the loving father with true paternalistic instincts, wants not to place
his son in harm's way. But it is the son, in both cases, who insists upon courting danger
(exile, battle) and supporting his father over that very father's objections.
If the wanderings of Rama—the Ramayana narrative per se—can be seen as
predicated upon Dasharatha's immoderate libido, then the attack upon Lanka by Rama
and his forces needs to be understood in terms of Ravana's similarly immoderate sexual
desire. It is Ravana's sister, Surpanakha, who creates the problem. While wandering in
forests away from Lanka, Surpanakha spies Rama and his brother Lakshmana. She is
smitten by the handsome Rama and makes amorous advances towards him. Rama,
toying with her, sends her to Lakshmana, who mocks her and ends up harming her,
cutting off her nose. Surpanakha returns to Lanka bent on getting her brother to avenge
her humiliation. She motivates him through her description of Rama's wife Sita,
inflaming Ravana with lust for the now fancied gorgeous woman. Ravana demands the
assistance of a fellow Rakshasa by the name of Marica, who transforms himself into a
golden stag and entices Sita, who in turn begs Rama to go capture the deer for her.
Ravana, disguised as a holy mendicant, manages to kidnap Sita in Rama's (and
Lakshmana's) absence and spirit her away back to the isle of Lanka. The justification for
Rama and company to invade Lanka and attack Ravana and his Rakshasas is first and
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foremost to retrieve Sita. No matter what the reason for the war, whether it is caused by
his paternal aunt or by his own father, Meghanada comes to that father's aid, the ever-
dutiful son.
Reinforcing the theme of filial piety, Datta employs one of his many epic similes
in the very first canto, alluding to yet another son who comes to his father's aid in time of
need. As Ravana surveys the battlefield on which his last-but-one fallen son Virabahu
lies
. . . Likewise VÆrab≠hu—crown-gem of warriors—
fell, crushing hostile heroes, as Gha±otkaca, raised in
Hi≤imb≠'s loving nest, like a Garu≤a, had fallen
at the time Kar≥a, wielder of K≠lap∞µ±ha, let fly
his missile called Ek≠ghnÆ to preserve the Kauravas.
And here too, there is a suggestion of libido gone astray. Ghatotkaca, a warrior of
tremendous size, was born from the illicit relationship between one of the
Pandavas—heroes of that other Hindu Indian epic, the Mahabharata—and a Rakshasi by
the name of Hidimba. Rakshasas (Rakshasi being the feminine of Rakshasa) in general
are endowed with the power to assume various forms at will. Hidimba, in the guise of a
voluptuous beauty, engaged in coitus with the Pandava Bhimasena. Following the birth
of their son Ghatotkaca, Bhima, who along with his four brothers was already in a
polyandrous marriage to Draupadi, abandoned both son and mother. But Ghatotkaca,
steadfastly faithful, vowed to come to his father's aid whenever and wherever called to
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mind. It was during the main battle narrated in the Mahabharata, between the Pandavas
and their cousins, the Kauravas, that Bhima thought of his son. Immediately Ghatotkaca
appeared and fought effectively on the side of the Pandavas, killing many Kauravas
before being slain himself by the projectile called Ekaghni (literally, "single-slayer," able
to kill anyone, but only one), launched from the bow named Kalaprstha (literally, "black-
back") by the warrior Karna. Even when slain, Ghatotkaca, that mountainous being, was
able to kill additional enemy merely by falling on them.
Meghanada ultimately is killed, as the title to the poem implies. In the ninth and
final canto, he is cremated along with his still living wife (the two are seen transported to
Shiva's heaven in the chariot of Fire—Agni's chariot). His father eulogizes him, and all
the Rakshasas of Lanka mourn his passing. The battle will resume after the poem ends,
for Ravana yet lives and must be vanquished—can be vanquished now89—by Rama, in
keeping with the Ramayana from which comes Datta's elaborated episode. But the tale of
loyal, selfless son Meghanada is now complete.
Datta tells us in one of his letters how it pained him to kill off Meghanada.
[QUOTE]
Meghanada, after all, represents the ideal son, the son that Datta himself had failed to be.
Rather than honor his father's wishes and marry, he had rebelled, going so far as to leave
his father's cultural community and become a Christian. Rather than come to the aid of
his father when his father's fortunes had taken a turn for the worse, Datta the son had fled
Calcutta for Madras, returning briefly once following his mother's death and then coming
back permanently—abandoning his wife and four children in Madras—to claim his
patrimony only after his father had passed away. Meghanada gave his all for his father.
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Even Ghatotkaca sacrificed himself for the sake of his father. Rama, though faithful to
his father, had in fact left him and gone south into self-imposed exile, thereby causing
Dasharatha's premature death. It is Meghanada, not Rama, who served is father best. It
is for Meghanada and, I submit, for himself as a failed Meghanada-like son that Datta is
grieving, a cathartic sort of grieving.
Humanism—
The Slaying of Meghanada has much to do with a mid-nineteenth-century,
Bengali Hindoo-College-fostered humanism. It shows up prominently in the
characterizations of the main combatants—Rama, Ravana, and the eponymous
Meghanada. Though Hindu gods always have had their human aspect, to wit, Shiva as
the marijuana-smoking irresponsible husband, they are also divine. Rama, considered to
have been an actual, historical prince, has long since been apotheosized into one of the
incarnations of the god Vishnu. As opposed to the Mahabharata, the Ramayana is a
sacred text, the mere hearing of which confers religious merit onto the listener. The
Ramayana's Rama, for all his foibles, is understood to be a god. Not so for Datta's Rama.
This nineteenth-century Rama comes to us shorn of his divinity. Bengali Marxists in the
middle of the 20th century noted gleefully this humanizing of deified Rama by Datta and
hailed the poet of Meghanada, however anachronistically, as a good Communist fellow
traveler.90 It is not just Rama who gets humanized at the hands of Datta. Hanuman, the
monkey god and ally of Rama, becomes in Datta's poem neither god nor monkey.
Datta had no problem making human both Rama and the opposing Rakshasas.
Recasting Hanuman proved more difficult. Datta struggled initially with Hanuman's
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simian nature, as we see in his letters to Raj Narain Bose. In May 1860, while composing
Meghanada, Datta writes:
I must tell you, my dear fellow, that though, as a jolly Christian youth, I don't care
a pin's head for Hinduism. I love the grand mythology of our ancestors. It is full
of poetry. A fellow with an inventive head can manufacture the most beautiful
things out of it.91
The dilemma seems perfectly clear. For Datta, it was a matter of separating out the
mythological from the religious in the Ramayana, something akin to the proverbial
classical Indian goose that could extract from a mixture of milk and water the milk and
drink it, leaving only the water. But the mythological so extracted included a flying
monkey named Hanuman who could transport a mountain like Gandhamadana. That sort
of Hanuman seems to have been unacceptable to Datta, too god-like perhaps, too super
monkey, certainly. In the end, Datta has the mountain come to Lanka on its own rather
than have Hanuman transport the mountain from the mainland, across the sea, and to
Lanka. Before that, however, Datta humanizes Hanuman, but does so without making
him explicitly into a man. In July of 1860 he writes:
Excuse the rambling letter and let me hear what favour the glorious son of
Ravana finds in your eyes. He was a noble fellow, and, but for that scoundrel
Bivishan, would have kicked the monkey-army into the sea. By the bye, if the
father of our Poetry had given Ram human companions, I could have made a
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regular Iliad of the death of Meghanad. As it is, you must not expect any battle
scenes. A great pity! Adieu, praying God to bless you and yours,
I am, dear R., ever yours affectionately,92
And several letters later:
I have resumed Meghanad and am working away at the Third Book. If
spared, I intend to lengthen this poem to ten Books and make it as complete an
epic as I can. The subject is truly heroic; only the Monkeys spoil the joke—but I
shall look to them.93
Datta did indeed "look to them," as he puts it, transforming what he clearly acknowledges
as monkeys, in his letters, into something else in his poem.
Let us consider for a moment the imagined geography of the Ramayana's world.
The tale of Rama's wanderings is, after all—despite its appeal throughout the South
Asian subcontinent and Southeast Asia—a "North-Indian," or what could be called
"Aryan-centric," epic. Today one might even call it an "Orientalist" epic, in the Saidian
sense of that term, for the Ramayana clearly makes those imagined characters living to
the south into the Other, demonizing some, animalizing others. In particular, those living
in the imagined southern portion of the subcontinent proper include monkeys as well as
bears, animals all. And it is here that Datta resisted the influence from his Ramayana-
poet predecessors. His southern warriors become just that, southern and warriors. It is
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left to the reader to infer a simian nature in them, or not, as he or she so chooses. No
such nature is actually denoted.
Take, for instance, the occurrence of Hanuman and of Sugriva in the first canto,
where Ravana surveys the opposing forces arrayed against him. Writes Datta,
At the northern gate stood guard the king himself, SugrÆva,
a lion of a hero. And D≠∏arathi watched the
western gate—alas, downcast without his J≠nakÆ, like
the lotus-pleasing moon without his moonlight!—backed up by
Lakµma≥a; the wind's son, Hanum≠n; and best of comrades,
VibhÆµa≥a. The opposition ranks had surrounded
golden La≈k≠, just as a hunting party deep within
the densest jungle, cautiously with teamwork ensnares a
lioness—whose form is charming to the eye, whose force is
furious, like goddess BhÆm≠!
Of note is the manner in which Sugriva and Hanuman are identified—by proper name
with an accompanying epithet: "Surgriva, a lion of a hero" and "the wind's son,
Hanuman." This practice of employing proper names, sometimes with and sometimes
without identifying epithets, is followed consistently throughout Meghanada. If the
epithets conjure up a monkey god in the reader's mind, so be it. Never does Datta suggest
as much. Never does he use any of the several terms for monkey in Bangla. On the other
hand, never are Hanuman and company referred to explicitly as men, either.
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In the third canto, there comes a time when Hanuman tries to impede the
movement of Meghanada's wife, Pramila, as she and her attending entourage of women
head for the Rakshasas' walled city of Lanka. Nrimundamalini, her maidservant, insults
Hanuman by referring to him as all manner of animal. Writes Datta,
The attending N∞mu≥≤am≠linÆ (that wrathful, hot-
tempered woman) twanged her bow inflamed, shouting threateningly,
"Barbarian, bring here at once that lord of SÆt≠! Who
wants you, you wretched little beast! We, by choice, have not struck
the likes of you with our weapons. Does the lioness pick
