The Slaying of Meghanada:

A Ramayana from
Colonial Bengal

Michael Madhusudan Datta

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Y the slaying of meghanada Y
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Y THE SLAYING OF MEGHANADA Y
A Ramayana from Colonial Bengal

Michael Madhusudan Datta

t r a n s l a t e d w i t h a n i n t ro d u c t i o n b y

Clinton B. Seely

1
2004
 1
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Copyright 䉷 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dutt, Michael Madhusudan, 1824–1873.
[Meghanadabadha kabya. English]
The slaying of Meghanada: a Ramayana from colonial Bengal /
Michael Madhusudan
Datta; translated with an introduction by Clinton B. Seely.
p. cm.
“This poem is a retelling of an episode about the character
Meghanada from the Ramayana.”
ISBN 0-19-516799-6
I. Seely, Clinton B. II. Title.
PK1718.D74M413 2004
891.4'44—dc21 2003049889

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
 Y
for Gwen,

who has lived with

and loved Michael
as long as I have
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 Y preface Y

It began, as so many intellectual pursuits begin for an academic, out of neces-

sity. One had to be prepared to go into the classroom and teach, sometimes
teach a text or materials relatively new and unfamiliar. Back in the early 1970s
when I joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, I teamed up with my
own professor, Edward C. Dimock, Jr., to offer a two-quarter survey course
on the cultural and literary history of Bengal. His interests centered primarily
in the premodern period around the figure of Sri Caitanya and the Vaishnava
poets and theologians associated with this Bengali saint. It was left to me to
cover the modern period, which meant, roughly, the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. I had been working on a dissertation that focused upon one of the
premier poets of the twentieth century, Jibanananda Das, and so felt comfort-
able with the more modern material. The nineteenth century, however,
seemed somewhat of an enigma. I had to prepare myself. And what better
place to begin than with Michael Madhusudan Datta, identified by the literary
historians as the man who began the modern age, literarily, and a man who
wrote during the heart of the nineteenth century? His magnum opus, “The
Slaying of Meghanada,” was not available in an English translation. I had to
struggle through this very erudite poet’s rich but linguistically complex text.
The experience proved rewarding, so much so that I have kept on reading
and translating and rereading and retranslating his epic poem ever since. As my
erstwhile colleague, a fine poet and translator of poetry, A. K. Ramanujan used
to be fond of saying, one never really finishes the translation of a poem, one
simply at some point must abandon it. I have come to that point and now
abandon my translation of Datta’s epic, a translation, as with all translations,
still in progress.
But, of course, I shall not really abandon my translation, for I’ll continue
to teach this text to undergraduates and grad students alike, as I have off and
on over the last three decades. And it is to the students I have had during
those years that I must express my warmest thanks. Their responses to Datta’s
poem were for the most part gratifying, though I could not convince all of
them of its charm. I wish also to thank my colleagues for their encouragement
in this project, particularly Dipesh Chakrabarty here in my department at Chi-
cago, and also Rachel Fell McDermott at Barnard College, who read the
manuscript with a helpful eye and who herself has taught this text through my
translation in her own classes.
 preface

Without a publisher, Datta’s poem, originally in Bangla, would have re-

mained relatively unknown to those who cannot read that language. I am truly
grateful to Oxford University Press and specifically to Theodore Calderara,
Associate Editor, for agreeing to at least look at the manuscript. Not all presses
were so generous. And I am more thankful still that Oxford has seen fit to
publish Datta’s marvelous work. I am obliged to Margaret Case, who, as copy-
editor, has spared me from committing any number of typographical errors
and infelicitous locutions. Those that remain—it goes without saying—are all
my doing, or undoing, as the case may be. Writing a book is one thing; actually
producing the physical object is quite another. Rebecca Johns-Danes, produc-
tion editor, saw to that end with a sure hand, which I appreciate. My sincere
thanks also go to Janel M. Mueller, Dean of the Division of the Humanities,
and to the Pritzker Endowment for South Asian Studies here at the University
of Chicago for their generous moral and financial support of this publication.
Finally and emphatically, I thank my companion, my critic, my confidante,
my Gwendolyn, my wife, a truly lovely person. It is she who has sustained
me over these many years. And it was she who set a fine example of how to
translate great literature with her rendition of the ornate Sanskrit prose nar-
rative Kadambari by Banabhatta. Now Datta’s The Slaying of Meghanada will
take its place side by side with Bana’s Kadambari on our bookshelf at home, as
it should be. Michael, I’m sure, would be pleased.

