Betrayed by Hope – A Review
Basudhara Roy is a poet, academic and faculty of English…
A review of Betrayed by Hope, a play-script authored by Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal, delving into the tumultuous life of Michael Madhusudan Dutt. Based on his letters, this genre-bending work brings to life the complex intersections of art, culture, and colonialism in 19th-century Bengal.
What does it mean to resuscitate, in art, a life from the past? When the life, especially, is that of one of the country’s foremost literary and maverick artists living in and through a tumultuous historical period and attempting to weave a cosmopolitan dream in times that were sadly parochial, how does one go about the act of biographical reconstruction with both veracity and vision? Betrayed by Hope authored by Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal is a play-script on the life of Michael Madhusudan Dutt based on the letters that he wrote to friends and well-wishers during his turbulent lifetime. A scintillating genre-bending work, as profound as it is lucid and as visionary as it is authentic, the play, divided into five short acts, encapsulates all the rich contradictions of an esoteric and exceptionally gifted mind nourished, incarcerated, and finally punished by the exigencies of its times.
From the very beginning of the play, one is drawn to its crisp pace and the compact ordering of its temporal universe. Biographical, as the work is, the authors have been careful in their selection of episodes from a prodigiously eventful life so that there is neither omission nor flattening, and the urgency and precision of the narrative are maintained remarkably throughout. Undiluted authenticity, an important concern in a literary work of this nature, has been ensured through exclusive dramatic reliance on Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s epistolary correspondence with close friends and acquaintances at various significant moments of his capricious literary career.
The winner of The Kalinga Literary Festival Fiction Book of the Year Award 2020-21, Betrayed by Hope appears for its readers, this month, in a new paperback avatar from HarperCollins. In his endorsement for the book, Abhijit Banerjee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, avers, “Anyone interested in the colonial encounter will want to engage with it.” As one enters the text, the truth of these words takes over. For the resurrection of the life of Michael Madhusudan Dutt (henceforth, referred to as MMD) with biographical consistency is not, primarily, the play’s project. Far more radical and visionary in its conceptualization, Betrayed by Hope is a singular postcolonial exploration of nineteenth-century Bengal and its protagonist’s extraordinary personality and underrated accomplishments vis-à-vis its dynamic spirit. Language, culture and geography repeatedly surface in the play as co-ordinates of creative fertility and in the bildungsroman of MMD’s growth as an artist, they triumphantly shape his transnational sensibility and tragic destiny
What makes this a play of vital academic interest is its strategic use of a pedagogic mode of investigation, reflection and meaning-making. The Sutradhar of the play is a millennial female academic from Bangladesh, a research scholar named Rubina Rahman, whose tone in the play “alternates between her lively city-girl self and the serious scholar with a task at hand.” She is, as her creators assert, “somewhat out of her depth in handling the interplay of the poet’s life in undivided Bengal with the divided legacy after Partition and the birth of East Pakistan in 1955, and the subsequent creation of Bangladesh in 1971.” The Sutradhar’s befuddled sense of identity and post-national consciousness mirrors, in a way, “MMD’s own negotiations with different cultural and linguistic legacies.” Posited as the subject of Rubina’s doctoral dissertation, MMD comes alive to her as well as to the reader/audience in all his diverse facets – Anglophile, polygot, precocious, profligate, convert, confident, cosmopolitan, subversive, and most indefatigably, an iconoclast.
Throughout the play, MMD is represented to the audience textually i.e.in reading out either from his work or letters with the researcher-narrator interpreting/commenting/ interrogating/ substantiating on these readings. The result is a rare dramatization of the interaction between a reader and a text that throws poststructuralist ideas like the ‘death of the author’ to the winds. “It is not for me to judge Mr. Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s character or mercurial life or the precarious paths of morality he often chose to tread,” says the Sutradhar at one point. At another point she says, “I am no longer a neutral researcher; I confess to having lost the academic distance necessary for a scholarly project. I am literally boiling with rage at our hero’s convenient double standards, at his hypocrisy, his selfishness.”