a quarrel with a jackal? We spared your life, now scamper
off, jungle-dweller! Simpleton, what is there to gain by
killing you? Be off with you, call the lord of SÆt≠ here,
and your master Lakµma≥a, and call that blemish on the
clan of R≠kµasas, that VibhÆµa≥a! Foe-conquering
Indrajit—his wife is pretty PramÆl≠—that woman
now will enter La≈k≠, by force of arms, to worship at
her husband's feet! What man of arms, you fool, can block her way?"
The insults, of course, are rhetorical. Still then, Datta has nicely associated Hanuman
with his more traditional animal character without actually making him so. He, in a way,
has his cake and eats it too. He lets someone from within the narrative call Hanuman an
animal while he, the poet, does not.
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When Datta refers to Rama's southern allies collectively, he does so not as
monkeys but as "southerners" (dakshinatya), pure and simple, "those who dwell within
the southern regions." In the seventh canto, Rama speaks to his supporters:
Save my clan, my honor,
and my life, supporters of the Raghus, and rescue her,
the Raghu wife, incarcerated by the wiles of that
R≠kµasa. You have bought this R≠ma with the coin of your
affection; by conferring generosity, now bind
firm with a noose of gratitude today the entire
Raghu line, O you who dwell within the southern regions."
In the ninth and final canto, Lakshmana has been revived. Rama's forces shout for joy.
Ravana, distraught, having thought Lakshmana slain, is reported to by his minister as
follows:
Hands cupped in deference, that best of ministers replied
with regret. "Who comprehends gods' m≠y≠ in this world of
m≠y≠, Indra among kings? Gandham≠dana, sovereign
among mountains and a god by nature, came himself last
night bearing a panacea and resuscitated
Lakµma≥a, O king. That is why their legions shout for joy.
As at winter's end a snake possesses twice the vigor,
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likewise champion Saumitri shows a renewed spirit—now
intoxicated by the wine of valor. And so too,
with SugrÆva, the southerners are enlivened, like a
herd of elephants, my lord—one hears—with its lordly bull."
Though the southerners are here likened by simile to a herd of elephants,
Lakshmana is compared to the herd's lordly bull. Neither part of the simile is anything
but flattering. Nowhere are the southerners referred to as animals literally, neither as
monkeys nor as any other sort of beast. To be noted is the absence of Hanuman as the
transporter of mountain Gandhamadana. In Valmiki and Krittivasa, it is Hanuman who
uproots the panacea-bearing mountain and flies it to Lanka. In Meghanada, it is the
mountain itself to whom Datta attributes divine qualities, and we know that mountains in
Hindu mythology once had wings and used to fly. Hanuman, by his very absence here in
this passage, is looking more and more the human warrior, less and less the flying
monkey god of the traditional Ramayana.
Transformations from canonical texts—
The Slaying of Meghanada has much to do with the internalizing of the Western
literary canon taught and consumed at Hindoo College in the first half of the 19th
century. Datta wrote his poem for his Bangla-speaking audience, but he expected
them—the educated among them—to see and appreciate his incorporation within it of a
rich sampling from the Western classics. Part of the beauty of the poem stems from
perceiving the manner in which Datta folds text into text. To paraphrase and at the same
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time play with the wording of Macaulay's 1835 minute on education cited earlier:
Meghanada is a text that is utterly Indian in language and imagery but "Young-Bengal"
Indian, "Bengal-Renaissance," "mid-nineteenth-century-educated" Indian in taste, in
morals, and in intellect. The educated Bengali Indian of that day knew his Shakespeare,
had read his Homer. To his friend Raj Narain Bose, in 1860 upon finishing the first
canto, Datta wrote:
It is my ambition to engraft the exquisite graces of the Greek mythology
on our own; in the present poem, I mean to give free scope to my inventing
powers (such as they are) and to borrow as little as I can from Valmiki. Do not let
this startle you. You shan't have to complain again of the un-Hindu character of
the Poem. I shall not borrow Greek stories but write, rather try to write, as a
Greek would have done.94
In the same letter, Datta adds ten lines of his own poetry, identifying them as the opening
lines to the second canto of Meghanada, adding:
You will at once see whom I imitate;
"Who of the gods impelled them to contend?
Lantona's son and Jove's—" Cowper's Homer's Iliad.
Milton has imitated this—
"Who first seduced them to that foul revolt?
The infernal serpent"—Book I
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But in the following letter, he tells Raj Narain that he has reconsidered that "exordium"
for the second canto, stating that it will be quite different. The very next letter came with
a manuscript of the complete second canto. And a letter later, Datta tells Raj Narain:
As a reader of the Homeric Epos, you will, no doubt, be reminded of the
Fourteenth Iliad, and I am not ashamed to say that I have intentionally imitated
it—Juno's visit to Jupiter on Mount Ida. I only hope I have given the Episode as
thorough a Hindoo air as possible.95
The appropriation of literary texts along with their transformation was by no
means confined to works from the Western canon. Datta's primary source of inspiration
is, of course, the Ramayana, a canonical Indian work of literature. Datta saw himself
very much a part of the Ramayana tradition, as is obvious from the invocation that begins
the fourth canto, an invocation that includes a litany of classical Sanskrit poets who
composed literature of various sorts on the Rama tale, both poetry and dramas. He ends
by including in his list of artistic ancestors the Bengali poet Krittivasa:
I bow before you, guru among poets, before your
lotus feet, V≠lmÆki. O crown-gem upon the head of
Bh≠rata, I, your slave, humbly follow after you just
as the wretched poor follow as camp followers of an
Indra among kings when that king goes on a pilgrimage
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to a sacred spot. Meditating day and night on foot-
prints you have left, how many pilgrims before me have gained
entrance to fame's temple, by subduing world-subduing
ƒamana—to become immortal. ƒrÆ Bhart∞hari;
scholar BhavabhØti, called ƒrÆka≥±ha; a man of marked
mellifluence, K≠lid≠sa—known throughout Bh≠rata
as the favorite son of Bh≠ratÆ; most captivating
Mur≠ri, epitome of his namesake's melodic
flute; and poet K∞ttiv≠sa, a repository of
achievements, ornament of this Bengal. —O forefather,
how am I to sport with regal geese upon the lake of
poetic rasa if you do not guide me? I shall string
anew a garland after plucking blossoms tenderly
from your literary garden. I strive to beautify
our language with divers decorations, but where shall I
(impoverished me!) obtain that gem cache, Ratn≠kara, if
you do not help? Show compassion, lord, to this needy one.
Valmiki is that poet, or collectively those poets, referred to as the "first poet" (adi
kavi) to whom is attributed authorship of the authoritative Sanskrit Ramayana. Bharata
stands for the Indian subcontinent. Death—one name for the god of death is
Samana—subdues all the world but can, of course, be defeated by reputation when one's
name lives on. Then comes a litany of real poets, Bhartrihari, Bhavabhuti, Kalidasa, and
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Murari, all composers of literary works in Sanskrit on the topic of Rama and his
wanderings. The list of his "forefathers" ends with Krittivasa, author of the Bangla
Ramayana so dear at this time to Datta's heart. Ratnakara, whose name quite literally
means "gem mine" and who, through penance and devotion to the god Rama, became
transubstantiated into the poet Valmiki himself, is asked by Datta in this apostrophe for
assistance in his own poetic endeavor.
Though the Ramayana constitutes the primary South Asian text informing Datta's
narrative, it is by no means the only one from that tradition to be folded into Meghanada.
The Mahabharata, India's other major Hindu epic, shows up in a number of similes but
also figures prominently in the eighth canto, where, in Datta's own words, "Mr. Ram is to
be conducted through Hell to his father, Dasaratha, like another Aeneas."96 There is no
question but that the Aeneid provides much of the framework for Rama's descent into the
netherworld, where we also find clearly traceable references to Dante's Inferno and
Milton's Paradise Lost. During the descent, there is even an image drawn verbatim
("pillar of fire," agni sthambha) from the Bangla translation of the Bible, an image of the
fiery staff that goddess Maya takes with her to illuminate the nether regions. The hell
Rama visits, however, is not that of the Aeneid or the Inferno or any other Western work
of literature. The hell in Meghanada, with its four directional gates and its 84
punishment pits, some of them specifically named and all of them situated in the southern
region, is that netherworld known as the city of Yama, Hindu god of the dead. It is the
nether region as depicted in the Bangla Mahabharata.
That same Mahabharata, composed in Bangla by Kasiramadasa (17th century),
provides the name of and some of the personality of one of the new characters,
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Meghanada's wife Pramila, introduced into Ramayana lore by Datta. Literary scholars,
knowing Datta's range of reading, have seen in Pramila—as she appears in canto 1 (the
loving bride), canto 3 (the warrior woman), canto 5 (the loving wife again), and canto 9
(the faithful widow-cum-suttee)—aspects of not only Tasso's Armida but also his
Clorinda, Virgil's Camilla, and Homer's Andromache. Datta, moreover, endows
Meghanada's spouse with many of the qualities of an idealized Indian wife. But it is the
Bangla Mahabharata source text that dominates, particularly for Pramila as Datta depicts
her in the third canto. In the Mahabharata, the "Ashvamedha Parva" (horse-sacrifice
book), Pramila appears in her own queendom, a strong warrior sovereign who confronts
Arjuna. It is after the great Bharata war between the Pandavas and Kauravas in which all
Kauravas are killed. Yudhishthira, eldest of the Pandavas, suffers remorse, tries to
commit suicide by starvation, but is admonished against such a sinful act by the sage
Vyasa, who counsels him to perform a horse-sacrifice as expiation. In such a sacrifice, a
horse is decked with silver and gold, allowed to wander at will for a year throughout the
world, but must be protected by an accompanying entourage from anyone who might
seek to possess it. In effect, those into whose realm the horse wanders are expected to
acknowledge the sacrificer's superior power. To the forehead of Yudhishthira's horse was
affixed a shiny gold mirror, signed by Yudhishthira with a warning: "This horse shall
roam the earth at will— / Should any warrior there impede / The sacrificial stallion, //
Him I shall best, by strength of arms, / Shall free this equine, then complete / The
ashvamedha yajna." At the completion of its wanderings, the horse is beheaded.
Yudhishthira and one of the Pandava twins remain in Hastina, while Arjuna and
the others troop behind the free-roaming horse. In various kingdoms, it provokes crises
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or battles, all of which Arjuna somehow surmounts. At one point, the horse enters