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 Y contents Y

d r am at i s per s o n ae xi

i n t ro d u ct i o n 3

THE SLAYING OF MEGHANADA

can t o 1 .
Investiture 71

can t o 2 .
Weapons Acquisition 90

can t o 3 .
Reuniting 106

can t o 4 .
Ashoka Grove 122

can t o 5 .
Preparations 139

can t o 6 .
The Slaying 155

can t o 7 .
Felling with the Shakti Weapon 176

can t o 8 .
City of the Spirits 197

can t o 9 .
Funeral Rites 218
Y

not es t o i n t ro d u ct i o n 231

glo s s ary 239

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 Y dramatis personae Y
(also see Glossary)

Rāksfiasas of the isle of Laṅkā

Citrāṅgadā, a wife of Rāvanfi a and mother of fallen Vı̄rabāhu

Mandodarı̄, main wife of Rāvanfi a and mother of Meghanāda
Meghanāda, eldest son of Rāvanfi a; also: Indrajit, Rāvanfi i, Vāsavajit
Pramı̄lā, wife of Meghanāda
Rāvanfi a, patriarch of the Rāksfiasas; also: Daśānana, Naikasfieya, Paulastya
Saramā, wife of Vibhı̄sfianfi a
Sūrpanfi akhā, sister of Rāvanfi a
Vibhı̄sfianfi a, a brother of Rāvanfi a and defector to Rāma’s side; also:
Rāvanfi ānuja

Rāma, some of his family and his allies

from the Indian mainland

Daśaratha, father of Rāma and Laksfimanfi a

Hanumān, son of Pavana/Prabhañjana and a major southern warrior
Laksfimanfi a, brother of Rāma; also: Rāghavānuja, Rāmānuja, Saumitri
Rāma, also: Dāśarathi, Rāghava, Rāghavacandra, Rāghavendra, Rāmabhadra,
Rāmacandra
Sı̄tā, wife of Rāma; also: Jānakı̄, Maithilı̄, Vaidehı̄
Sugrı̄va, new monarch of the southern kingdom of Kisfikindhyā
Sumitrā, mother of Laksfimanfi a and one of Daśaratha’s three wives
Ūrmilā, wife of Laksfimanfi a

Goddesses

Durgā, the supreme goddess and wife of Śiva; also: Abhayā, Ambikā,
Annadā, Bhagavatı̄, Bhairavı̄, Bhavānı̄, Bhaveśvarı̄, Bhı̄mā, Cāmunfi dfi ā,
Canfi dfi ı̄, Gaurı̄, Haimavatı̄, Īśānı̄, Īśvarı̄, Jagadambā, Kātyāyanı̄,
Ksfiemaṅkarı̄, Mahāśakti, Maheśı̄, Maheśvarı̄, Nistārinfi ı̄, Pārvatı̄, Śakti,
Śaṅkarı̄, Śaśāṅkadhārinfi ı̄, Satı̄, Tārinfi ı̄, Ugracanfi dfi ā, Umā
Laksfimı̄, goddess of good fortune; also: Indirā, Kamalā, Rājalaksfimı̄, Ramā,
Śrı̄
Māyā, a goddess, “illusion” deified

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 dramatis personae

Rati, wife of Kāma; also: Varānanā

Śacı̄, wife of Indra; also: Indrānfi ı̄, Paulomı̄
Sarasvatı̄, goddess of speech, the arts, and learning; also: Bhāratı̄, Varadā
Vārunfi ı̄, wife of the god of the sea, Varunfi a/Pracetas/Pāśı̄

