“Betrayed By Hope” A Review
The author reviews ‘Betrayed by Hope‘, a powerful play by Namita Gokhale & Malashri Lal, exploring the life and struggles of Michael Madhusudan Dutt. Published by Harper Collins in 2024, this play delves into the poet’s identity crisis, his fascination with English culture, and his ultimate disillusionment.
Today I take this opportunity to share my thoughts on the play “Betrayed by Hope”, This is a play based on the life of Michael Madhusudan Dutt by Namita Gokhale & Malashri Lal and published by Harper Collins, 2024. The Price is Rupees 299.
The saying goes, that only a free person is a happy person, and the amount of happiness depends on the amount of freedom that he has in his heart. The freedom is not about physical freedom but the freedom with which one arrests one’s thoughts, beliefs and sensibilities without being a physical rebel. When our hopes do not step up to a logical culmination of our life’s premise of hopefulness, it is honestly then that we betray our own selves, our own life. In Bengal, Michael Madhusudan Dutt was honestly that special genius, despite being the perennial rebel and iconoclast. The love for English ways, literature and sensibilities that was ingrained into his senses by his English teacher, David Lester Richardson as well as the radical poet Louis Vivian Derozio in diverse ways, while Dutt was a student of Hindu College, had added to his verve. Humans have this tendency to be dazzled by an alien love and to this day, such pull yet draws and holds many minds. And yet that was not all during colonial times, for our age-old barbarities practised in the name of religion was as Jawahar Sircar states, accounts for some of our leanings towards the west.
Thus, the play Betrayed by Hope, has Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal, deal with this sensitive topic by having the Sutradhar in a sari, a red bindi and a cultivated Asian-English accent, referring to her notes a little too frequently in seeming discomfort. Such dithering, proves how one is torn apart with hesitations about the work at hand. Like PhD scholars who look for a subject to walk in and out easily to earn a degree, she had chosen Dutt likewise, but to her dismay it wasn’t so. Michael Madhusudan Dutt had not mere depth but carried deep within his being unawares, the great Bengal legacy too. He sought in his Epitaph to use his sacred mother-tongue. Yet he was that Anglophile, the son of a wealthy home who embraced wine, English ways, words, dress and carriage and whose heart cried for all thing English. His friends however always remained those same Bengali ones…Gourdas Bashak, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Rajnarain Basu, to whom he wrote his letters and who stood by him with love, care and understanding till in 1865, when he was no longer enamoured by England and her ways, and rudely hurt by the land and its people after being thoroughly disillusioned, fallen deep in debt, a chronic alcoholic, he returned homeward. His letters to his friends echo with such utterances like…Goddammit, so it must/ How are you, old boy? / to give our language a jolly lift/it is my intention to throw off the fetters forged for us by a servile admiration of everything Sanskrit/ In matters literary, old boy, I am too proud to stand before the world in borrowed clothes. I may borrow a necktie, or even a waistcoat, but not the whole suit…such chatty and confiding tone (brought to prove by the Sutradhar of Dutt being the accomplished showy polyglot. It has its reflection on the reader’s mind and makes it clear that his split soul fought with an identity crisis within his self.
The play beautifully brings out Dutt’s life in his fanciful Anglophile world, when he deserts his parents afraid that he might have to marry a Bengali girl (of a Zamindar family); the dire straits he brought his first English wife Rebecca Thompson McTavish and their four children Bertha Blanche, Phoebe, George and Michael; and later his second English wife, Amelia Henrietta Sophie White with her son Milton. He himself realizes that he had become a postcolonial paradox and the Sutradhar beautifully announces that Fate rolled him those same dice back, that he had once done with Fate! Never to be subdued he remained a failure despite being called to the Bar by the Society of Gray’s Inn and being a Barrister-at-Law; and his short bursts at sonnet writing; and his mastery over the realm of the amitrakshar chhanda. The Sutradhar found in Dutt, “Our hero-caught between conflicting cultures and languages- was a European by education and temperament, a Bengali in his beating heart.”
Nandan Dasgupta’s translation of Dutt’s Bangla poems to English, as well as by Amit Chaudhuri and Debasmita Dutta, bring back memories of Madhusudan Dutt. The play written in a genial vein however remind the reader again and again of this iconic talent of Bengal, who just did not know the mathematics of life. His death in a charity hospital brings the reader to commiserate with the heartfelt lament in Atma Bilap
I wonder at times
Alas, what did I gain,
Betrayed by Hope?
The life-river flows
to the death ocean
How do I turn it back?
Each day older, each day weaker-
Yet Hope persists! What a pain!
Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal has paid their heartfelt tribute to the memory of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, the nineteenth century pride of Bengal, in this play Betrayed by Hope, that has won the Kalinga Literary Festival Fiction Book Award 2020-2021. Betrayed by Hope rings with a line from Nissim Ezekiel, in my mind…Home is where we have to gather grace. The rash and impetuous teenager sighing for Albion’s distant shore and worshipping Bacchus, dining at Mars and Stone was the passionate elite youth baptized as Michael. It is a big ‘Why?’ that confronts the readers. Dutt’s Ratnavali, Sermista, Tilottama Sambhav Kavya, Meghnadbadh Kavya, Padmabati…are rich works. Is it an irony of life that hope betrayed him piteously! His writings hail him for all time to come. It was the rebel within him, that went by the name of “Hope”. It was hope that betrayed him through and through. The Sutradhar’s questions ring out …The man, the poet, where do they meet? Where do they disengage? Yes, it is at that point, his lauding of John Milton with Satan as his icon, that had made Michael Madhusudan Dutt too, have the Demon King Ravana as his hero, clamouring over the injustice of Meghnad’s death for all time to come.
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