Pramila's queendom, a land inhabited solely by women warriors—this, the result of a
curse. As Pramila, foremost of the warrior women, tells Arjuna, she was the son of a raja
who while hunting one day chanced upon Shiva and Parvati making love in the forest.
Parvati caught sight of the peeping monarch and, mortified with embarrassment, cursed
him along with his army (among which was his son) to be women and remain in the
woods. If a male child somehow were born to any of them, he would die after his twelfth
year. Initially Pramila appears hostile to Arjuna, defying the great Pandava warrior. It is
this aspect of her that, in some ways, defines her character. She is strong and confident,
able to stand up to any man. No matter that in the end she agrees to relinquish the horse
and requests Arjuna to wed her. She remains, symbolically, the defiant woman warrior.
Datta drew upon this lightly sketched character (the Pramila episode occupies
only two of the more than a thousand pages in one printed version of the Bangla
Mahabharata) for his own Pramila, who in canto 3 defies Rama and with her entourage of
armed women enters the walled city of Lanka. We have confirmation, in one of the
satirical farces Datta wrote the year before, that his Pramila has links to that character in
the Mahabharata. As already mentioned, Datta had been commissioned by the Paikpara
raja brothers to write two social satires. "Is This What's Called Civilization?" (ekei ki
bale sabhyata?) mocks those pseudo Young Bengal men who, without the benefit of
schooling such as that which Hindoo College imparted to the likes of a Michael
Madhusudan Datta, caroused and visited brothels and pretended to know English, all in
the name of being cultured, Western, "civilized." The targets of the second of the two
satires, "Hair on the Back of the Old Coot's Neck" (bura salikera ghare rom), were those
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of the landowning class or zamindars who took advantage, sexually and otherwise, of the
poor peasants living on their property. The latter work has as its main character the old
lecher landowner by the name of Bhaktaprasad, who lewdly eyes one of the young
peasant girls. To himself he muses, with comical bombast and an air of resignation, that
he might not be able to have his way with her. "After conquering the entire world,
oceans and all," says Bhakta in a theatrical aside, "was not Partha (Arjuna) in the end
bested at the hands of Pramila?" (act 2, scene 1). This same Pramila of the Bangla
Mahabharata will be fleshed out and transformed into Meghanada's wife in Meghanada.
The Meghanada character in Krittivasa's Bangla Ramayana does not have a
named wife, though his wives, plural, are said to number 9,000. Valmiki, in the Sanskrit
Ramayana, gives Meghanada no wife at all. Meghanada, however, already had acquired
a wife in two other South Asian texts to which Datta had access, though he does not list
their authors in the litany of poets to whom he pays homage in the passage cited above.
In neither of these other two texts is she named Pramila but rather Sulocana ("she of
beautiful eyes") instead. One of the texts is a Ramayana written in Bangla some seventy
years prior to Meghanada. Its authors were Jagata Rama and his son Rama Prasada, and
their Ramayana became designated the Jagadrami Ramayana, from the prime author's
name. The other text or rather texts are the various scripts for the Ramlila, literally, "the
divine play [lila] of Rama."
Ramlila scripts come, if not verbatim at least in essence, from the Ramayana,
most often the Hindi Ramayana by sixteenth-century poet Tulsidasa. Ramlila dramas are
annual enactments by real people of the mythic clash between Rama and Ravana,
culminating in the defeat of the Rakshasa sovereign. They usually get staged out-of-
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doors, often but not always progressing from one location to another throughout the town
or village in which the performance takes place. And they are performed pervasively
throughout northern India.97 Moreover, they were also performed in Calcutta during
Datta's lifetime. We know this from one of the most significant works of Bangla
literature of this period, Sketches by Hutom, the Owl (Hutoma pencara naksha). In that
book, the character Hutom, from his bird's-eye vantage point, draws verbal sketches
illustrating buffoonery and the absurd among everyday people and common events in
contemporary Calcutta. One of those sketches bears the title "Ramlila." Though Hutom
shows the reader more of the characters on the periphery surrounding the performance, it
is the Ramlila enactment, held in the garden of one of Calcutta's wealthy elite of that day,
that serves as the central event and motivation for the actions sketched.
The Ramlila, no doubt, was at that time in the middle of the 19th century part and
parcel of Calcutta culture. Furthermore, as evidence that Datta would have been
acquainted with the Ramlila, we have the statement of his best friend, Bysack, indicating
that he, and thus other cosmopolitan Bengalis, knew well this non-Bengali dramatic form:
"The Hindustani Ram Jatra and Ram Lila are performed with great éclat mostly by
professional people. The Bengalis, on the other hand, . . ."98 In the Ramlila scripts one
finds Meghanada with wife, one and only one wife, and a wife who has the name
Sulocana. Though Ramlila scripts vary in length, depending upon the number of days
over which the drama is to be enacted, many of them contain the audience-pleasing scene
of not just the slaying of Meghanada but also his cremation. In these Ramlilas, Sulocana
mounts Meghanada's funeral pyre and becomes a "suttee," the common English spelling
of the word sati, meaning "true wife." (Suttee had been legislated illegal by the British
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East India Company in 1829.) Datta concludes his epic in similar fashion, with
Meghanada's wife—Datta names her Pramila—becoming a suttee and being taken by the
god of fire, Agni, up on high to Shiva and Durga's heaven.
The Jagadrami Ramayana (1790-91) likewise incorporates the cremation of
Meghanada and has his wife, Sulocana, mount the funeral pyre and become a suttee. It
seems quite probable that the Jagadrami Ramayana's Sulocana herself as well as the
cremation of both Meghanada and wife come directly from the Ramlila, or more
precisely from Tulsidas' Ramayana (Ramcaritmanas) mediated through the Ramlila.
And, it is from the Jagadrami Ramayana or the Ramlila or a combination of the two that
Datta takes a part of the character of his creation, Pramila. But Pramila and Sulocana are
not the same person. Though Sulocana and her entourage of female attendants proceed
both to Rama's encampment and to the walled city of Lanka, as do Pramila and her
women in Meghanada, Sulocana and company do so not "like the Amazonians as
described by Michael Madhusudana Datta, but as devotees of Rama," writes Dinesh
Chandra Sen.99 The Amazonian nature stems from the Bangla Mahabharata.100
The cremation proper is lavish; the symbolism, pointed. The pyre becomes like
an altar for Durga, the form of the goddess most widely and warmly worshipped by
Hindu Bengalis. What the Ramlila is to much of northern India, Durga Puja is to the
Bengal region. These two Hindu religious events—Durga Puja and the Ramlila—take
place simultaneously, in both real and mythic time. It is Durga's puja which gives rise
each year to the largest public festival in the Hindu Bengali community. Symbolically,
once a year, in the autumn, Durga—also known as Parvati and by more than a hundred
other names—returns home, just as married daughters everywhere in Bengal return home
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to their parents' household. She arrives on the sixth day of the waxing moon; stays for
the seventh, eighth, and ninth days; and on the tenth day must return to her husband's
house—to Shiva's home on Mount Kailasa. During her stay—during the Durga puja
festivities in Bengal—she is honored ritually, with sacrifice. The tenth day, called "the
victorious tenth" (vijaya dasami) is a bittersweet time for all Hindu Bengalis, since the
goddess (the symbolic daughter) must depart for yet another year. The image of the
goddess is on that day immersed in the Ganges whereby she (her spirit) travels upstream
to the Himalayas and her husband's home. Left behind, once the water has washed away
the clay, is "the empty / splendor of an idol's frame without its life-like painted / image, at
the end of an immersion ceremony"—so Datta depicts the wife of Meghanada on her way
to the cremation pyre. And with that cremation—comparable to the immersion of the
goddess—the ninth and final canto of Meghanada draws to a close. In Hindu mythic
history, with all its many tales intertwined, Rama is said to slay Ravana on "the victorious
tenth," the very day Parvati departs for Mount Kailasa. It is with the slaying of Ravana
that Ramlilas, of no matter how many days' duration, end. By concluding his epic with a
reference to that tenth day of Durga puja, Datta has effectively foreshadowed the
inevitable demise of the Rakshasa king, in accordance with the traditional Ramayana.
There is yet another canonical text that informs part of the last canto of
Meghanada, and that is the Iliad, the twenty-fourth and final book of that Homeric epic.
Ravana's farewell address to his daughter-in-law and slain son recalls those of
Andromache, Hekabe, and Helen to the corpse of Hector. Where Priam had extracted
from Achilles a promise to cease hostilities for eleven days (nine to mourn, one for
cremation and burial, and one to build a grave-barrow), Datta's Ravana requests seven.
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(In the Jagadrami Ramayana, hostilities cease for a day only.) Sraddha or ceremonies
honoring the dead vary in length among Hindus from caste to caste. A week is not an
uncommon period of time for such an activity. The Rakshasas weep for their beloved
prince, "seven days and seven nights."
Épique à clef—
There has always been some question as to what if anything in political terms
Datta meant by Meghanada. He composed and published the poem only a few years
after the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, but no mention of that ever appears in any of Datta's
extant letters. Bengali intellectuals of this period seemed little concerned by, unaffected
by, that rather significant event in British colonial history. Datta clearly had a sense of
history, however. His first published piece, "The Captive Ladie," took the defeat of the
Hindu king Prithviraja and the symbolic start of Muslim hegemony in north India as the
underlying subject matter for his romantically tragic tale of love and death. From his
letters, we know that he was receptive to the idea, despite his false modesty, that he
himself might write a national epic: "The subject you propose for a national epic is
good—very good indeed. But I don't think I have as yet acquired sufficient mastery over
the 'Art of poetry' to do it justice. So you must wait a few years more. In the meantime, I
am going to celebrate the death of my favourite Indrajit."101 Raj Narain Bose had
suggested as subject matter Simhala Vijaya (Victory over Simhala [Sri Lanka]), which,
Datta tells Bose rather nonchalantly, "I have forgotten the story and do not know in what
work to find it; kindly enlighten me on the subject."102 It happened to be a subject dear to
Bose's heart and one about which he later wrote, while extolling the virtues of Bengalis
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as a people: "Prince Vijay Simha, who was banished from his homeland by his father and
