Michael Madhusudan Dutt

Date of birth:

25 Jan 1824
City of birth:
Jessore, Bengal
Country of birth:
India

Current name country of birth:

Bangladesh
Date of death:
29 Jun 1873
Location of death:
Calcutta, India
Date of 1st arrival in Britain:
01 Jul 1862
Precise 1st arrival date unknown:
Y
Dates of time spent in Britain:
July 1862 - April 1869

More than any Bengali writer , Dutt is a figure of legend and myth. I do not know about the younger generations, grew up listening to fascinating stories about his life and times and remarkable abilities. One was a cautionary tale that my father enjoyed telling. Dutt was superlatively talented, and mastered English so thoroughly that he could dream of composing verses that would rival the great poets in the language. This was not an ambition that India's British rulers could countenance, much less encourage; and so the Englishmen he knew poured cold water on his efforts. His youthful production, The Captive Ladie), remained his only book of English poems. My father would round off the story with the pronouncement that since Michael could not succeed as a poet in English no one else in the subcontinent could. I wonder if the warning had the effect of a dare and got me into writing poetry in English. Whether it did or not, I am sure if I then followed Dutt into switching to our shared mother tongue no epic or sonnet cycle would emerge – not even if I tried to emulate his lifestyle.

Making good use of his location in London, Murshid has explored many published and unpublished sources of information which have a relevance to the vita of Michael, in particular the archival records and institutional publications from colonial times which are available in Britain and France. With the help of such sources he has been able to unearth new facts, correct many previously held misconceptions, and cast new light on areas of Michael’s life which had been veiled to the public eye before. In particular, his assiduity in chasing records of births, baptisms, marriages, and deaths is exemplary. His work has been invaluable in establishing the real identity of the two women who shared Michael’s life, Rebecca Thompson and Henrietta White. In my generation we grew up with the notion that Henrietta was his second wife and that she was French. She was neither. She was also from the English-speaking circle of Madras. Her father was a friend and colleague of Michael’s, and she and Michael became close after she had lost her own mother and her father had remarried. She and Michael do not seem to have been formally married, presumably because Rebecca had never granted him divorce. There is no record either of their marriage or of Michael obtaining a divorce from Rebecca. Henrietta and her children were fluent in French because of their French sojourn, but as Murshid points out, had she been of French ethnic origin, her name would have been Henriette, not Henrietta. Prior to Murshid’s definitive researches, even this very simple clue hadn’t been followed up by anybody. Murshid has been able to show that Rebecca Thompson was an orphan who was three-quarters white (with a British father and a mother who was classified as an ‘Indo-Briton’). Henrietta’s father George Giles White was clearly British, but her mother Eliza might have been either British or Eurasian.