A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 16 (The sonnet in India, the beginnings in West Bengal, with reference to Tagore & Michael Madhusudan Dutt)

 I could go on about the sonnet abroad and how DG Rosetti embellished his paintings with sonnets or vice versa but refrain as I want to come to what is really refreshingly new about my book which is about the popularity and growth of the sonnet in India.

After English education came in rightly or wrongly through colonialism and imperialism as one of the gifts or curses of the British Empire it was natural that Indians who read all the sonnets and more quoted in my book so far, except for the French, Italian and German ones perhaps, and the ones by Berryman and Beckett, should feel the urge to take up writing sonnets.

And so the sonnet  (and sonnet sequences and the muses, which have traveled nations, times, spaces, places and also poets, and gone through the hands of women too as readers and writers, all having been reported on more or less diligently by me, till now, also showing the differences in its content, form, structure, the language used changing, the historical background mutating, all delineated to a brief extent, the topics and themes dealt with widening etc.,) entered its last phase in "the jewel in the crown", as it was then called, our India. And naturally, it found its first most devoted votary in West Bengal, in the great poet, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, who wanted to make the East and the West meet through his sonnets and epic poems in English and Bengali. He found the iambic pentametre ideal and wrote a sonnet that is also memorable on why he turned back to writing on Indian topics, (after his dalliance with the British, that also led to his conversion to Christianity, and his very Victorian looking beard, and his wife Henrietta being from abroad/ over there,) but by also using freely all foreign models to make Indian poetry in the mother tongue as well as in English more powerful.

Rabindranath Tagore (by writing the foreword) and Theodore Dunn (1918) brought out a book  of English sonnets by Bengalis in which we find these sonnets by Michael Madhsudan Dutt (https://www.amazon.com/Bengali-Book-English-Verse-Rabindranath/dp/1112470972)

Sonnets.
I.

I am not rich, nay, nor the future heir
To sparkling gold or silver heaped on store;
There is no marble blushing on my floor
With thousand varied dies:—no gilded chair,
No cushions, carpets that by riches are
Brought from the Persian land, or Turkish shore;
There is no menial waiting at my door
Attentive to the knell: and all things rare,
Born in remotest regions, that shine in
And grace the rich-man's hall, are wanting here.
These are not things that by blind Fate have been
Allotted ever to the poor man's share:
These are not things, these eyes have ever seen,
Tho' their proud names have sounded in this ear!

II.

But oh! I grieve not;—for the azure sky
With all its host of stars that brightly shine,
The green-robed earth with all her flow'rs divine,
The verdant vales and every mountain high,
Those beauteous meads that now do glittering lie
Clad in bright sun-shine,—all, oh! all are mine!
And much there is on which my ear and eye
Can feast luxurious!—why should I repine?
The furious Gale that howls and fiercely blows,
The gentler Breeze that sings with tranquil glee,
The silver Rill that gayly warbling flows,
And e'en the dark and ever-lasting Sea,
All, all these bring oblivion for my woes,
And all these have transcendent charms for me!

 (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Bengali_Book_of_English_Verse/Sonnets_(Michael_Madhusudan_Dutt)

"He dedicated his first sonnet to his friend Rajnarayan Basu, along with a letter which in which he wrote:

“What say you to this, my good friend? In my humble opinion, if cultivated by men of genius, our sonnet in time would rival the Italian.”

When Madhusudan later stayed in Versailles, France, the sixth centenary of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri was being celebrated all over Europe. He composed a poem in memory of the immortal poet and translated it into French and Italian and sent it to the court of the king of Italy. Victor Emmanuel II, the then monarch, was enamored of the poem and wrote back to the poet:

“It will be a ring which will connect the Orient with the Occident.:

Sharmistha (spelt as Sermista in English) (1857) was Madhusudan’s first attempt at blank verse in Bengali literature and is a verse play in the Shakespearean manner in being poetry. It is a type of verse used in poems. In this type of verse every line of the poem should have exactly 14 letters. ..Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee, while paying a glowing tribute to Madhusudan’s blank verse, observed:

“As long as the Bengali race and Bengali literature would exist, the sweet lyre of Madhusudan would never cease playing.” (https://stepupbdit.wordpress.com/2015/09/05/bengali-sonnet-star-michael-madhusudan-dutt/)

The two sonnets that I quoted are clearly Romantic and form a whole showing in seed his ability to write poems that connect into a totality much needed for writing epic poems but his most startling sonnet is in Bengali explaining why he chose to write an epic poem on the Ramayana though influenced by Milton, the most. I do not know the translator so cannot give the name but here it is in English:

“Oh Bengal, myriads of gems are there in your treasure trove; -

neglecting it all (imbecile that I am),

mad with lust for the riches of others, did I roam

in lands foreign; resorting, unfortunately, to begging.

Many days did I spend relinquishing pleasure!

Surrendering body and mind to insomnia and starvation,

destroyed myself in fruitless worship, venerating unworthy ones; -

I dallied in the moss; forgetting the lotus-garden!

In my dream, your guardian goddess said to me later –

“Dear child, your mother’s treasury abounds with jewels,

then why this destitution of yours today?

Go back, you ignorant one, go back home!”

I complied to this order with pleasure; in time I found

my vernacular mine, filled with gems.” (taken from the introduction to http://www.kaveribooks.com/index.php?p=sr&Uc=9789386191052)

As it is a translation it is not true to his ability to rhyme and write in iambic pentametre and use the volta effectively etc., but the sonnet is startlingly great in showing him as not only the father of  Bengali blank verse but also of the Indian and Bengali sonnet rivalling the Petrarchan and Shakespearean varieties and he is arguably the best epic poet of our modern nation, India, better in my humble opinion, any day, than Aurobindo with his Savitri which is too didactic, at any rate. What I find most compelling here is his marriage of the East and the West, a meeting of the God the Father and the Nation-(State/Bengal as)Mother and himself as the son of both, having a very different vision from that of a Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. He has inspired me a lot as a poet and so has the latter saint. I was told about Michael Madhusudan Dutt by my mother. It is no wonder that I too have turned to the sonnets, blank verse and writing on him at my age.

Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar’s lofty praise runs:

“Meghnad Badh is a supreme poem.”

Rabindranath Tagore would later declare:-

“It was a momentous day for Bengali literature to proclaim the message of the universal muse and not exclusively its own parochial note. The genius of Bengal secured a place in the wide world overpassing the length and breadth of Bengal. And Bengali poetry reached the highest status.”

In the words of Sri Aurobindo :-

“All the stormiest passions of man’s soul he [Madhusudan] expressed in gigantic language.” 

(https://stepupbdit.wordpress.com/2015/09/05/bengali-sonnet-star-michael-madhusudan-dutt/)

This chapter is my humble tribute to him as a sonneteer who shows the way to me along with all the other giants I have quoted in this book, to be added to the above tributes I have given by three greats on him.  He inspired me as a poet, Indian, Christian and sonneteer and as the innovator of Bengali Blank Verse as well as for his ability to go beyond what others were doing at the time, to be truly an international figure of literature, and not limited only to his own state or language or the country in his art, whereby he like Tagore gave it all greater lustre, though that may not be understood by narrow language chauvinists or straitened fanatic nationalists or geographically minded people, in these days of rising parochialism. His gift is to find and make the necessary ruptures where it is needed, and reinstate continuities where they are needed to be kept intact and to transcend in the matters of religion, creed, nationalities, languages, cultures, and classes/classics.

If Dante revived pride in the vernacular and the literature of a nation Michael Madhusudan Dutt did the same for Bengal and India and more in thus undoing the colonial yoke, fighting it the only way he could with literature and poetry/words.