with several followers boarded an ocean-going vessel, proceeded to Simhala, and
conquered that aforementioned island and by whose name, Simha, that Simhala island
came to be known—he was a Bengali."103 It would have been a national epic depicting
the conquest of Sri Lanka by a Bengali, with the Bengali being the vanquishing hero.
Instead, Datta wrote about almost the same topic, the conquest of Lanka, but with the
hero, Prince Meghanada, the vanquished.
Datta mined what came to be the source book for another historical tradition, a
work that captured the fancy of many Bengali intellectuals in the 19th century, James
Tod's Annals of Rajasthan. Tod's Annals seemed somehow to provide Bengalis, Datta
included, with a sense of the Indian heroic. Datta took the plot for his drama
"Krishnakumari" from Tod. The Bengali novelist Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838-
94), in his search for truly heroic Indian characters, would follow Datta and others to that
same source book by Tod. Datta, as already noted, thought poorly of "Ram and his
rabble," preferring the "grand fellow" Ravana. Chattopadhyay later in that same century
would write equally disparagingly about the Bengali Krishna, so popular in the Radha-
Krishna songs then and even now. Though he did not refer to the lover of Radha as
rabble, Chattopadhyay rejected that Krishna completely while at the same time professing
his admiration for a different Krishna, a grander fellow, so to speak, the Krishna of the
Mahabharata, the Krishna who did not engage in (divine) erotic sport with Radha and the
gopis but instead drove warrior Arjuna's chariot into battle and counseled killing one's
enemies. First Datta, then later Chattopadhyay, would take this critical look at Bengali
cultural heroes of the day and find them wanting. Each writer in his own way would try
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to discover the truly heroic, which in both cases meant reformulating one's own tradition
slightly while at the same time looking outside the immediate confines of one's dominant
popular culture.
The gestures by Datta toward Indian history and national epic, and his
reformulation of the Indian heroic aside, the question remains as to the political
significance, if any, of Meghanada. Does Datta's text in some way presage or encourage,
as Chattopadhyay's writings would do, a nationalist consciousness among Indians and
thus participate in the nationalist movement that was to emerge in the last quarter of the
century? Can his poem be read sensibly as allegory? Is it in some meaningful way an
épique à clef? The writer and critic Pramathanath Bishi thought so:
Michael Madhusudan Datta's era was a time of not insignificant social
change in Bengal. Such a minor revolution had not taken place in Bengali society
for quite some time. It was not just that many of the English-educated Bengali
elite of that day imbibed the foreigners' alcohol—British culture itself acted upon
their minds like some sort of intoxicant. Each and every English book appeared
in their eyes like a bottle of spirits. They forgot their mother tongue; they
converted to Christianity in hopes of becoming pukka Western gentlemen and in
furtherance of those aspirations even spelled their names in English in the most
contorted of ways; and they nurtured fantasies of being able to dream in English.
Disgust toward "Ram and his rabble," the sparking of one's imagination at the
idea of Ravana and Meghanada—those attitudes were not peculiar to Datta.
Many of his contemporaries had the very same feelings. What was native seemed
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despicable; what was English, grand and glorious. Such was the general
temperament. Ravana and his son stood as the symbolic embodiments of such a
scenario. Ravana's grandeur, Ravana's heroic nature, Ravana's golden Lanka,
Ravana's animus toward Rama—all of these utterly captivated the educated elites.
Though Datta may have written Lanka, he was thinking England. Blending the
above-mentioned attitudes with the contemporary societal situations, Datta cast
Ravana's character as representative of the English-educated segment of society.
He built up Ravana to such proportions that none could be greater—hence, by
comparison, Rama and Lakshmana appear diminutive.104
Read this way, Meghanada becomes all that much more tragic. The cultured,
cosmopolitan Indians, the Hindoo-College-educated class, the Calcutta elite that had
enriched themselves with the literature and science and philosophy coming from the West
and in turn would enrich their own culture, as Datta is enriching his—those sorts of
Indians were doomed to defeat at the hands of the traditionalists, the parochial, provincial
but powerful majority who had tradition on their side. But tragic heroes are heroes
nonetheless. In defeat, Meghanada becomes, by the rules of tragedy, the victor, capturing
one's imagination. Likewise, it will be the vanquished elites who in many ways become
the victors and, during the next decades, will contribute to the emerging nationalist
debate.
A different interpretation of Meghanada comes from William Radice, who finds
the key to this epic in a combination of xenophilia and xeonphobia. The xenophilia need
hardly be argued. It is patently clear in the liberal borrowings from Western literature.
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Datta and the Hindoo-College-educated elite could be said to love the foreign, epitomized
by Western literary culture. On the other hand, the xenophobia, reasons Radice, has
much to do with nationalism.
To trace the nationalist or xenophobic strain in Madhusudan requires
subtlety and empathy: one must be prepared to read between the lines sometimes,
to look for the deeper implications of his writing. But there is an upper layer, so
to speak, which is obvious. Patriotism does not necessarily imply xenophobia,
but it is xenophobia's sine qua non—and patriotism Madhusudan had in
abundance.105
As part of his effort to "read between the lines," Radice "look[s] closely at Book VI, for
evidence of implicit xenophobia—not so easy to detect as the xenophilia of the epic's
Miltonic verse-form, Virgilian structure and Homeric tragic pathos."106 It is in this canto,
or book 6, that Lakshmana actually slays Meghanada.
Radice tells us something of the reading experience. Readers of Meghanada, he
says, see Lanka as "home." The Rakshasas are "us," the "insiders"; Rama and his cohorts
are "them," the "outsiders."107 The "us" here corresponds to Hindu India whose surrogate
becomes Meghanada, slain while performing a very Hindu sort of worship to the Hindu
god Agni.
We have, in short, in Book VI of Madhusudan's masterpiece, an intense
and impassioned projection of the shameful and humiliating defeat of the
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champion of the 'insiders' by the dastardly and immoral tactics of the 'outsiders'.
Is it too far-fetched to suggest that this reflects the shameful subjugation of Hindu
India by the alien, outcaste British?108
"Ram and his rabble," in Radice's reading, take on the symbolic value of colonial
power in opposition to traditional Hindu India. In Bishi's reading, Ram et al. serve
symbolically as traditional Hindu India itself, countering and encumbering the
Westernized educated, modern (vs. traditional) Indians of nineteenth-century Calcutta.
Both of these allegorical, historicized readings, it should be noted, come from the 20th
century, not from an audience contemporary with Datta.
Reception, assessment—
Datta himself provides us, through his letters, with a number of reactions to his
poem. All of them ring positive, which should hardly come as a surprise, given his self-
confidence and ebullient personality. Meghanada was published in two installments,
cantos 1-5 in January of 1861 and then cantos 6-9 in July of that same year. After
bringing out the first installment, and having finished the sixth canto, he bragged to Raj
Narain Bose:
The poem is rising into splendid popularity. 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 impossible to equal Virgil,
Kalidasa and Tasso. Though glorious, still they are mortal poets; Milton is
divine.109
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And throughout that year, up to and beyond the publication of the second installment, he
wrote that same Raj Narain, often including some mention of his cherished epic
composition:
On the whole the book is doing well. It has roused curiosity. Your friend
Baboo Debendra Nath Tagore [Rabindranath's father], I hear, is quite taken up
with it. S--- told me the other day that he (Baboo D) is of opinion that few Hindu
authors can "stand near this man," meaning your fat friend of No. 6 Lower
Chitpore Road, and "that his imagination goes as far as imagination can go."110
Some days ago I had occasion to go to the Chinabazar. I saw a man seated in a
shop and deeply poring over Meghanad. I stepped in and asked him what he was
reading. He said in very good English—"I am reading a new poem, Sir!" "A
poem!" I said, "I thought there was no poetry in your language." He
replied—"Why, sir, here is poetry that would make my nation proud."111
I have not yet heard a single line in Meghanada's disfavour. The great
Jotindra has only said that, he is sorry poor Lakshman is represented as killing
Indrajit in cold blood and when unarmed. But I am sure the poem has many
faults. What human production has not?112
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In July of 1962, Datta finally reached England, the land of his dreams. The month
before, he had written Raj Narain announcing his departure but also the republication of
Meghanada:
Meghanad is going through a second edition with notes, and a real B.A. has
written a long critical preface, echoing your verdict—namely, that it is the first
poem in the language. A thousand copies of the work have been sold in twelve
months.113
Lest we think the above epistolary evidence all puffery and self-congratulation, it
should be noted that one of the leading Bengali authors and emerging intellectuals of the
day, Kaliprasanna Simha (1840-70), felt so moved by Datta's literary accomplishment
that he convened—in February of 1861, a month after the first installment of Meghanada
appeared— a public assembly at which he honored the poet, with words of praise and a
"silver claret jug," at least that was the way Datta himself described the object in one of
his letters. Simha came from a wealthy family and had both the time and the money to
pursue matters that interested him. Much younger than Datta, he had at the tender age of
13 founded one of those societies for the acquisition of knowledge, his being called the
Society for Encouraging Learning (Vidyotsahini sabha). Simha studied at Hindoo
College but completed his education at home. In his teens he had composed several
dramas. He took an active part in the current social reform movements, such as
promoting widow remarriage and opposing both polygamy and prostitution. Between
1862 and 1864, he published his popular and genre-breaking social commentary,
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Sketches by Hutom the Owl, in which, as noted above, there is reference to the Ramlila
performances in Calcutta at this time. With help from Sanskrit scholars, Simha translated
the entire Sanskrit Mahabharata into Bangla, no mean feat by one of the prominent
litterateurs of the day. It was this Kaliprasanna Simha who personally presented Datta
with that expensive token of his—and the like-minded Bengali intelligentsia's—sincere
appreciation for Datta's extraordinary artistic accomplishment. He and his fellow
