Toru Dutt (1856-1877)

Born in Calcutta in 1856, Toru Dutt seemed destined to live between worlds: her childhood shaped by Bengali storytelling and Milton’s Paradise Lost, her adolescence by studies in France and England, her poetry by the effort to make those worlds speak to one another.^[1]

Loss marked her early life: her beloved brother Abju died in 1865, and her sister Aru, with whom she traveled to Europe, died in 1874. These personal griefs hover behind her mature poetry, which often turns to memory and lament as artistic resources.^[2]

At the age of thirteen, she sailed with her parents and Aru to Europe. The Dutts lived first in France and later in England, where Toru studied French literature and music in Nice before attending the pioneering “Higher Lectures for Women” at Cambridge in 1872. Few Indian women of her generation had such access to European education; fewer still returned home determined to make its resources speak to Indian cultural traditions.^[3]

When she returned to Calcutta in 1873, Dutt found herself caught between the cosmopolitan freedoms she had tasted in Europe and the restrictive social pressures of colonial society. “I have not been to one dinner party…since we left Europe,” she noted in a letter, her wry observation cutting to the heart of her alienation.^[4] Yet her isolation spurred a different kind of immersion: she turned to Sanskrit texts, to the Mahabharata and Ramayana, and began weaving India’s epic traditions into poetry written in English and French. (And who doesn’t admire a poet who could shift from Hugo to the Mahabharata without missing a beat?)

The result is a corpus at once slender and astonishing. A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields (1876), her translations from French poets like Hugo and Gautier, earned praise from Edmund Gosse and went through multiple editions. Her posthumously published novels include Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers (1879), written in French, and Bianca, or The Young Spanish Maiden (1878), written in English—making her not just a pioneer but the first Indian woman to produce novels in both languages.^[5] And then there is Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (1882), which gathers together retellings of Hindu myths and original lyric poems, including the elegiac “Our Casuarina Tree,” where memory, loss, and attachment to place entwine with the natural world.^[6]

It is tempting to call her work hybrid—French, English, Indian; epic, lyric, novel—but such terms flatten more than they reveal. James Darmesteter famously described her as “three souls and three traditions,” and he wasn’t wrong.^[7] Yet what makes her so compelling for us today is the way she refused to keep those traditions in their separate boxes. Her poems and prose insist on crossing boundaries, on showing us what happens when languages, forms, and histories are made to live together—sometimes in harmony, sometimes in tension. Reading her, we begin to see the Victorian canon itself as less insular, more global, and frankly more interesting than we may have imagined.^[8]

Standard Editions of Toru Dutt’s Works

• Dutt, Toru. A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields. Calcutta: B. M. Bose, 1876.
• —. Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan. London: Kegan Paul, 1882.
• —. Collected Prose and Poetry. Oxford University Press, 2005.

Reference Texts & Biographical Studies

• Das, Harihar, editor. The Life and Letters of Toru Dutt. London: Kegan Paul, 1921.
• Sen Gupt, Padmini. Toru Dutt. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1968.
• Nair, K. R. Ramachandran. Three Indo-Anglian Poets: Henry Derozio, Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu. New Delhi: Sterling, 1987.
• Dwivedi, A. N. Toru Dutt: A Study in Diversity. New Delhi: Atlantic, 1995.

Key Literary Criticism, Edited Collections & Thematic Studies

• Darmesteter, James. “Literary Remains of Toru Dutt.” Revue Critique d’Histoire et de Littérature, 1883. n. pag.
• Gosse, Edmund. “Toru Dutt.” Critical Kit-Kats. William Heinemann, 1913, pp. 197–212.
• Lootens, Tricia. “Bengal, Britain, France: The Locations and Translations of Toru Dutt.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 34, no. 2, Sept. 2006, pp. 573–90. Cambridge University Press.
• Phillips, N. A. “Strategic Singularity in the Poetry of Toru Dutt.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, vol. 1, no. 3, Winter 2005. n. pag..
• Boutaghou, Maya. “What Books Do You Read? Toru Dutt, A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields and Imagining Francophone Intertextual Maps.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 20, no. 4, 2018, pp. 552–68. Taylor & Francis.
• “Toru Dutt’s Writing and Nineteenth-Century Cross-Cultural Dialogue.” Journal of Victorian Culture Blog, Oxford University Press, 25 Mar. 2021.
• Ali, Syed Abid, and Sheeba Azhar. “Toru Dutt: A Multilingual Decoder and Re-Coder of French and Sanskrit Verses.” International Journal on Studies in English Language and Literature (IJSELL), vol. 2, no. 6, 2014, pp. 47–55. Arc Journals.