An East London scholar of Victorian Indian literature reads about a father raging over his son taking his bride’s surname and recalls a poet who reinvented himself completely
Wednesday, 21 October 2026. Bow, East London. A cafe in Victoria Park by the boating lake, three swans staring at me with naked hostility, a Penguin edition of Bengali poetry in translation, 10.05am.
A Father, A Surname And A Button Maker
The London Prat this morning carried a piece on whether a son should take his fiancee’s last name. A retired insurance manager from Ealing threatens to boycott his son’s wedding, withdraw funding and disinherit the family Labrador after the son agrees to take his bride’s surname. The father appeals to centuries of family heritage. On inspection, the heritage goes back exactly as far as a button maker in Birmingham in 1892.
I read it twice and then read it aloud to the swans, who were unmoved. I study nineteenth-century British and Indian literature, and the Victorian obsession with names, lineage and inheritance is the engine of half the novels I teach. But the piece made me think of a poet rather than a novel, and of a name change far more dramatic than anything in Ealing.
From Madhusudan To Michael
Madhusudan Dutt was born in 1824 in a village in Bengal, into a wealthy Hindu family. As a brilliant young student at Hindu College in Calcutta, he fell in love with English poetry, especially Milton and Byron, and dreamed of becoming a great English poet. In 1843, he converted to Christianity and took the name Michael. His father, a prominent lawyer, was furious. He cut him off. The rupture was public, painful and very nearly permanent.
Michael Madhusudan Dutt went on to live in Madras, marry, travel to England and France, struggle with debt and eventually discover that his true genius lay not in English but in Bengali. His great epic, Meghnad Badh Kavya, published in 1861, retells part of the Ramayana from the point of view of the demon king’s son, in blank verse adapted from Milton. It is one of the founding works of modern Bengali literature. He changed his name, lost his family’s approval and then gave his family’s language its greatest modern poem. Fathers, take note.
The Victorian Fear Of The Wrong Name
In the Victorian novels I teach, names are property. In Trollope, a man’s surname is a seat in Parliament and a share of the county. In Dickens, it is either a mark of respectability or a joke. Esther Summerson in Bleak House does not know her real name, and the whole plot turns on discovering it. The idea that a name is something you might choose, rather than something you inherit and guard, would have struck most Victorian fathers as the first step towards revolution.
The father in the report is a perfect late Victorian. He is not defending a name so much as a fantasy of continuity, a line stretching back through history that turns out, when anybody checks, to stop at a Birmingham button maker. Dutt’s father, at least, had a real heritage to defend. He was wrong to cut off his son, but he was not inventing his ancestors. The Ealing father is defending a pedigree with the depth of a teaspoon.
There is a lovely irony in Dutt’s story. The name he took to escape his heritage is now inseparable from it. Every schoolchild in Bengal knows Michael Madhusudan. The Christian name and the Hindu name sit together on statues, stamps and street signs, and nobody finds the pairing strange any more.
Russian Patronymics, A Digression
My other obsession, Russian politics, offers its own perspective. In Russia, every person carries a patronymic, a middle name formed from the father’s first name. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin carries his father’s name inside his own every time anybody addresses him formally. It is a system of extraordinary patriarchal confidence. You cannot escape your father in Russian. He is grammatically part of you. The Ealing father would love it. He would move to Moscow tomorrow, if he could bring the Labrador.
Russian political humour, for what it is worth, has long had fun with the names of its leaders. NewsThump once ran a headline in which Putin announces triumph in the 2018, 2024 and 2030 elections, which is as accurate a piece of political forecasting as anything I have read in a think-tank report. A name, in that system, is not inherited. It is permanent.
What I Would Tell The Son
If the son in the report ever wandered into my seminar, I would hand him a copy of Dutt’s letters, written from poverty in Versailles in the 1860s, full of debt, homesickness and fierce pride in his own work. I would tell him that people change their names for love, for faith, for art and for freedom, and that the worst that usually happens is a furious father and a Labrador temporarily removed from the will. The best that happens is a new literature.
The Swans Have Moved
The swans have gone to harass a family with a toddler and a bag of bread. The cafe owner, a Polish woman who once told me her surname is unpronounceable in English and she likes it that way, has refilled my tea without asking. I asked whether she would ever change her name. She said she changed it once, at her wedding, and changed it back at her divorce, and that both occasions were improvements. I wrote that down. Michael Madhusudan Dutt would have put it in a sonnet.