Bengalis recognized full well that that piece by Datta was something the likes of which
had never before been seen in the Bangla literary world. A new era had begun, and they
wished to acknowledge the event properly.
The Slaying of Meghanada went through six editions during Datta's lifetime,
testimony in and of itself of the poem's positive reception generally.114 Following Datta's
death in June of 1873, an obituary appeared in Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay's journal,
Bangadarshan, the premier Bangla-language journal of the day. It was penned partially
by Chattopadhyay himself and included two poetic tributes to Datta by other poets. For
his part, Chattopadhyay began by saying that Bengal had now learned to cry, that
Bengalis openly, unabashedly were weeping for a Bengali poet. He then lavished praise
upon Datta, mentioning no work of his specifically, not even Meghanada, but ranking
Datta as one of the two finest poets Bengal had ever produced—Jayadeva, a Bengali of
the 12th century who wrote a single work and that in Sanskrit, the Gitagovinda, being the
other poet of distinction.115
A number of years later, in 1881, a piece on Meghanada came out in that same
journal, authored not by Chattopadhyay but by one of the staff writers, which the author
of the article himself regrets, claiming that only Chattopadhyay could do justice to Datta's
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poem. Be that as it may, this author goes on to examine the Meghanada character in
detail, citing passage after passage from the text proper. When it comes to Maghanada's
noble and brave response to Lakshmana in Canto VI, in the slaying scene, the author says
he deems it unnecessary to be specific, assuming that all of his readers know that part of
the poem by heart:
Were I to be capable of conjuring up before you in its entirety that
unprecedented scene of the temple of the Nikumbhila sacrifice, I would be able to
convey to you the magnanimity of Meghanada's character. But such is hardly
necessary. We know full well that that particular section of the poem is imprinted
in searing letters of fire upon the hearts of educated Bengalis.116
What drives the narrative, that is to say, what causes the death of Meghanada, so
the author concludes, is the truth of the axiom that the sins of the father are visited upon
the son. "Due to the faults of the father, the son is destroyed; it is an ancient notion. This
very truism, however, is the essence of The Slaying of Meghanada."117 It is his father,
Ravana, who seals Meghanada's fate and causes his demise. But in a more generalized,
abstracted sense, it is Fate itself that seals his fate, a fate beyond Meghanada's control.
The "modern scientific fatalist" [adhunika baijnanika adrstabadi], according to the
author, says the same thing. Meghanada, our author declares, had been built upon the
solid foundation of fatalism. The majority of the world's immortal poetry, he states
forthrightly, has this philosophy as its unifying principle.118 This "modern scientific
fatalist" aside—whatever our author might have had in mind when he wrote those words
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in 1881—to be noted here is his inclusion, by inference, of Meghanada among "the
world's immortal poetry."
As one might expect, not everyone gave Meghanada unqualified praise. A certain
young man, destined to become the most celebrated Bengali writer of all time, found
Datta's poem lacking. Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), born the very year in which
Meghanada appeared, declared straightforwardly and unequivocally that the work failed,
that it was no epic at all. Tagore, twenty-one years young at this time, may even have
been responding indirectly to the laudatory criticism of less than a year earlier in
Bangadarshan, which he and almost all educated Bengalis read religiously. "In
mahakavyas [literally, 'great poetry,' but also 'epic']," he wrote, "we want to see a grand
personage; we want to see grand feats accomplished by that grand personage."119 None
of that do we find in Meghanada, concluded Tagore. Nothing as glorious as the defeat of
the Trojans by the Greeks. Nothing immortal in the characters, not in Meghanada
himself, certainly, not in Ravana nor Rama nor Lakshmana.
Tagore then spoke of a parallel world that we all inhabit, peopled by characters
from myth and fiction, a world that is different for different cultures with different mythic
and literary traditions. It is a world, unseen, whose inhabitants, without our consciously
knowing it, affect our very thoughts and lives. We know these people. They are, in some
sense, alive for us. Shakespeare's Hamlet frets and dithers, worries and wonders about
his father, his mother, his uncle. Hamlet is "real," he "lives," Tagore would say, a
permanent inhabitant of that world of immortal, memorable characters. What characters
has Datta created with his Meghanada who now take up residence in that parallel
universe of the imagination? The answer Tagore gives to his own rhetorical question is,
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none. Datta has added no lasting, living character to the Bengali reader's mind, not a new
sort of Meghanada, not a Pramila, his wife, not a different Ravana, with personality and
unforgettable character, to accompany us in life.
It is the task of the mahakavi [literally, "great poet," but also "epic poet"] to create
all those immortal companions. Now I ask you, how many new inhabitants has
Michael [Madhusudan Datta] sent off to live in that all-pervasive poetic world
that surrounds us? If he has sent not a one, then which of his writings are you
going to call mahakavya?120
Obviously not Meghanada:
I have not dissected The Slaying of Meghanada limb by limb and examined
each—I have critiqued its fundamental substance, the source of its very life's
breath. And, I found it had no breath of life. I found it was no mahakavya at
all.121
Tagore subsequently explained away his attack on Datta's text as just so much
juvenile exuberance:
Previously, in the heat of youth's brash overconfidence, I had penned a harshly
critical piece on The Slaying of Meghanada. The juice of the mango yet unripe is
full of acid—likewise, immature criticism is acerbic. When other skills are found
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in short supply, that of poking-jabbing-clawing-scratching becomes finely honed.
I, by drawing bared nails across this immortal poem, had been looking for the
easiest way to elevate my name to immortality.122
Youthful, misguided egotism, Tagore implied, propelled his actions. Harold Bloom a
century later would identify this behavior as "the anxiety of influence."123 Here was a
genius, Tagore, encountering a genius of his previous generation as well as encountering
a work of genius, Meghanada. He, Tagore, needed to "misunderstand," to "misperceive,"
in order to control and to avoid being controlled by it and by Datta. It is a classic Harold-
Bloomian case of misprision, as Bloom calls it. It is the anxiety of influence acted out by
the twenty-one-year-old Tagore, the Nobel laureate to be.
Meghanada—Datta's Meghanada—has no doubt taken his place among those
living in the parallel world of literary characters of which Tagore spoke. Pramila—not
the Pramila of the Bangla Mahabharata but Datta's Pramila, of Meghanada—is living
there too. To simply aver that such is the case rings hollow. To prove the existence of
particular characters in his mind-based world is near impossible without the testimony of
some other member of the Bangla-speaking community who could say, "yes, they live in
my parallel universe." We do have some evidence, albeit inconclusive, in the form of
Bengali given names. Meghnad Saha, born in 1893, was to become a world-renowned
nuclear physicist. His given name—the spelling reflects the Bangla pronunciation of
Meghanada—is uncommon among Bengalis, as far as I know. I presume he became the
namesake of the character Datta created. Meghanada is also known as Indrajit,
("victorious" [jit] over Indra), and Indrajit is a rather prevalent name among Hindus in
94
Bengal. But Indrajit serves as an epithet for more than Meghanada. A number of gods
defeated Indra, a Vedic god whose prowess in the later Hindu period had waned. Indrajit
can stand for Vishnu. The prevalence of Indrajit as a Bengali man's given name does not
necessarily tell us anything about the presence or absence of Datta's Indrajit in the
parallel world of literary characters. Of real live Pramilas, there are two Bengali women
about whom we know, one of them because of the fame of her husband, Kazi Nazrul
Islam (1899-1976), a most prolific poet, composer and singer of song, political magazine
editor, and all-around charismatic figure. Nazrul Islam actually named his wife,
undoubtedly after Datta's dramatic heroine.124 He knew Meghanada well, having some
years earlier adapted Datta's epic poem to a dramatic folk genre called letogan.125 And
there lived one Pramila Nag, whose birth date is unknown and who died in the Bangla
year 1303 (1896-97 C.E.). We know little about her, other than the fact that she was a
poet.126
The more persuasive proof that Datta's characters had gained entry to the parallel
literary universe of the mind comes in the form of a Ramayana told by one Dhan Gopal
Mukerji (1890-1936). He was a Bengali, resident in the United States of America and
one of the very few public intellectuals from India in the States during this period. He
contributed to a book entitled What Is Civilization?, brought out in 1926, introduced by
Hendrik Willem Van Loon (author of The Story of Mankind), which contained additional
contributions by, among other notable personages, Maurice Maeterlinck (Belgian poet
and philosopher, Nobel laureate in 1911, two years prior to Tagore) and W.E.B. Du Bois
(leading African-American intellectual, editor of the mouthpiece journal of the
N.A.A.C.P.). Two years earlier, in 1942, Mukerji had published a children's book, Hari,
95
the Jungle Lad. He responded to Katherine Mayo's critical Mother India with his A Son
of Mother India Answers (1928). And in 1930 there appeared his Rama, the Hero of
India: Valmiki's "Ramayana" Done into a Short English Version for Boys and Girls (E.P.
Dutton & Co., New York). Of note is the claim in the title that the retold tale draws upon
Valmiki's Ramayana. When it comes to the chapters named "Indrajit's Fall" and
"Indrajit's Funeral," Mukerji's so-called Valmiki Ramayana transmogrifies into
something based squarely upon Datta's The Slaying of Meghanada. There is no funeral
for Indrajit (Meghanada) in Valmiki's epic. There is in a Ramlila performance, but
Mukerji's depiction of the funeral procession matches uncannily that described in
Meghanada. And, Mukerji mentions Meghanada's one and only wife—no name, just the
designation "wife"—who emerges out of Datta's text, not from Valmiki's or even
Krittivasa's Ramayana. That Datta's Meghanada and wife had so blatantly and
effortlessly assumed their places in this retelling, by a Bengali, of the Ramayana belies
Tagore's youthful assertion that no characters from Meghanada were meet to enter the
immortal literary world. They were indeed meet, and they did enter.
Over the years, Tagore's was not the only voice to negatively criticize Datta's
poem. Pramatha Chaudhuri (1868-1946), editor of one of the most prestigious avant-
garde literary magazines of the early decades of the 20th century and himself a close
friend of Tagore, disparaged Meghanada for being foreign, too foreign. It was not of the
soil, so to speak, and therefore did not smell right—didn't smell at all, oddly enough.
