Toru Dutt


Toru Dutt was a Bengali translator and poet from the Indian subcontinent, who wrote in English and French, in what was then British India. She is seen as one of the founding figures of Anglo-Indian literature, alongside Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, Manmohan Ghose, and Sarojini Naidu. Dutt is known for her volumes of poetry in English, A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields and Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, and for her novel in French, Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers. Her poetry is characterized by sensitive descriptions and lyricism. Her poems revolve around themes of loneliness, longing, patriotism and nostalgia. Dutt died young, at age 21, which has influenced some comparison of her to the poet John Keats.

Biography

Early life and education

Toru Dutt was born in Calcutta on 4 March 1856 in a Bengali family that had converted to Christianity. Her father was Govind Chandra Dutt and her mother was Kshetramoni Dutt, of the Rambagan Dutt family. The Dutt family was one of the first Calcutta families to be strongly influenced by the British colonial and missionary presence. Toru Dutt's grandfather Rasamay Dutt and her father both held important positions under the British government. Her cousin Romesh Chandra Dutt was also a writer and Indian civil servant. Dutt's father converted to Christianity in 1862, when Dutt was six years old. Her mother initially resisted conversion, but eventually became a practising Christian as well. Both of Dutt's parents published some writing: her father wrote poetry and her mother published a translation into Bengali of a religious monograph.
Toru was the youngest child of three, after a sister Aru and a brother Abju. She and her siblings spent most of their childhoods in Calcutta, splitting their time between a house in the city and a garden house in the suburb of Baugmaree. Dutt was educated at home by her father, and by the Indian Christian tutor Babu Shib Chunder Bannerjea, learning French and English, and eventually Sanskrit, in addition to her first language of Bengali. During this time, she learned John Milton's epic poem of Christian allegory Paradise Lost by heart. She also learned stories of ancient India from her mother.
Dutt's brother Abju died of consumption in 1865, when he was fourteen.

Life in Europe

In 1869, when Dutt was thirteen, Dutt's family left India, making Dutt and her sister some of the first Bengali girls to travel by sea to Europe. The family spent four years living in Europe, one in France and three in England. They also visited Italy and Germany.
They first lived in France, from 1869 to 1870, in the south of France and in Paris. During this time Dutt studied French in Nice and was briefly a student at a boarding school. In 1870, the family lived in Onslow Square, Brompton, London, where Dutt studied music. In 1871, they moved to Cambridge, where they remained until 1873.
In 1872, the University of Cambridge offered a lecture series, ‘Higher Lectures for Women,’ which Toru Dutt attended with her sister Aru. At the time, women were not entitled to become members of the University of Cambridge, and opportunities for higher education were limited. This was an opportunity for women to access University lectures, set up by a group including philosopher Henry Sidgwick and suffragist campaigner Millicent Garrett Fawcett. 'Lectures for Ladies' became Newnham College in 1871, but Toru Dutt did not herself matriculate as a member of the women's College, presumably because she was living in Cambridge and had no need for College accommodation. Her correspondence does refer, however, to 'Merton Hall', then the home of Newnham College, and to Miss Clough, Principal of Newnham College. While not a member of a Cambridge college, therefore, Dutt would have had access to the college's stimulating intellectual discussion and critical thinking. At the end of 1872, Toru Dutt met and befriended Mary Martin, the daughter of Reverend John Martin of Sidney Sussex College. The friendship that developed between the two girls at this time continued in their correspondence after Toru’s return to India.
The family left Cambridge in 1873, living in St Leonards, Sussex from April to November 1873, and then returning to Calcutta.

Later life

When Toru Dutt returned to Calcutta in 1873, at age seventeen, she found it challenging to re-integrate with a culture which now seemed like "an unhealthy place both morally and physically speaking" to her Europeanized and Christianized eyes. Her sister Aru died of consumption in 1872, aged twenty. Three years after returning to Calcutta, she wrote to her friend Mary Martin that "‘I have not been to one dinner party or any party at all since we left Europe," and that "If any friend of my grandmother happens to see me, the first question is, if I am married," both statements expressing a frustration with what she saw as a restrictive and conservative society. However, she also recognized that Europe could not replace India as her true home. She took consolation in reinvigorating her studies of Sanskrit with her father, and hearing her mother's stories and songs about India.
Like both of her siblings, Toru Dutt died of consumption at a young age, on 30 August 1877.

Writing

Toru Dutt was a natural linguist and in her short life became proficient in Bengali, English, French and, later on, Sanskrit. She left behind an impressive collection of prose and poetry. Her two novels, the unfinished Bianca or The Young Spanish Maiden written in English and Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers, written in French, were based outside India with non-Indian protagonists. Her poetry comprises A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields consisting of her translations into English of French poetry, and Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan which compiles her translations and adaptations from Sanskrit literature.
A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields was published in 1876 without a preface or introduction. It contains 165 poems, mostly translated from French into English by Dutt, except for one poem composed by Dutt, "A Mon Père," and eight poems translated by her sister. At first this collection attracted little attention, though it eventually came to the attention of Edmund Gosse in 1877, who reviewed it quite favorably in the Examiner that year. Sheaf would see a second Indian edition in 1878 and a third edition by Kegan Paul of London in 1880, but Dutt lived to see neither of these triumphs. The second edition added forty-four new poems, a portrait of Toru Dutt and her sister, and a preface by their father.
At the time of her death, she left behind two novels, Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers,, the first novel in French by an Indian writer, and Bianca, or the Young Spanish Maiden, in addition to an unfinished volume of original poems in English and Sanskrit translations, Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan. It was after Dutt's death in 1877 that her father discovered the manuscripts of her writings, among which was Ancient Ballads.
When Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan was published posthumously in 1882, Edmund Gosse wrote an introductory memoir for it. In this he wrote of Toru Dutt: "She brought with her from Europe a store of knowledge that would have sufficed to make an English or French girl seem learned, but which in her case was simply miraculous." The ballads are essentially Indian in genre and outlook and are the poetical attempts to reveal her return to her land. In them are enshrined what she had learnt of her country from books and from her people. She did not anglicise her ideas but kept close to the ethical values of the original tales while her understanding of modern life and dedication to craft has helped her to make these ideas of yore relevant to posterity. Some well-remembered poems from this volume include "A Sea of Foliace," "The Lotus," "Sîta," and "Our Casuarina Tree." "Our Casuarina Tree," in particular, is often taught in high schools in India as a part of the English curriculum.

Publications

Dutt also published translations of French poetry, and literary articles, in Bengal Magazine from March 1874 to March 1877. Notable magazine publications from this time include essays on Leconte de Lisle and Henry Louis Vivian Derozio in December 1874. She also published some translations from Sanskrit in Bengal Magazine and Calcutta Review.
In addition, Dutt wrote a great many letters, which were published in 1921 as the Life and Letters of Toru Dutt by Oxford University Press, edited by Harihar Das.