Gods

Agni, god of fire and Meghanāda’s personal deity; also: Hutāśana,

Sarvabhuk, Sarvaśuci, Vaiśvānara, Vibhāvasu, Vı̄tihotra
Indra, known as lord of the gods, lord of the skies; also: Āditeya,
Ākhanfi dfi ala, Devendra, Jisfinfi u, Kuliśı̄, Mahendra, Meghavāhana,
Purandara, Sahasrāksfia, Śakra, Sunāsı̄ra, Vajrapānfi i, Vajrı̄, Vāsava
Kāma, god of love; also: Anaṅga, Kandarpa, Kusumesfiu, Madana, Manasija,
Manmatha, Mı̄nadhvaja, Pañcaśara, Phuladhanu, Smara
Kārttikeya, general of the gods; also: Kumāra, Sfi adfi ānana, Śaktidhara,
Śikhidhvaja, Skanda, Tārakāri
Krfifisnfi a, see Visfinfi u; also: Śyāma
Pavana, god of the wind; father of Hanumān; also: Prabhañjana
Pracetas, god of the sea; also: Pāśı̄
Śiva, the supreme god and husband of Durgā; also: Āśutosfia, Bhairava,
Bhava, Bhaveśa, Bhı̄ma, Candracūdfi a, Dhūrjatfii, Digambara, Girı̄śa,
Hara, Īśāna, Jatfiādhara, Kapardı̄, Maheśa, Mohana, Mrfityuñjaya,
Nı̄lakanfi fitha, Pañcamukha, Paśupati, Pinākı̄, Rudra, Sadānanda, Śambhu,
Śaṅkara, Sthānfi u, Śūlapānfi i, Śūlı̄, Tāpasendra, Tripurāri, Triśūlı̄,
Tryambaka, Vāma, Virūpāksfia, Viśvanātha, Vrfifisabhadhvaja, Vrfifisadhvaja,
Vyomakeśa, Yogı̄ndra
Visfinfi u, a major god with ten avatars, including Krfifisnfi a; husband of Laksfimı̄;
also: Caturbhuja, Cintāmanfi i, Gadādhara, Hari, Hrfifisı̄keśa, Keśava,
Krfifisnfi a, Mādhava, Murāri, Pı̄tāmbara, Punfi dfi arı̄kāksfia, Sauri, Upendra
Yama, god of death; also: Danfi dfi adhara, Krfitānta, Śamana

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Y the slaying of meghanada Y
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 Y introduction Y

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 Calcutta,
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, Meghanadavadha kavya (The slaying of Meghanada) (1861),
needs be seen, very much like its author, as simultaneously 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 even today mark with his text and its year of
publication the divide between the so-called premodern and modern eras in
Bangla literature. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it may
seem strange to refer to a time in the nineteenth 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 what preceded it. Datta’s Meghanada marks a major shift in imag-
inative writing, a shift in the Bangla literary sensibilities of its day. Bengal
during the nineteenth century and on into the beginnings of the twentieth
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.

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 introduction

Background

Call it a fluke of history, but Kolkata (then 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 subcon-
tinent for its commercial headquarters. Calcutta did not exist before the British
merchants, Job Charnock prominent among them, set up shop along the banks
of the Hooghly just north of the mouth of that river that 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 Com-
pany was, so to speak, now really in business. It would remain so throughout
the eighteenth century and through much of the nineteenth, until the latter
half of that century when, following the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857—seen from
another angle as the first Indian War of Independence—the crown assumed
authority, dissolving the East India Company and taking unto itself India, fig-
uratively its crown jewel.
The nineteenth 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. Ori-
entalism, since Said’s perspicacious 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 re-
fers 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 con-
quest 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 cul-

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tures 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 fun-
damentally, in Saidian terms, imperialistic even today. From the Saidian per-
spective, both the Orientalists and the Anglicists of 1800 were Orientalists.
Both contributed to the British colonial enterprise and particularly to the jus-
tification 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 nineteenth 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 con-
cede 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 any-
thing found in India.
At the start of the nineteenth 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, 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 a 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 ad-
ministrators 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 in 1784 being another—where the lan-
guages 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. Ben-
gali’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.”