Since the seeds of thought borne by winds from the Occident cannot take root
firmly in our local soil, they either wither away or turn parasitic. It follows, then,
96
that The Slaying of Meghanada is the bloom of a parasite. And though, like the
orchid, its design is exquisite and its hue glorious, it is utterly devoid of any
fragrance.127
Except in the eyes of Tagore, Pramatha Chaudhuri, and a few others, Datta's The
Slaying of Meghanada has maintained its status from its publication to the present as a
worthy piece, nay, a masterpiece of Bangla literature—and not just written literature but
staged drama too. It was dramatized by the great Bengali playwright Girishchandra
Ghosh in the 1877 and performed on the boards of the National Theatre, which had come
into existence during that decade of the 1870s.128 Previous to that, there had been a
staging of another dramatized version at the Bengal Theatre, in 1875; Haraprasad Sastri,
literary scholar of renown, did his own rendition, producing it in 1899.129 And, Kazi
Nazrul Islam, as noted above, adapted Meghanada to a dramatic folk genre called
letogan. Edward Thompson, in his study of Tagore that appeared in 1926, had cause to
mention Datta and his signature poem: "He [Datta] keeps an almost unbounded
popularity, and there can be very few among Bengal's thousands of annual prize-givings
where a recitation from his chief poem is not on the programme."130 And still today,
Meghanada is performed in the theater to rave reviews and appreciative audiences in
Kolkata, done by a cast of one man acting out the many parts. Datta's text lives yet.
97
ON TRANSLATION
Just a word or two on my translation process: The meter I have adopted is a
compromise between the original Bangla and the manner in which Datta suggests, in a
personal letter, that his meter should be read.
You want me to explain my system of versification for the conversion of
your sceptical friends. I am sure there is very little in the system to explain; our
language, as regards the doctrine of accent and quantity, is an 'apostate', that is to
say, it cares as much for them as I do for the blessing of our Family-Priest! If
your friends know English, let them read the Paradise-Lost, and they will find
how the verse, in which the Bengali poetaster writes, is constructed. The fact is,
my dear fellow, that the prevalence of Blank-verse in this country, is simply a
question of time. Let your friends guide their voices by the pause (as in English
Blank-verse) and they will soon swear that this is the noblest measure in the
Language. My advice is Read, Read, Read. Teach your ears the new tune and
then you will find out what it is.131
The most common meter in pre-modern Bangla literature goes by the name of
payar, which designates a scansion system—that is to say, a way of counting poetic
feet—as well as a couplet structure. Traditional payar couplets display end rhyme. Each
line of the couplet consists of fourteen syllables, generally divided in some sort of
meaningful way with a caesura or break after the eighth syllable. The couplets tend to be
semantically self-contained. What might be thought of as a sentence or a clause could
98
spill over from one hemistich to the other, but not from one couplet into the following
couplet. For example, from Krittivasa's Ramayana:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
bhag-na- du- ta ka- he gi- ya ra- va- na go- ca- ra
The bearer of bad tidings went to Ravana and said:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
vira- bahu pa- re vart- ta su- na lan- ke- svara
"Virabahu fell, now hear the news, O lord of Lanka."
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
so- ke- ra u- pa- re so- ka ha- i- la ta- kha- na
On top of sorrows came more sorrow at that time;
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
simha- sa- na hai- te pa- re raja da- sa- nana
Raja Dasanana tumbled from his lion-throne.132
Note the end rhymes: cara/svara and khana/nana. Note too the self-contained nature of
the lines, ending with a punctuation mark, at least in my literal English rendering.
99
Datta took that basic payar structure, retained the fourteen-syllable line, discarded
end rhyming, and allowed for enjambment. That is to say, his poetic lines flow across the
weak boundaries within a line, suppress the sense of a couplet structure altogether by not
exhibiting couplet rhyming, and come to an end, meaningfully, anywhere within the line,
not just at the end of a line. He names his meter amitraksara chanda ("unfriendly-letter
meter," i.e., unrhymed meter) or, in other words, the Bangla version of blank verse, a
major innovation in Bangla prosody at the time. From a scene somewhat comparable to
that narrated above from Krittivasa's Ramayana, Datta writes in Meghanada:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
ni- sa- ra sva- pa- na- sa- ma to- ra e va- ra- ta,
This news of yours is like a nightmare,
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
re du- ta! a- ma- ra- vrin- da ya- ra bhu- ja- bale
Oh messenger! By whose strength of arms the immortals
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
ka- ta- ra, se dha- nurd-dha- re ra- gha- va bhi- kha- ri
are harassed, that wielder of the bow the Raghava beggar
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
va- dhi- la sam- mu- kha ra- ne? phu- la- da- la di- ya
100
has slain in face-to-face battle? With flower petals . . . .
The rhyming is gone. The second line runs into the third: "By whose strength of arms the
immortals are harassed, . . ." The fourth line completes one sentence and begins another,
with only a prepositional phrase.
In my translation, I hold to the fourteen-syllable, unrhymed line displaying
enjambment, though I make no effort to force my lines to be coterminous with the
original. The four lines above I render as follows:
"This news of yours, messenger, is like a nightmare! Beggar
Raghava in face-to-face battle slew the archer who,
by his strength of arms, has harassed even the immortals?
[Did Providence,] with flower petals, . . .
My lines of poetry are neither in Miltonic iambic pentameter nor are they equivalent in
sound to Datta's. As Datta notes in his letter cited above, Bangla does not exhibit the
"doctrine of accent and quantity." Put differently, Bangla does not have stressed and
unstressed syllables. The iamb relies on stress patterns in English, specifically that of
two syllables, one unstressed followed by one stressed, as in the snippet from Paradise
Lost that Datta quotes in another letter:
Who first seduc'd them to that fowl revolt?
Th' infernal Serpent
101
Though I cannot and should not avoid stress within words, for that is natural to the
English language, I have tried to avoid an iambic pattern, or any other pattern, of stress.
Bangla, as Datta tells us, cares as much for stress as he, a Christian, cares for the
blessings of his natal family's Hindu purohit. Stress is used in Bangla for emphasis, but
all syllables within an individual word receive equal stress. One should keep this in mind
when encountering the innumerable proper names in Datta's poem. The reader, of course,
is free to pronounce them in anyway whatsoever in English but might want to try giving
each and every syllable equal weight: RA-GHA-VA. If any syllable is going to receive
stress, it should be the first: RA-gha-va, instead of ra-GHA-va or ra-gha-VA.
I have adhered to Datta's own paragraph divisions. He does indent, and so do I.
In most cases I have reproduced his punctuation, also. All parentheses in my translation
are to be found in his original. I must admit to diminishing slightly the number of
exclamation marks, however. Datta, in his letters, in his poetry, and in life, is
exuberantly exclamatory.
Datta's language is extremely rich, appropriate to the elevated style frequently
found in art epics, or what is sometimes called secondary epics. I have made an attempt
to reflect some of that grandeur with the lexicon upon which I draw. Datta liberally uses
epithets as appellatives and modifiers. I chose not to double-translate those. That is to
say, I have either let the epithet stand untranslated in the poem (but explained in the
glossary) or rendered it into its literal meaning. For example, in the initial line we have
"Virabahu," a character whose name means "he whose arms (bahu) are 'virile' (vira) or
strong." I leave this appellative epithet as a proper name and do not double-translate it
102
into "strong-armed Virabahu." Comparably, in the third line we have the goddess "of
ambrosial speech (amrtabhasini)," an epithet for the goddess Sarasvati, also known as
Bharati. I translate this literally but do not include the proper name, Amrtabhasini, or add
the word Sarasvati, which does not appear here in the text at all. When, in lines 7 and 8,
the reader finds "the hope of Rakshasas" and "conqueror of Indra" and "Meghanada"
(literally: "cloud [megha]-noise [nada]" or "thunder") all together, she or he can rest
assured that all three epithets occur in the original text: raksasabharasa / indrajit
meghanade. I treat two of these as adjectival ("the hope of Rakshasas"; "conqueror of
Indra") and one, the final member of the series, as an appellative epithet ("Meghanada").
Datta employs his epithets as poetic ornamentations in several ways: their variety
adds a lushness to the text, their tonal qualities often provide alliteration, and their literal
meanings can transform these epithets into metaphors in their own right. In lines 16-19,
for example, Datta plays off of the literal meanings for three epithets he places there.
Mrtunjaya, a name for Shiva, means "victorious over death"; the poet Valmiki also
became victorious over death, by virtue of his "immortal" poem, the Ramayana. Varada,
literally the "giver of boons" (here referring to goddess Sarasvati), is praised for the boon
of hers that made Ratnakara (Valmiki's name before he became a poet)—"ratnakara"
means both "mine (akara) of gems (ratna)" and "the ocean," which is a mine of pearls
and other gems—into a veritable ocean or mine of poetry himself. Rather than tease the
epithets for resonances here or in footnotes to the poem, I let the reader have the
satisfaction of doing that on his or her own. A glossary is appended to the translation to
assist those unfamiliar with the mythology of Hindu India.
103
Let me conclude with a Bengali reader's experience of reading Datta's meter. At
age nine Nirad C. Chaudhuri was asked by his father to memorize passages from
Meghanada. His father claimed that only those who read Datta's blank verse properly
could be considered cultured. For decades after the epic came out, Chaudhuri tells us,
"bridegrooms were challenged by their sisters-in-law to prove their culture" by reading
the Meghanada. Of his own acculturation to the new meter, this amitraksar chanda—the
verse structure that Datta had his friend read Milton in order to fathom—Chaudhuri
recounts:
My father very carefully checked our tendency to stop at the end of the
lines—a particularly important precaution because Michael had taken over as the
foundation of his blank verse the fourteen-syllable rhyming couplet, and we,
finding the metre to be the same, unconsciously read blank verse like couplets and
made it sound incredibly grotesque. My father showed us how to read this blank
verse—exactly like prose, with attention only to the sense and the punctuation;
and he said, if we did that, the rhythm would come out as a matter of course. I did
so, and after a little practice with my father, began to recite the rolling verse
paragraphs with complete ease.133
I invite the reader to recreate Chaudhuri's experience of Datta's poem.

