Light In The Morning

n a career spanning at least forty years, Meenakshi Mukherjee built up a reputation grounded in books on literature and culture, exploring the relationship between fiction, history and community in works such as The Twice-born Fiction (1971), Realism and Reality (1986) and Elusive Terrain: Culture and Literary Memory (2008).  Ironically, Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848-1909), the subject of Mukherjee’s first foray into biography, was not one among his generation of Indians in dire need of one. As Mukherjee herself documents in her afterword, that job was done thrice in English, in 1909 by G.A. Natesan, in 1911 by J.N. Gupta and in 1967 by Rabindra Chunder Dutt and a few more times in Bengali. Of these, it is his son-in-law, J.N. Gupta, who had access to material unavailable to others, as well as a vivid style (it is a truism that our ancestors wrote much better English than most of us). This is how he presents a famous occasion in the life of R.C. Dutt: ‘Bankim [Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay] suggested he [R.C. Dutt] should contribute in Bengali to the Banga Darsan... “Write in Bengali!” exclaimed Mr Dutt; “but I hardly know the literary style.” “Style!” rejoined Bankim; “whatever a cultured man like you will write will be style. If you have the gift in you, style will come of itself.” This was a memorable episode in the life of Mr Dutt, for from that day he turned to Bengali literature.’

The incident could not be told better and Mukherjee does not attempt to do so. From a celebrated family known as the Dutts of Rambagan, when barely twenty he crept into a boat in Calcutta with two friends. They boarded a ship to Britain to write the ICS examinations in London. Only one Indian, Surendranath Tagore, had cleared the exam till then. Amazingly, all three friends—R.C. Dutt, Bihari Lal Gupta and Surendranath Banerjea—and a brilliant young man from Bombay, Sripad Babaji Thakur, qualified. Hailed by the nation at large, the heroes returned home to join work, though Banerjea famously dropped out to become an eminent political nationalist.

From 1874 to his death in 1909, Dutt worked tirelessly both as an administrator—he climbed to the top rung of the ICS and after retirement was Dewan of Baroda—and as a writer of books, each more renowned than the other. Of these Mukherjee evaluates the first book, The Peasantry of Bengal, very highly, equating its concerns with the Subaltern Studies initiative in its grasp of the grassroots. His most famous work, The Economic History of India, is analysed in detail in the context of contemporary theorists, probing the argument presented in it for its current relevance. Whatever that might be, it leads one to agree with Gandhi, who wrote: “When I read Mr Dutt’s Economic History of India, I wept, and as I think of it again my heart sickens.”

The books on literature and history by R.C. Dutt (The Literature of Bengal; A History of Civilisation in Ancient India) were famous in their time but, as Mukherjee suggests, are largely irrelevant today. The six novels in Bengali, most of them praiseworthy, seem similarly lost to current generations. His famous translations from the Ramayana and Mahabharata and his Lays of Ancient India await re-evaluation by future scholars. Still, one comes away from this biography of a man representative of India’s long nineteenth century of modernity with a sense of the persistence in the Indian identity of some of the contradictions that informed his character and achievements. The legacy of his negotiation between two languages, of his reading of history through literature, and, most importantly, of his ambivalent attitude (ranging from admiration to  total condemnation) towards the British colonial project, contain a valuable repository of some of the unique confluences that are formative of the Indian modern.

His most valuable contributions seem to have been his thinking on famine and empire, on political moderation and staunch secularism, on literary value and historical materialism. This is a record of a distinguished life, and Mukherjee is faithful to its contours. We are given two family trees and a list of all the honours accorded to him, which are dazzling enough. Yet it is fair to say that its distinction lay in the works it produced, whose contribution to our idea of India will change shape and colour in the eyes of every generation reading him anew.