Toru Dutt

Little Toru was told a folk-story by her nurse, of a peddler of bracelets who gets the vision of the Goddess. The story touched the deepest cords of her emotions. It stayed in the subconscious and when adolescent Toru started writing poetry, the story came back to her and flowed in rhymes. "Jogadhya Uma", from which the above lines are taken has a mystical touch and speaks well of the young poetess’ prowess to synthesize Indian lore and the English language for her poetry.





Toru Dutt was born on March 4, 1856, in Rambagan, 12 Manicktollah Street, Calcutta, to father Govin Chunder Dutt and mother Kshetramoni, a family that become Christians in 1862. Toru was the youngest child, arriving after sister Aru and brother Abju (who died in 1865).

A precious child, Toru was steeped in an intellectual atmosphere of her home with a linguist-poet father and a highly cultured mother. This family background exercised tremendous influence on Toru and her siblings. The very air of their garden-house in Calcutta hummed with poetry as all her three uncles - Hur Chunder, Omesh Chunder and Greece Chunder - were writing for Dutt Family Album.

Toru, the youngest of the three children of Govin Chunder and Kshetramoni - Abju and Aru being the other two - was perhaps the frailest and the most intelligent. Her father gives a graphic picture of her as



“Puny and elf-like, with disheveled tresses,

Self-willed and shy ne’er heeding that I call,

Intent to pay her tenderest addresses

To bird or cat, - but most intelligent…”



Various happy and unhappy, shattering and creative events took place with incredibly rapid succession in Toru’s life. In 1862, when she was just six, the Dutt family embraced Christianity.

Toru felt the first staggering blow of fate at nine when her only brother Abju died. The shock was tremendous and the two sisters, Toru and Aru, turned to literature for consolation, trying to drown their grief in the repeated readings of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Four years later the family left for Europe where the girls could glean rich treasures of knowledge and become versatile.

Their first stay was in Nice, in the South-east of France. Here she attended school and learnt French - a language in which they attained proficiency to use it for creativity.

The stay at Nice was short and was followed by a visit to Italy and then to England. In London, the lessons in music aroused Toru’s finer sensitivities and opened new vistas of the world of emotions. A two-year period at Cambridge helped in further blossoming of her personality. Toru came into contact with Mary Martin at Cambridge and the two fostered a life-long bond of friendship and affection. The correspondence with Mary Martin is a valuable source to know the mental make-up of the young poetess. The letters reveal the young writer’s childlike joy in life with her intellectual maturity. They speak of flowers and birds and of artistic vision, scholarly pursuits and morbid illness.

On their return to India in 1873, Toru and Aru engaged themselves in literary pursuits. During this period, Toru completed the translations of poems from French into English. She titled it ‘A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields’. It was out in March 1876. Meanwhile, goaded by a desire to bring out "another sheaf gleaned in Sanskrit fields", Toru started studying Sanskrit with her father. Putting to creative use three languages - French, English and Sanskrit - Toru was indeed a pioneer of the Indo-Anglican literature, a harbinger of a new era in Indian writings in English. On her elder sister Aru’s death Toru had written:

"Of all sad words of tongue and pen/The saddest are these- it might have been".

Toru Dutt’s literary achievements lay more in her poetic works than in her prose writings. Her poetry is meager, consisting of A Sheaf Gleaned From French Fields and Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan. Her poetry has sensitive descriptions, lyricism and vigor. Her only work to be published during her lifetime was A Sheaf Gleaned From French Fields, an unassuming volume in its overall get-up.

In selecting poems for translation Toru focused attention on the Romantics of French literature, although she also included Chenier, Courier, Lamartine and a few others of the transition period as well as Brizeux, Moreau, Dupont and Valmore who were not Romantics. The poems that she translated were probably those which could touch the cord of her imaginations and sentiments - patriotism, loneliness, dejection, frustrations, illusions, exile and captivity.

Though European by education and training, Toru was essentially an Indian at heart. From her childhood her mother had imbued in her love for the old legends from the Puranas, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Her readings of the old Sanskrit classics gave her first-hand knowledge of the charming stories. Her woman’s imagination wove myriad colored picture and she embarked upon her work, Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan. It shows her keen interest in the Indian translations. The stories included are of Savitri, Lakshman, Prahlad, Sindhu and others.

Toru also wrote two novels - Bianca and Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers. The former, an incomplete romance, is in English and the latter in diary form, is the story of Marguerite and is in French. The manuscripts of these works were discovered after her death amid her papers. Both these works have simple plots which sustain the story element, the language is poetic and the characters are clearly drawn.

Toru Dutt died on August 30, 1877, in the prime of her youth, at 21. She is often called the Keats of the Indo-English literature for more than one reason - her meteoric rise on and disappearance from the literary firmament, as also for the quality of her poetry. Toru died, like John Keats, of consumption and the end came slow and sad.

James Darmesteter pays a befitting tribute to her, “The daughter of Bengal, so admirable and so strangely gifted, Hindu by race and tradition, and an English woman by education, a French woman at heart, a poet in English, prose writer in French, who at the age of 18 made India acquainted with the poets of French herself, who blended in herself three souls and three traditions, died at the age of 21 in the full bloom of her talent and on the eve of the awakening of her genius, presents in the history of literature a phenomenon without parallel.”









Thanks to Navdeep Randhawa for biography info.

allpoetry.com/poets/DamnUnique