The name of the first playwright in Bengali in not unknown to any. The play which bestowed such fame and honour to Ramnarayan Tarkaratna is called Kulinkulosarbossho. Once, the play Ratnabali, composed by him, was being enacted in the king’s palace in Belgachhia’s Paikpara in Calcutta. Ratnabali was, however, a translation of Sri Harsha’s Sanskrit drama. When the play was being rehearsed, the news rode on the back of thin air and from the northern fringes of the city, it reached Calcutta’s southern localities inhabited by the western sahibs. Immediately came the request from quite a few powerful westerners that they too would be eager to watch the drama. It was nice to find the sahibs so excited!
Ramnarayan Tarkaratna
But would they understand the Bengali play? To make the play easier for the sahibs to comprehend, it had to be translated into English. But there was a problem there too. There was no time in hand, neither was a translator readily available. As soon as Gourdas Basak heard this, he asserted, “Who says that there is no translator? Why, Michael is there!” That very year Michael Madhusudan Dutt returned to Calcutta on resigning from his job in Madras where he stayed for seven years. When the request to translate a play came from a dear friend, Michael immediately conveyed his assent. Keeping the western sahibs in mind, he translated the play into pure Saxon English with great speed. The two rajas of Paikpara, two brothers Pratapchandra and Iswarchandra Singha, sent their manager Ram Chattopadhyay to Michael with a cheque of five hundred rupees as a very modest honorarium!
In due time, on the third stage presentation of the play, the sahibs came to see it riding their phaetons. They have been doubly happy: first because of the acting and then for the translation. Everyone sang a paean in praise of the translator. If the event stopped here, it would not have been cherished as a historical event. But the performance of Ratnabali brought new waves into Bengali literature. The translation brought to Michael’s parched soul an air or spring. He immediately decided on writing Bengali plays. Just as the night sky on the day of the festival of lights is dazzled by the colourful radiance of the fire crackers, Michael, from then on, began to illuminate the sky of the Bengali theatre, for so long almost bereft of plays, with new plays and farces and satires. Plays such as Sarmishtha, Ekei ki bale sobbhota, Buro shaliker ghare ron followed in quick succession….
(This excerpt is translated from Purnendu Pattrea’s Kolkatar Galposalpo)
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