"Greek to Me": Two Versions of Modern Epic in Victorian Bengal

Abstract

Abstract:Victorian Bengal saw a number of young writers, working under the influence of Orientalist scholarship, Romantic literary theory, and English poets like John Milton and Lord Byron, attempt to translate the great Sanskrit epic Rāmāyana into a modern world epic. This paper juxtaposes two such attempts: Romesh Chunder Dutt's Rāmāyana (1898) and Michael Madhusudan Dutt's Meghnādbadh kābya ("The Slaying of Meghanada," 1861-2). Read together, I argue, these poems embody two very different ways of recasting a colonial text as worldly. Where Romesh repackages the Rāmāyana within a comparativist rubric that telegraphs its resemblances to Homer or Milton, Madhusudan projects a blasphemous worldliness that stresses his ability to break with the past.