Militant Classicism

Michael Madhusudan Dutt and the Rewriting of Indian Myth

Abstract

This paper explores the refunctioning of myth in nineteenth-century Bengal through the works of Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824–1873), one of the most radical figures of the Bengal Renaissance. It argues that Dutt’s literary project can be understood as a form of militant classicism — a poetics that simultaneously reveres classical form while destabilising canonical hierarchies. By appropriating Miltonic blank verse and epic conventions, Dutt reimagined sacred narratives from the Ramayana and beyond, elevating demonised figures like Meghnad and giving voice to heroines such as Pramila and Krishna Kumari. These revisions reveal myth’s dual capacity to sustain and unsettle authority, while also exposing the tensions of colonial modernity, religious reform, and gender politics. The paper traces Dutt’s experiments across epic, tragedy, lyric, and satire, showing how myth became a medium through which cultural identity, sovereignty, and female agency were negotiated. Reception history is examined to highlight how his works provoked devotional anxieties, inspired nationalist reinterpretations, and continue to invite feminist and postcolonial readings. In foregrounding Dutt’s militant classicism, the paper contributes to larger debates on myth as a living form — not a static inheritance but a contested and generative idiom of cultural politics in colonial Bengal.