Shoshee Chunder Dutt Selections from ‘BENGALIANA’ Edited by Alex Tickell Shoshee Chunder Dutt Selections from ‘BENGALIANA’ Edited by Alex Tickell Published by Trent Editions, 2005 Trent Editions School of Arts, Communication and Culture Nottingham Trent University Clifton Lane Nottingham NG11 8NS http://human.ntu.ac.uk/research/trenteditions/mission.html © This edition: Trent Editions 2005 © Introduction: Alex Tickell 2005 ISBN 1-84233-049-7 Contents Introduction By Shoshee Chunder Dutt Reminiscences of a Keráni’s Life Shunkur: a Tale of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 The Street-Music of Calcutta The Republic of Orissá; a Page from the Annals of the Twentieth Century By Kylas Chunder Dutt A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945 Notes Glossary Acknowledgements A number of people have helped me with this project. I would like, firstly, to thank Stephen Minta for arranging a York University travel grant that enabled me to carry out research in India. I also want to thank Elleke Boehmer for her enthusiasm and editorial advice. In the early stages of research Meenakshi Mukherjee and Shubhendu Kumar Mund were both valuable sources of information about Kylas Chunder Dutt. Special thanks go to Amina Yaqin and Peter Morey for discussion and careful assistance with some of the Hindi/Urdu terms in the text. I am also exceptionally grateful to Md. Mahmudul Hasan, who painstakingly looked up many of the Bangla words in the glossary. Yet again, I am indebted to Bodh Prakash and Sucheta Mahajan and family for their hospitality, friendship, and help with research on Bengaliana in India. In both Delhi and Calcutta, members of the Dutt family were very generous with their assistance, and I would like to thank Malavika Karlekar and Kalyan Dutt in particular. In Calcutta the staff of the National Library were a great help and allowed me access to a number of rare editions of Shoshee’s work. Finally, I would like to thank Rachel Goodyear for her advice, support and her invaluable editorial role in the preparation of this edition. Introduction Born in 1824 into the highly literary Dutt family and educated at Calcutta’s newly established Hindu College, Shoshee (Sasi) Chunder Dutt is one of the most articulate representatives of a new cross- fertilization of European and Bengali culture in early nineteenth-century Calcutta. Remembered chiefly for his religious verse work A Vision of Sumeru (1878), which was written after his conversion to Christianity, Shoshee (I will use the Bangla convention of referring to the author by his first name) produced ten works in English, several of which were published dually in London and Calcutta. The first member of his family to publish verse in English (in 1848), he was also a prolific prose writer, and the range of his work, which includes historical studies, anthropology, a novel in three volumes, and even crime reportage, reflects the curiosity and intellectual stamina of a nineteenth-century polymath. The Dutt family were respectable members of Calcutta’s Hindu middle class and Shoshee’s uncle, Rasamoy Dutt, had made his fortune as a financial consultant for a British firm. This may be why Shoshee was thwarted in his youthful aspirations to become a teacher or literary editor and was, instead, encouraged to take up a comparatively lowly position as an apprentice accounts clerk, or kerani, after he graduated from the Hindu College. Shortly afterwards he took a job in the colonial government treasury where his diligence earned him quick promotion; at the same time he started to become known for his journalism. Shoshee Dutt spent most of his subsequent career as Head Assistant at the Bengal Secretariat and was awarded the title of Rai Bahadur, or deputy magistrate, in recognition of his thirty-four years of service. He died in 1886. Although he never married, Shoshee had two sons, Suresh and Raman, and also acted as guardian to his orphaned nephews, one of whom, Romesh Chunder Dutt, would later distinguish himself as a brilliant nationalist historian and economist. Shoshee’s other nephew, Jogesh Chunder Dutt, recalls the literary influence of his uncle’s guardianship thus: On the death of our father, our uncle Bubu Shoshee Chunder Dutt came to live in our house in order to bring us up. He too used to sit at night with us and our favourite study used to be pieces from the works of the English poets. Two very important lessons my brother learnt from our uncle – independence of character and thirst for literary fame.1 Although largely forgotten today, Shoshee’s writing can be located historically at the beginning of what is now known as the Bengal Renaissance, an intellectual and artistic rebirth that started in Calcutta in the early 1800s and reached maturity in the late nineteenth century in the work of writers such as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Rabindranath Tagore. However, unlike the later writers of the Bengal