Poised between the self and the world as creativity is, it is often impossible to separate the art and the artist. Where does personality end and creation begin? Similarly in the act of interpretation too, it is virtually impossible to be impersonal. No wonder then that the Sutradhar’s reflections are mediated through her own identity consciousness: “I do understand MMD’s cultural confusion. We encounter the same sort of dilemma more than a hundred years later. The same linguistic confusion … am I a Bangla-speaking Bengali, or am I propelled by an alien English tongue?” Her gender-identity also surfaces robustly at times: “Literary brilliance, overweening ambition – these things didn’t give him the right to destroy so many lives. Tortured genius! Hah! Let me flag that these tortured genius types are always men.” And yet, it is through such gender-identification with MMD’s abandoned wife that Rubina Rahman’s most intense and eloquent critical insight is born: “In the depths of his heart, did Madhusudan feel guilt towards the wife he had abandoned in Madras along with the four children he had fathered? Was he turning his guilt into dramatic art by focusing on heroines, bold and accomplished in his shorter plays and poems?”
It is interesting to note that the play’s title Betrayed by Hope is an antithesis of the title of Dutt’s well-known biography Lured by Hope (Oxford University Press, 2003) written by Ghulam Murshid and translated from Bengali into English by Gopa Majumdar. The colonial subtext, perhaps consciously evoked by this resonance in nomenclature, is striking and leads one to ruminate on the brand of hope that both these texts effectively contour. The hope that lures MMD’s life and ultimately betrays it, was distinctly born of the colonial encounter. His craving for “Albion’s distant shore”, his thirst for English and other European languages, his reverence for British culture and education, and his ardent desire to earn the respect of fellow Englishmen, were all idiosyncratic to the inordinately fertile and immensely turbulent socio-historical period that MMD was part of. Similarly, his literary accomplishments in Bengali, fuelled primarily by his culturally hybrid imagination and his exceptional felicity in the classical languages of Europe, would not have been possible in any other historical period.
“You may take my word for it … that I shall come out like a tremendous comet,” wrote MMD in a prophetic letter to his close friend, Raj Narain Basu in 1861, foreshadowing his transient, blazing genius. Betrayed by Hope poignantly represents both the rich creative possibilities and the disabling cultural limitations of Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s times, both the astounding flight and the glaring failure of his age. His sensibility, richly nourished by the complex cultural encounters of colonialism, could not attune itself, at the same time, to its dogmatic prejudices. An exile in his own country and a nostalgia-ridden foreigner in England, MMD lived continually in the interstices–of language, religion, culture, morality, profession and posterity. His creativity also, as the Sutradhar points out, comes vitally from these interstices.
Having been an avid and admiring reader of three formerly co-edited books by Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal– In Search of Sita: Revisiting Mythology (Penguin India, 2009), Finding Radha: The Dance of Love (Penguin India, 2018), and Treasures of Lakshmi: The Goddess Who Gives (Penguin India, 2024), I cannot help but discern a familiar narrative structure in Betrayed by Hope. In each of these four books, there is an interweaving of creativity with criticism, a strategic montage effect, the achronological illumination of biographical facts by intensification of particular episodes, and the projection of a whole through fragments, all of which amount, in my view, to a distinctive feminist mode of narration
Critics widely agree that MMD has not been well-served by the English translators of his Bengali writing. However, by creatively translating his life into English, Betrayed by Hope, gives Indian Writing in English a brilliant hero, a native Prometheus. In a classic celebration of the cosmopolitanism that had punished MMD in life, Betrayed by Hope, therefore, is as much a cultural interrogation as a reconstruction of the enigmatic character of Michael Madhusudan Dutt in the way that Gokhale and Lal’s former books attempt to reconstruct Sita, Radha, and Lakshmi within the Indian cultural matrix, and if the success of those books is anything to go by, in this search for what betrayed him, Michael Madhusudan Dutt shall not only be found but shall be academically cherished and creatively reinterpreted for decades to come.
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Basudhara Roy is a poet, academic and faculty of English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Her latest work is featured in Madras Courier, Lucy Writers Platform, Berfrois, Gitanjali and Beyond, The Aleph Review and Yearbook of Indian English Poetry 2020-21, among others.