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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 Com-
pany’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 rec-
ognized education of the colonial subjects as a major principle upon which
the colonial enterprise should be based. Gauri Viswanathan shows 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 of Calcutta established Hindoo (the older spelling of Hindu) Col-
lege “to instruct the sons of the Hindoos in the European and Asiatic languages
and sciences.”5 Hindoo College survives today as Presidency College, the pre-
mier 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 instruc-
tion 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 educa-
tion 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
At this very point in time, an amazingly charismatic and brilliant young

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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 “freethinking” Scotsman, and the young Henry likewise developed
into a freethinker, 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 thy
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 Gold-
smith’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 just
teach in the classroom. Around him gathered a coterie of Hindoo College
students, by upbringing Hindus, but nonetheless attracted to this smart, charm-
ing, young, 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 collegegoing intellec-
tuals 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 out-
ward 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,

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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 reenvisioned
Hinduism, grounded upon the ancient Hindu sacred texts known as the Upan-
ishads, formed the basis for the Brahmo Samaj’s theology. Brahmoism was still
Hinduism, but it looked very much like a form of Christianity without Christ.
Though from one viewpoint still Hinduism, the Brahmo Samaj became seen
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 of 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. Ben-
tinck was the first of the truly anti-Orientalist, pro-Anglicist governors-general.
And it was while he governed that the Orientalist-Anglicist controversy solid-
ified 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” whereas the Anglicists sought “to ed-
ucate 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 cham-
pion 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 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

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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 nineteenth century but particularly in the first half of it
in the intellectual crucible of Calcutta, Christianity represented not just a re-
ligion 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 Shake-
speare 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, Christi-
anity, the British, and the English language itself were all three civilizing forces
and should be brought to bear on India. Quite spectacularly, albeit bombasti-
cally, 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, “this queenly Hindustan,” as he styles her, 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 lan-
guage,—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 Ae-
neas—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 had clearly less concern

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for 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 Christi-
anity 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 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 dis-
paraging 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 alone, for the British members had recused
themselves from this matter that concerned Hindus and Hinduism fundamen-
tally. In his letter of resignation dated April 25, 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-year-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 college’s junior depart-
ment (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, 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

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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 Macaulay’s minute, one can infer that the com-
mittee 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 Eng-
lish. In his minute he asserted:

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 litera-
ture of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western
literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the com-
mittee 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 phi-
losophy. 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 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

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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 hun-
dred and twenty years, a nation which has previously been in a state as bar-
barous 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 peo-
ple. 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 dialects of the country, to enrich those dia-
lects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomencla-
ture, 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 pre-
empted 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 literally “the slaying of the demon Madhu,”

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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 the law courts, a legacy from the Moghul Empire perpetuated by
the British East India Company until 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 neigh-
borhood (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 bi-
ographer, 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 Col-
lege 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 com-
fortable in an English-medium environment. He read literature in English,
much of it English literature 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 orna-

ments which too often veil her native charms:—To illustrate this,
we need not go very far: The works of a famous living poet—

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“Anacreon Moore” will serve our purpose:—Beautiful as the po-

etry 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.
Thanks to Gour Dass Bysack (also spelled a number of different ways,
including Gour Dos Bysac, by Datta himself), 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 acrosti c
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, at-
tended to education in both the arts and the sciences. And Datta, through one
of his poems, acknowledges that other branch of a college education:

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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 be likely to 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
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 idio-
syncratic 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 lit-
eratures. 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

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Kabi-matribhasha (The poet’s mother tongue), subsequently revised and re-

named 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 trans-
lation 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 English-cum-European culture. That sentiment is 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 strand
As if she were my native-land!32

No matter that he was an only child and had no sister, the sentiments
expressed were heartfelt. 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 medal for that
essay, 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, the language of all his
letters: “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 dedi-

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