Toru Dutt

Torulata Dutt

Calcutta, India

1870–3

Toru Dutt was born into the well-known Dutt family of Rambagan. Many of her uncles and cousins as well as her father, Govin Chunder Dutt, published poetry and prose. Her education and upbringing were rather unusual, even for progressive mid-nineteenth-century Bengal. Toru Dutt’s family had converted to Christianity, which in some ways led to a feeling of social alienation in India. In 1869, a few years after the death of his son Abju, Govin Chunder Dutt took his wife and two young daughters Aru and Toru to travel in Europe. They spent a few months in Nice, where both sisters attended a French pension and learnt French. In 1870 the family travelled to Brompton, England via Boulogne. It was unusual for Indian women of the time to travel abroad and also to gain an education abroad. 

In England both sisters continued their French studies. While living in Cambridge between 1871 and 1873 they attended the higher lectures for women at the university. 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 until the time of Toru’s death. Dutt seemed to have acquired a good set of acquaintances whilst attending the lectures at Cambridge, as she mentions quite a few names in her correspondence with Martin after her return to India. Among these names are Mr and Mrs Baker, the proprietors of Regent House where the Dutt family lodged in Cambridge; the son, Reginald, and daughters of Rev. H. Hall of St Paul’s Church, Cambridge; Mr Clifford, who later came to officiate at the church near the Dutt’s Garden House outside Calcutta; and Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb, who was then Professor of Greek at Trinity.  

A collection of Toru Dutt’s correspondence includes her letters written from England to her cousins in India. Dutt was a natural linguist and in her short life became proficient in Bengali, English, French and, later on, Sanskrit. Although she died at an exceptionally early age 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 interestingly based outside India with non-Indian protagonists. Her poetry comprises A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields, consisting of her English translations of French poetry, and Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, a compilation of her translations and adaptations from Sanskrit literature.

A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields was published in 1876 by the Saptahik Sambad Press, Bhowanipore without any preface or introduction. At first this collection attracted little attention but later it famously fell into the hands of Edmund Gosse, who gave it a splendid review in The Examiner of August 1876. When her collection of Sanskrit translations Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan was published posthumously in 1882, Edmund Gosse wrote an introductory memoir for it. In this he wrote of 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’ (p. xiii).