The other derives from Dutt's poetical career, which evolved--or rather mutated--dramatically in his mid-thirties. As a brilliant and brash youth his avowed ambition was to become a great poet in English, "Which", he wrote to his dearest friend, Gour Das Basak, "I am almost sure I shall be, if I can go to England." He was eighteen then, and hoped to travel to "England's glorious shore" within a year. Circumstances put paid to his plans, however, and when twenty years later he did set sail, his literary aims had changed hue, so to speak.

At seventeen Dutt was writing English verses of derivative precocity; by his mid-thirties he had written a fair and varied amount: wistful lyrics, serious-minded sonnets, long or longish narrative poems. A few that he sent to "Blackwood's Magazine" and "Bentley's Miscellany" were rejected, but he did publish widely in periodicals in Calcutta and Madras, and in 1849 self-published his sole book of English verse, "The Captive Ladie", which besides the long title poem included the longish "Visions of the Past". The critical response was mixed--sufficiently mixed, it seems, to hasten a revision of Dutt's literary aims. The comment of the educationist John Drinkwater Bethune--that his English education and poetic talent would be more fruitfully utilised if he were to write in his mother tongue--certainly gave him pause.

After "The Captive Ladie" Dutt wrote only a few short poems in English. But he did write two other things that were remarkable, though for very different reasons. The dramatic fragment "Rizia: Empress of Inde", published in 1850 in a Madras weekly, is the first literary work by a non-Muslim Bengali to use a Muslim protagonist; while the lecture "The Anglo-Saxon and the Hindu", published in Madras in 1854, is a pointed statement, though articulated by one of the colonised, of the colonial view of the relationship of British rulers with their Hindu subjects. But through the mass of Orientalist stereotypes there resounds Dutt's passionate praise of the English language.

As it happened this was the last complete piece of original writing in English from Dutt's pen. Within a few years his love of English and western literature would be redirected to serve his mother tongue. Already he had begun studying Sanskrit and brushing up his Bengali. The decisive change--the "mutation"--came about quite fortuitiously. Dissatisfied with the Bengali plays being put on in Calcutta, Dutt remarked to his friend Gour that he could do better. To prove his point he wrote "Sermista", which was an instant success and won him generous patrons.

The Michael Dutt every Bengali knows--the author of "Meghnadbadh", the fashioner of Bengali blank verse, the first Bengali sonneteer, the witty farceur--was launched. Only his letters to friends were still in English, in a crisp epistolary style modelled on Byron's. His European sojourn, undertaken so that he could become a barrister, broadened his knowledge of western literature and deepened his commitment to his mother tongue. The sharpest statement of his revised stance occurs in a letter to Gour: "If there be anyone among us anxious to leave a name behind him, and not pass away into oblivion like a brute, let him devote himself to his mother-tongue. That is his legitimate sphere--his proper element. European scholarship is good in as much as it renders us masters of the intellectual resources of the most civilized quarters of the globe; but when we speak to the world, let us speak in our own language. Let those who feel that they have a spring of fresh thought in them, fly to their mother-tongue. Here is a bit of 'lecture' for you and the gents who fancy that they are Swarthy Macaulays and Carlyles and Thackerays! I assure you, they are nothing of the sort. I should scorn the pretensions of that man to be called 'educated' who is not master of his own language."

Ever since it has been a Bengali foible to dismiss subcontinentals who write in English by saying, "If Michael couldn't do it with consummate success it is perverse of you to even dream of attempting it." The world has changed since Dutt's days and today there are western writers who fancy that they are pale-skinned Rushdies and Walcotts and Naipauls.

Kaiser Huq teaches English at Dhaka University.

HYMN

I
Long sunk in Superstition's night,
By sin and Satan driven--
I saw not--cared not for the light
That leads the blind to Heaven.

II
I sat in darkness--Reason's eye
Was shut--was closed in me--
I hasten'd to Eternity
O'er Error's dreadful sea!

III
But now, at length thy grace, O Lord1
Bids all around me shine:
I drink thy sweet--thy precious word--
I kneel before thy shrine!--

IV
I've broken Affection's tenderest ties
For my blest Savio's sake:--
All, all I love beneath the skies,
Lord! I for Thee forsake!

--9th February, 1843.

I SIGH FOR ALBION'S DISTANT SHORE

I
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 corss the vast Atlantic wave
For glory, or a nameless grave!

II
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 is she were my native-land!

(Kidderpore, 1841)