1
For most of his life, he used "Dutt" as the Anglicized spelling of his surname. In 1866
while in Europe, he writes his main benefactor back in Calcutta, the renowned Isvar
Chandra Vidyasagar,: "I am 'published' Barrister as Michael Madhusudan Datta, Esquire.
You might drop the vulgar form 'Dutt'"; Ksetra Gupta, ed., Madhusudana racanavali
(The Collected Works of Madhusudan) (rpt., 1980; Kolkata: Sahitya Samsad, 1974), 618.
I accede to his wishes expressed in that letter and refer to him as Datta.
104
2
South Asian names and the spellings of names in the Roman alphabet have changed
over time. In the case of place names, I shall from here on use the English spellings
current during Datta's lifetime and call Kolkata Calcutta and Chennai Madras.
3
Sisir Kumar Das, Sahibs and Munshis: An Account of the College of Fort William (New
Delhi: Orion Publications, 1978), 150.
4
Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India [New
York: Columbia University Press, 1989].
5
Sushil Kumar De, Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century, 1757-1857 (Kolkata:
Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1962), 480.
6
Ibid., 481.
7
Ibid., 486ff.
8
Ibid., 488.
9
A somewhat comparable institution, Haileybury College, had been opened in England
in 1805 and continued to serve as training college for young civilians headed for
Company service in India. The philosophy driving that educational institution would
appear to have been far more Anglicist than Orientalist from the very outset, interested in
fully preparing the new recruits before they could become corrupted by actual India;
Sumanta Banerjee, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth
Century Calcutta (Kolkata: Seagull Books, 1989), 34-35.
10
David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian
Modernization, 1773-1835 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1969), 241-42.
11
Ibid.
12
Gupta, Madhusudana racanavali, 638.
13
Ibid., 639.
14
De, Bengali Literature, 491.
15
Suresh Chandra Maitra, Madhusudana Datta: jivana o sahitya (Madhusudan Datta:
Life and Literature) (Kolkata: Puthipatra, 1975), 33.
16
Concerning his age and the year when he entered Hindoo College, the earliest
biography of Datta gives thirteen and1837; Yogindranath Basu, Maikela Madhusudana
Dattera jivana-carita (A Biography of Michael Madhusudan Datta) (5th ed.; Kolkata:
Chakravarti, Chatterjee, and Co., 1925), 25 and 48. The editor of Datta's collected works
cites Brajendranath Bandyopadhyay's opinion—that the year was 1833—noting that the
college magazine (March 7, 1834) mentions Datta reading aloud at the college's awards
ceremony; Gupta, Madhusudana racanavali, xi. More recent biographers, first Maitra
and then Ghulam Murshid, opt for the date given in the earliest biography. Maitra cites
overwhelming evidence of a second, older Madhusudan Datta at Hindoo College in the
early 1830s; Maikela Madhusudana Datta, 32-33. Murshid agrees with Maitra; Ashara
chalane bhuli: Maikela-jivani ("Fooled by Hope's Deception: A Michael Biography") (2d
ed.; Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, 1997), 28.
17
Thomas Babington Macaulay, "Minute on Education," in Sources of Indian Tradition,
ed. by Wm. Theodore de Bary (New York and London: Columbia University Press,
1958), 2:44-45.
18
Ram Mohun Roy, "Letter on Education,'' in Sources of Indian Tradition, 2:40-43.
19
Macaulay, "Minute on Education,'' in Sources of Indian Tradition, 2:47.
105
20
Ibid., 2:49.
21
Amalendu Bose, Michael Madhusudan Dutt (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1981), 9.
22
Maitra, Maikela Madhusudana Datta, 28.
23
Murshid, Ashara chalane bhuli, 19-20.
24
Gupta, Madhusudana racanavali, 622,
25
Ibid., 622-23.
26
Ibid., 438.
27
Ibid., 454.
28
Nagendranath Som, Madhu-smriti (Remembrances of Modhu) (3d ed.; Kolkata:
Vidyodaya Library, 1989), 8; Murshid, Ashara chalane bhuli, 39.
29
30
Ibid., 556.
31
Ibid., 602.
32
Ibid., 438.
33
Ibid., 519-20.
34
Ibid., 520.
35
Ibid., 524.
36
Ibid., 525-26; letter dated and timed, "Kidderpore, 27 Nov., [1842,] Midnight"
37
Quoted in Basu, Maikela Madhusudana, 124.
38
Ibid., appendix, 4.
39
Murshid, Ashara chalane bhuli, 65.
40
41
42
Gupta, Madhusudana racanavali, 528-29.
43
Ibid., 528.
44
45
Ibid., 66; photocopy of the relevant page from the college registry appears on page 88.
46
Ibid., 107.
47
I want to thank Rachel Fell McDermott for questioning today's generally held but
erroneous belief that Madhusudan became Michael Madhusudan upon converting to
Christianity. It was due to her prodding that I came to see the obvious, which, like the
"purloined letter" of Edgar Allen Poe's story of the same name, has been in plain view all
along.
48
Amalendu Bose sees a direct connection between the decline in his income and the
decline in the importance of Persian, which Raj Narain spoke, as a useful language in the
courts; Michael Madhusudan Dutt, 26. Persian, however, had begun its decline a decade
earlier and probably had no bearing on his financial situation. Other biographers suggest
that Raj Narain had, for reasons unknown, been disqualified by judges from pleading
appeal cases; Murshid, Ashara chalane bhuli, 86.
49
50
51
Ibid.
52
Murshid, Ashara chalane bhuli, 94. Other biographies have him leaving Calcutta
earlier in December and arriving the day before Christmas.
53
Ibid., 100, 102.
106
54
Ibid, 103, n.29.
55
56
In Kim, Kipling immediately declares his hero to be "English," but how English is he?
In Kipling's words, Kim was "white—a poor white of the very poorest. The half-caste
woman who looked after him (she smoked opium, and pretended to keep a second-hand
furniture shop by the square where the cheap cabs wait) told the missionaries that she was
Kim's mother's sister; but his mother had been nurse-maid in a Colonel's family and had
married Kimball O'Hara, a young colour-sergeant of the Mavericks, an Irish regiment.
He afterwards took a post on the Sind, Punjab, and Delhi Railway, and his Regiment
went home without him. The wife died of cholera in Ferozepore, and O'Hara fell to drink
and loafing up and down the line with the keen-eyed three-year-old baby." Rudyard
Kipling, Kim (New York and Scarborough, Ontario: New American Library, 1984), 19.
That Kim's mother served as a "nurse-maid in a Colonel's family" does not, quite
obviously, preclude her from being "half-caste," just like the woman who is said to have
looked after Kim. I thank Amanda Hamilton, who studies the Anglo-Indian community
in nineteenth-century India, for calling my attention to Kim's wonderfully ambiguous
pedigree.
57
58
59
Ibid., 478.
60
And, looked at differently, "The Captive Ladie" is also "Orientalist," Rosinka
Chaudhuri tells us in her study of nineteenth-century poetry by Indians, primarily
English-language poetry; Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal: Emergent Nationalism
and the Orientalist Project (Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2002), 108. "Orientalist poetry" by
Indians is that which "used form and style borrowed from English poetry and themes
taken from Orientalist translations of Indian classics [by such Englishmen as Sir William
Jones and H.H. Wilson] or the ancient and medieval history of India [compiled by the
likes of James Tod among others]"; ibid., 152. But "Orientalism," a term today with
many valences, need not be inferred as negative here, for Orientalist poetry of this kind,
writes Chaudhuri, contributed to the engendering of a nationalism of sorts, a nationalism
that "signified pride in, and an awareness of, an indigenous culture and tradition"; ibid.,
132
61
Ibid., 507.
62
Ibid., 531.
63
Ibid., 538.
64
Ibid., 534.
65
Ibid., 535.
66
Ibid.
67
Ibid., 536-37.
68
Quoted in Basu, Maikela Madhusudana, 159-60; Bethune's letter dated July 20, 1849.
69
Ibid., 160-61.
70
Nilmani Mukherjee, A Bengali Zamindar: Jaykrishna Mukherjee of Uttarpara and His
Times, 1808-1888 (Kolkata: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1975), 169-70. The Society
formally started in 1851; planning had begun the previous year.
71
Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, 142-65.
107
72
73
Ibid., 539.
74
Basu, Maikela Madhusudana, appendix, 20.
75
76
77
Gupta, Madhusudana racanavali, liv; Isvar Chandra Singh's letter dated May 8, 1859.
78
Ekei ki Bale Sabhayata? [Is This Called Civilization?], in Gupta, Madhusudana
racanavali, 241-54.
79
Goutam Chattopadhyay, ed., Awakening in Bengal in Early Nineteenth Century
(Selected Documents) (Kolkata: Progressive Publishers, 1965), 1:lxi-lxvii. As noted
earlier, there were two Madhusudan Datta at this time, both associated with Hindoo
College. This may be the senior one, not our poet.
80
Only two plays were performed at this important and innovative theater, one for which
Datta produced a translation and one his original composition. The premature death of
the younger of the Paikpara rajas kept the doors of this theater closed for good; Asutosh
Bhattacarya, Bamla natyasahityera itihasa: prathama khanda, dvitiya bhaga,
madhyayuga (1873-1900) (History of Bangla Dramatic Literature: volume one, part two,
middle period (1873-1900) (3d ed.; Kolkata: A. Mukherji and Co., 1968), 426.
81
Gupta, Madhusudana racanavali, 575; letter written to the actor Keshav
Gangopadhyay, after finishing his drama "Krishnakumari" in September of 1860. The
play was not performed until February of 1867, the very month Datta returned from
Europe.
82
The classic studies of Ramayanas in Bangla remain Dinesh Chandra Sen's The Bengali
Ramayanas (Kolkata: University of Calcutta, 1920) and more recently Asit Kumar
Banerjee, ed., The Ramayana in Eastern India (Kolkata: Prajna, 1983). For a brief
discussion of some of the variations among Rama narratives, see Edward C. Dimock, Jr.,
Edwin Gerow, C.M. Naim, A.K. Ramanujan, Gordon Roadarmel, and J.A.B. van
Buitenen, The Literatures of India: An introduction (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1974), pp.72-80. For a more in-depth examination of aspects of the
diverse Ramayanas in several different linguistic traditions, see Paula Richman, ed.,
Many Ramayanas: The diversity of a narrative tradition in South Asia (Berkeley, Los
Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1991).
83
84
Ibid., 562.
85
Rabindranath Tagore, "Meghanadavadha kavya" ("The Slaying of Meghanada"), in
Rabindra-racanavali, acalita samgraha (The Collected Works of Rabindranath Tagore:
Out-of-Print Material) (Kolkata: Visvabharati, 1962; first published in Bharati, August,
1882) 2:80.
86
Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 19.
87
Harekrishna Mukhopadhyay, ed., Krittivasi Ramayana (Kolkata: Sahitya Samsad,
1957), 351-52.
88
89
This hierarchy of vulnerability is implicit from the very beginning of the war: Ravana
will be the last to die. In Krittivasa it is made explicit as follows: "But for Virabahu and
108
Indrajit, there are no warriors; once they have perished, Ravana shall be destroyed"; and
"If Virabahu does not die, Ravana will not perish"; Mukhopadhyay, Krittivasi Ramayana,
330 and 335.
90
Marksavadi no. 5 (September[?] 1949): 132.
91
92
Ibid., 551.
93
Ibid., 556.
94
95
Ibid., 554.
96
Ibid., 558.
97
See Norvin Hein, The Miracle Plays of Mathura (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1972), and Philip Lutgendorf, The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of
Tulsidas (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1991).
98
99
Sen, Bengali Ramayanas, 251.
100
Bishvanath Bandyopadhyay has written a persuasive article demonstrating the
correspondences between Sulocana of the Jagadrami Ramayana and Datta's Pramila;
"Pramilara utsa" ("The Origins of Pramila"), Desh, 22 Phalgun, 1388/March 6, 1982, 9-
10. Bandyopadhyay concedes that there is little if anything of the warrior woman in
Sulocana. But that aside, the two female characters and their actions are too alike for the
similarities to have been coincidental. Dinesh Chandra Sen had earlier suggested that
Datta must have read the Jagadrami Ramayana; Bengali Ramayanas, 251. In a letter to
the editor, following publication of Bandyopadhyay's article, a reader wondered in print
whether we can trust the Jagadrami Ramayana as a credible, legitimate text; Sushanta
Sarkar, "Pramilara utsa," Desh, 20 Caitra 1388/April 3, 1982. I have no answer for him.
Furthermore, he asks, why have literary historians been so disinterested in this text?
Again, no answer from me.
101
102
Ibid., 564.
103
Raj Narain Basu, Se kal ar e kal (Then and Now ) (2d ed.; Kolkata: Bangiya Shahitya
Parishad, 1956; ed. based on the 1st ed, pub. 1879), 95.
104
Pramathanath Bishi, Bamla sahityer naranari (Men and Women in Bangla Literature)
(rpt. 1966; Kolkata: Maitri, 1953), 25.
105
William Radice, "Xenophilia and Xenophobia: Michael Madhusudan Datta's
Meghnad-badh kabya," in Rupert Snell and I.M.P. Raeside, eds., Classics of Modern
South Asian Literature (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1998), 147.
106
Ibid., 150.
107
Ibid., 152.
108
Ibid., 163.
109
110
Ibid, 558.
111
Ibid., 561.
112
Ibid., 564.
113
Ibid., 567.
114
Gupta, Madhusudana racanavali, xxxiii.
109
115
Bangadarshan, 2:5 (August, 1873), 232.
116
Bangadarshan, 8:6 (September, 1881), 262.
117
Ibid., 263.
118
Ibid., 264.
119
Rabindranath Tagore, "Meghanadavadha kavya" ("The Slaying of Meghanada"), in
Rabindra-racanavali, acalita samgraha (The Collected Works of Rabindranath Tagore:
Out-of-Print Material) (Kolkata: Visvabharati, 1962; first published in Bharati, August,
1882) 2:78.
120
Ibid., 79.
121
Ibid, 81 (misprinted as 79).
122
Rabindranath Tagore, Jivanasmrti (Reminiscences); cited in Rabindra-racanavali,
acalita samgraha, 2:718.
123
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1973).
124
It was Abdul Mannan Syed, the current Executive Director of the Nazrul Institute,
Dhaka, who called my attention to the fact that Nazrul renamed his wife. Such a practice,
of course, was not unprecedented. Rabindranath Tagore's wife's name had been
changed—from Bhabatarini to Mrinalini—by the Tagores on the occasion of her
marriage into the family.
125
Karunamaya Goswami, Kazi Nazrul Islam: A Biography (Dhaka: Nazrul Institute,
1996), 15.
126
Subodh Chandra Sengupta, ed., Samsada Bangali caritabhidhana (Samsad's
Biographical Dictionary of Bengalis) (Kolkata: Sahitya Samsad, 1976).
127
Pramatha Chaudhuri, "Sabuja patrera mukhapatra" (Sabuj Patra's Manifesto), in
Nana-katha (Miscellany) (Kolkata: By the author, 3 Hastings Street, [1919]), 109-10.
128
Introductory notes by Abinash Chandra Gangopadhyay speak of this production of
Meghanadavadha kavya as the first production mounted at the newly renamed National
Theatre; see Debipada Bhattacharya, ed., Girisa racanavali (The Collected Works of
Girishchandra Ghosh) (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1964) 147.
129
Ibid., 29, 31.
130
Edward Thompson, Rabindaranath Tagore: poet and dramatist (2d ed.; London:
Oxford University Press, 1948), 16.
131
132
Mukhopadhyay, Krittivasi Ramayana, 335.
133
Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 186.
110

