Michael Madhusudan Dutt

Michael Madhusudan Dutt (born January 25, 1824, Sagardari, Bengal, India [now in Bangladesh]—died June 29, 1873, Calcutta [now Kolkata], India) was an Indian poet and dramatist, the first great poet of modern Bengali literature. Dutt was a dynamic, erratic personality and an original genius of a high order. He was the first Bengali playwright and pioneered the sonnet form in the language. His best known work is the epic poem Meghnad Badh Kavya (1861; “The Slaying of Meghnad”).

Dutt was born in a village in undivided Bengal and attended the local school. Later his father, a lawyer, moved the family to Calcutta (now Kolkata). Dutt was educated at the Hindu College (now called Presidency University), the cultural home of the Western-educated Bengali middle class. He studied Bengali, Sanskrit, and Persian but aspired to write in English. In 1843 he became a Christian—partly to escape an arranged marriage—and embraced European culture. He left Hindu College, which did not admit Christian students at the time, and enrolled in Bishop’s College, where he studied Greek and Latin as well as Sanskrit.

Dutt’s conversion to Christianity upset his family, and he was financially cut off by his father; he remained impoverished for the rest of his life. He moved to Madras (now Chennai), where he began teaching in schools while also editing a variety of newspapers and journals. He married a European woman named Rebecca McTavish and prefixed Michael to his name. During this time he published two books of English poetry under the pen name Timothy Penpoem; The Captive Ladie (1849) was the first of these. While Dutt’s earliest compositions were in English, they were relatively unsuccessful, and he turned, reluctantly at first, to his mother tongue of Bengali.

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Dutt’s transition to writing in Bengali coincided with his return to Calcutta, where he worked as a clerk at the police court and, later, as an interpreter. While no record of a divorce from his wife has been found, his marriage appears to have ended, and he began living with another European woman—their relationship lasted until her death. His principal works, written mostly between 1858 and 1862, include prose dramas, long narrative poems, and lyrics. His most important composition was Meghnad Badh Kavya, a retelling of an episode from the Hindu epic the Ramayana in which Meghnad (also called Indrajit), son of the antagonist Ravana, is slain by Lakshmana, half brother of the epic’s main protagonist, Rama. Dutt also wrote the first Bengali play, Sarmistha (1859), based on an excerpt from the other great Hindu epic, the Mahabharata.

Dutt’s poetic works include Tilottama Sambhav Kavya (1860; “Birth of Tilottama”), a narrative poem on the story of Sunda and Upasunda; Brajangana (1861; “Woman of Braja”), a cycle of lyrics on the Radha-Krishna theme; and Birangana (1862; “War Heroine”), a set of 21 epistolary poems on the model of Ovid’s Heroides.

Dutt experimented ceaselessly with diction and verse forms, and it was he who introduced amitraksar (a form of blank verse with run-on lines and varied caesuras), the Bengali sonnet—both Petrarchan and Shakespearean—and many original lyric stanzas. Despite his literary success, Dutt continued to struggle financially. He went to England in 1862 to study law and was eventually called to the bar after some years of penurious living in France. He was plagued by debt and bankruptcy until his death in 1873.