Renaissance, who explored and re-examined aspects of indigenous art and literature as part of a burgeoning regional nationalism, Shoshee’s work, and the work of his cousins, is marked by a comparative lack of interest in Bangla as a literary medium. Indeed, Shoshee’s seemingly unambiguous poetic investment in the culture of the colonizer has meant that his prose, while representing some of the earliest fiction in English by a South Asian, has received scant attention in nationalist, Marxist and postcolonial literary histories. The short fictions and journalism selected here from Shoshee’s prose collection Bengaliana (1877) are significant precisely because they throw into sharp relief the limitations of interpretative strategies that look for signs of agency in emergent cultural nationalisms, subaltern resistance, or in forms of psychic disturbance within the colonial text. Instead, bridging colonial and metropolitan culture, Shoshee’s prose is densely inter- discursive and at times derivative, but in its critical edge, humour, and self-confidence it also serves very clearly as the foundation for later, more highly theorized nationalist writing. In Bengaliana we encounter a text that satirizes colonial attitudes, imagines armed rebellion against the British, and includes a historical fiction set during the 1857 Mutiny─in short, writing that makes us rethink the scope and sophistication of an elite Indian-English literary response to colonialism in the mid- nineteenth century. ‘A NEST OF SINGING BIRDS’: THE RAMBAGAN DUTTS The Dutt family, like the more famous Tagores, made a collective contribution to the intellectual and cultural life of Bengal in the nineteenth century. Originally from the Burdwan district, the family was well-known in Calcutta from the end of the eighteenth century, and its head, Nilmoni Dutt, who set up home in the suburb of Rambagan, was a wealthy and distinguished local figure. Nilmoni’s eldest son, Rasamoy Dutt, who was born in 1779, was also prominent in civic life, holding important governing positions in two of Calcutta’s new colleges, the Hindu College and the Sanskrit College, as well as acting as a magistrate in the East India Company’s small claims court. However, it was not until the succeeding generation and the publication of an extensive corpus of writing by Rasamoy’s children and the sons of his younger brother, Pitambur, that the family’s literary reputation was established. Rasamoy’s sons (Shoshee’s cousins) wrote verse, his nephew Romesh Chunder Dutt produced historical novels, translations and economic studies, and his cousin once removed became famous as the poetic child prodigy Toru Dutt. Rasamoy’s second son, Kylas Chunder Dutt, was educated, like his brothers, in the Hindu College that had been founded in 1817, the year of his birth. The College’s curricular focus on English and the classics enabled talented young men such as Kylas to test their literary ambitions in the language of the colonizer. While still a student, Kylas published several articles and prose fictions, among which is a remarkable short-story, ‘A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945’, published in The Calcutta Literary Gazette (6 June 1835), that envisages a popular uprising against British Rule over a century in the future. Kylas was regarded as one of the most gifted students to pass through the Hindu College and, with a student-friend, edited a short-lived monthly journal of his own, The Hindu Pioneer. He was awarded first prize at the college for three successive years and after finishing his education rose quickly in the East India Company, becoming a deputy collector in the revenue department while still in his twenties. Kylas’s brothers, Govin (Govind), Hur (Hara), and Greece (Girish), all attended the Hindu College and shared their brother’s literary ambitions. Encouraged by the College’s principal, David Lester Richardson, who patronized them with the collective title ‘the Rambagan nest of singing birds’,2 they produced essays and verse in English and eventually published, with Kylas’s son Omesh (Umesh), a collection of their poetry entitled the Dutt Family Album in 1870. Some of the contributors to the Dutt Family Album were already published poets in their own right, and Hur Chunder Dutt had two collections, Fugitive Pieces (1851) and Lotus Leaves: Poems Chiefly on Ancient Indian Subjects (1871), to his credit. Greece Chunder Dutt also published a number of volumes of poetry including The Loyal Hours (1876), which commemorates visits to India by the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh, Cherry Stones (1881), and Cherry Blossoms (1887). After Rasamoy’s death in 1854 his sons converted to Christianity, and from this time onwards their poetry, including much of the verse in the The Dutt Family Album, incorporates religious motifs and distinctly Christian themes, sometimes in direct, negative contrast to their representation of Hinduism.