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The Slaying of Meghanada Introduction C.B.

Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824-73 C.E.), exceptional as poet and playwright in

its author, as simultaneously both extraordinary and representative. It is an extraordinary

piece of literature, a sophisticated verse narrative in nine cantos; it is utterly

representative of the cosmopolitan culture of mid-nineteenth-century India.

passé in a here-and-now world self-characterized as postmodern. But modern contrasts

Call it a fluke of history, but Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta)—not Mumbai

Rebellion of 1857—seen from another perspective as the First Indian War of

taking unto itself India, figuratively its crown jewel.

temporarily resolved, a debate that pitted Orientalists against Anglicists. Both

acts—whether intended by the actors as political or not is immaterial—by which the

what might best be called a narrative conquest, as opposed to a physical conquest.

anything found in India.

college: Persian, Hindustani, and Bengali. Bengali's topic, pejorative as well as

those ancient texts that could advance science and civilization.

colony.4 The commitment to education, however, could hardly be considered one-sided

European than Asiatic.

importance ascribed to English. Of Hindoo College, cultural historian Sushil Kumar De

Hindoo College appointed the soon-to-be-seventeen Henry Derozio to teach

questioning, atheistically inclined teacher. Derozio's residence in Calcutta developed into

alcohol—both taboo among good Hindus of the day.

creation, consisted of a monotheistic religion, devoid of any anthropomorphic deity. The

triumvirate of Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva but instead the abstract principle of "brahman,"

rejected Brahmos, even their own blood relatives, as outcastes.

Governors-General. And it was while he governed that the Orientalist-Anglicist

Anglicists, Charles Trevelyan, the Orientalists' objective "was to educate Europeans in

the sciences of the West."10 Trevelyan's pronouncement came out in a publication

thereby "lost its attractiveness to Indians."11

Christianity or join the Brahmo Samaj, both equally sacrilegious moves.

intellectual, even civilizational, tradition. Christianity stood for the European

Enlightenment. It stood for Western Civilization. Christianity subsumed within it the

IV)—Quis novus hic nostris successit sedibus hospes?"—which he translates: "Who is

Anglo-Saxon, who brings with him his language:

the Anglo-Saxon. Yes—I love the language,—the glorious language of the

Anglo-Saxon! My imagination visions forth before me the language of the

commits suicide—Datta's Crusader has a mission to perform in that land to which he

ventures. "It is the glorious mission, I repeat, of the Anglo-Saxon to renovate, to

regenerate, or—in one word, to Christianize the Hindu."13

debating club known as the Academic Association:

doctrines ridiculed, its philosophy despised, its ceremonies accounted fooleries,

hypocrites and fanatics.14

(or infamous, depending upon one's perspective) minute on education. Macaulay, a

desideratum-cum-justification of Britain's colonial enterprise. It was the committee's

medium of instruction, formed the very crux of that ongoing Orientalist-Anglicist

English. Macaulay opted for English. In his minute he asserted:

I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I

home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am

Hindoo College, already an English medium institution, was unaffected by the

as a purveyor of (worthwhile) knowledge:

The Sanscrit language, so difficult that almost a lifetime is necessary for

veil is far from sufficient to reward the labor of acquiring it.18

less as a snub of India's cultural heritage than as an endorsement of English as a medium

place among civilized communities. I speak of Russia. . . . The languages of

what they have done for the Tartar.19

Macaulay is clear about his objectives:

conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.20

As outrageous as Macaulay's statement on the goals of education might appear

opinions, in morals, and in intellect."), the Company's educational policy proved, to a

degree, successful. Hindoo College, in a sense, had preempted Macaulay's minute. It