Tracking a forgotten prodigy
This is an unusual book from Bibek Debroy. It pieces together information, gleaned from various sources, to present an overview of the life and work of a man who translated virtually every Sanskrit epic that Debroy himself would attempt about a century later.
Manmatha Nath Dutt died in 1912 when he was just 47 years old, but in this relatively short period of time he wrote over 40 books, most of them translations of Hindu epics and religious texts from their original in Sanskrit. Every time Debroy would start on a new translation project, he would find that an earlier translation of the same text had been done by Dutt.
Dutt’s translations were extremely handy for Debroy when he began translating the Ramayana, the Mahabharata or the Puranas. Partly impressed by Dutt’s stupendous body of work and partly intrigued by this coincidence, Debroy began his extensive and painstaking research to know more about the translator who preceded him. The objective was to tell the world about a “translator extraordinaire”, about whom very little was known. The book under review is an outcome of that endeavour.
Strictly speaking, this book is not a biography of Dutt. Debroy himself admits that his research into the life and work of Dutt is not adequate and he hopes that whatever he has put together in the book will be a trigger for historians to write a complete biography of the man. Not being a biography has detracted little from the overall appeal of the book. What emerges from its 156 pages, neatly divided into six short chapters, is a fascinating story of a man who remains virtually forgotten by history in spite of his familial connections to the social and literary elite of the time and the rich body of literary work that he left behind.
The style that Debroy adopts to reveal the many facets of Dutt’s lineage is riveting. In the absence of authoritative information on his subject, Debroy does not display any authorial certitude in making assertions about Dutt’s family or academic background. Instead, he presents his research by quoting reference materials in abundance and guides the reader to a set of possible conclusions. In the process, Debroy recreates his own research journey and takes the readers along almost in the same sequence of discovering facts, sharing with them the same excitement of tracing Dutt’s family lineage as he must have experienced.
Early in the first chapter, therefore, Debroy refers to a portion of Sucheta Kriplani’s unfinished autobiography, where India’s first woman chief minister and a member of the Constituent Assembly identifies Manmatha Nath Dutt as her maternal grandfather. It transpires that Dutt had married Charubala Sen, daughter of Prasanna Kumar Sen, who had embraced the Brahmo Samaj and followed the breakaway group led by Keshub Chandra Sen.
Debroy’s meticulous research raises a few more interesting questions about Dutt’s lineage. He dispels the impression that Dutt could belong to the accomplished and affluent Datta lineage of Hatkhola in Kolkata, but raises questions on whether Dutt knew Rabindranath Tagore. Could Dutt have studied in the same school that Tagore had attended only for a brief period of time? Being contemporaries, could they have met in Pabna in East Bengal, where Tagore would often visit to look after his estate? And whether the writer, Manmatha Dutt, referred to in Tagore’s Noshotoneed (which was made into a film by Satyajit Ray by the name of Charulata) was actually Dutt the translator? Debroy provides no clear answers. But further research by Debroy establishes that Dutt had indeed grown up in Pabna and completed his higher studies after shifting to Kolkata.
The chapter on roads in Kolkata, named after Dutt, provides a detailed account of the processes and history behind the naming of streets in the city in the early 20th century. Another chapter on Dutt’s unsuccessful attempts to get his books purchased or “patronised” by the government of India brings out a new facet of Dutt.
After the publication of his early translations by Deva Press, he turned an entrepreneur, set up his own press — Elysium Press — and tried desperately to sell his books to the government in an effort that often met with failure, as Debroy has recounted.
Debroy’s research also shows that Dutt must have led a lonely life. He lost his wife quite early when he was 26 and his three children stayed with their maternal family. He was an established name as an author when he died in 1912, but there is virtually no mention of his passing away in contemporary journals around that time. Dutt had embraced the Brahmo Samaj, but translated Hindu epics and he was often seen as trying to please the colonial government. This perhaps deprived him of a collective identity that could have taken his legacy and memory forward. Dutt also wrote at a time when Bengal had a galaxy of pedigreed writers engaged in translations of ancient texts. But these alone could hardly explain why so little is known about Dutt.
It is possible that Dutt suffered the fate of a self-published author. He was not just a translator, but also a bookseller and publisher. As Debroy argues, Dutt did not get the kind of marketing support for his own books that established publishing houses could have provided. But for Debroy, Dutt was an extraordinary translator and he deserved to get that recognition. Debroy’s book on Dutt is the first such attempt at correcting a historical wrong.