THE WRITINGS OF TORU DUTT

Author(s): Dipendranath Mitra

Source: Indian Literature , April-June 1966, Vol. 9, No. 2 (April-June 1966), pp. 33-38
Published by: Sahitya Akademi

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23329477

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 TORU DUTT

Therefore I fain would consecrate a lay

Unto thy honour, Tree, beloved of those
Who now in blessed sleep, for aye, repose,
Dearer than life to me, alas! were they!
Mayst thou be numbered when my days are done
With deathless trees—like those in Borrowdale,
Under whose awful branches lingered pale
'Fear, trembling Hope, and Death, the skeleton,
And Time the shadow;' and though weak the verse
That would thy beauty fain, oh fain rehearse,
May love defend thee from Oblivion's curse!

THE WRITINGS OF TORU DUTT

Dipendranath Mitra

England, the Dutt family—Toru, Aru and their

AFTERparents—returned
a stay of about four years in France and
to Calcutta in November 1873.
The sisters, who had, while in Cambridge, started translating
into English from French poetry, appeared in print for the
first time in the March 1874 number of the Bengal Magazine.
Aru was already seriously ill and died four months later, in
July. Between March and July of the same year, fourteen
translations from French poets appeared in the magazine with
the initials 'A.D.' or 'T.D.', inconspicuously printed at the
bottom of each piece, from which we know that each sister
contributed seven translations. Thereafter, only T.D.'s con
tributions, but in larger numbers, continued to appear in the
magazine regularly for quite some time after her death on 30
August 1877.
What the initials stood for was never revealed until
A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields was published and reviewed
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 INDIAN LITERATURE

in the May 1876 number of the magazine. However, sin

'no pains' were 'spared to make the magazine worthy of th
best educated and most advanced section of the Benga
community', to which the eminent Dutt family belonged,
and since quite a few of the Dutts were very actively associated
with the magazine, very few regular readers of it, if any
found the initials mysterious.
In a letter* dated 15 December 1874, Toru wrote, 'Papa
says he will publish our translations from French poets as
soon as there are two hundred pieces. At present I send the
to the Bengal Magazine'. This must have inspired her t
work harder, and from the January 1875 number, six to
dozen of her translations appeared every month under
new section called 'Specimens from Modern French Poets'.
In November 1875 she informed Miss Martin, 'I have
finished my book of French poetry translated into English.'
The manuscript was then shown to a number of publishing
firms, 'but Calcutta publishers,' she has recorded, 'are a very
timid class of people, not at all enterprising, and they are be
sides more given to the sale of books than publishing new ones.'
And so, 'It was to be printed only and not published.'
A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields came out in March 1876.
It contained translations of 165 poems (of which eight were
done by Aru) by about 70 French poets, with her critical
notes on each piece running to over 40 pages, but without
any preface or introduction—a sizable volume of 232 pages,
bound in pale blue cloth with gold lettering on the spine.
Very few copies of this edition in the original binding are to be
seen anywhere now (the National Library, Calcutta, has one),
whereas Mr Edmund Gosse's remarks on the get-up of the
book—'a most unattractive orange pamphlet of verse', 'the
shabby little book', etc.—made in his 'Introductory Memoir'
to her Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, a much smaller
volume than the Sheaf, are widely known. (There is a re

* AllofToru Dutt's letters referred to in this article were addressed

to her English friend Miss Mary Martin, and are produced in Harihar
Das's Life and Letters of Toru Dutt, Oxford, 1921.

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 TORU DUTT

ference in one ofToru's letter, dated 24 March 1876, to M

Martin to the effect that copies sent to England were in pape
cover, that being easier for transmission; Mr Gosse m
have received one of these copies.) However, looking a
copy of this edition now, accustomed as we are at present
seeing most books produced in this country under a restricted
economy, we cannot, while we understand Mr Gosse's
action, say that she was really that badly let down by th
Saptahik Sambad Press.
The reception of her book was such that, with a fe
months of its publication, she could look forward to a seco
edition of it. We read in a letter dated 12 February 18
'I have very little time to give to reading just now, as I am
busy with adding pieces and notes to, and correcting
Sheaf.' But she did not live to see the revised and much e
larged second edition of the book which came out in 187
it contained over 30 new pieces with notes, a 'Prefato
Memoir' by her father, Govin Chunder, and a frontispie
portrait of the two sisters. This edition was soon exhauste
and an attractively produced third edition was published b
Messrs Kegan Paul & Co., London, from which a few piec
included in the second edition, were dropped, and th
poems were all re-arranged by grouping together all piec
by one poet.
During her lifetime, the Bengal Magazine also published
apart from her verse translations, the only two essays sh
known to have written. One of these was on Leconte de Lisle
together with some translations of his poems, and the other
on Henry Vivian Derozio. Both appeared in the December
number of 1874. And in June and July, 1875 appeared,
under the general title of A Scene from Contemporary History,
two translations in prose made by her from two speeches
delivered, not long ago, in the French Legislative Assembly.
One was by Victor Hugo, in which he, in 1851, vehemently
opposed the proposal to bring about certain constitutional
changes designed to make Louis Napoléon the virtual king of
France; and the other was delivered by M. Thiers, in 1870,
strongly objecting to the proposal of France's declaring war
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 INDIAN LITERATURE

on the King of Prussia.

By the end of March 1877, Torn was too ill to write.
contracted the same dreaded disease, 'consumption', wh
had already claimed the lives of Aru and her brother
Since Toru's return to India, Miss Martin had been regu
receiving from her long letters, but she received none
three months, between March and June. And when
wrote to her again on 18 June it was a mere note of sixty w
beginning with, 'I am still very ill—fever every day.'
last letter to Miss Martin was dated 30 July 1877 in w
she said, 'I feel sometimes very tired and weary and lo
and this illness has made me suffer very much.' She p
away a month later.
When after her death her father examined her pap
he found, among some other writings, an unfinished rom
in English, entitled Bianca or the Young Spanish Maiden
complete French novel, Le Journal de Mademoiselle d'Ar
Bianca was published serially in the Bengal Magazine, bet
January and April, 1878. The circumstances of the her
of this unfinished tale, Bianca Garcia, the younger and
surviving daughter of a Spanish gentleman who had se
in an English village, have some touching resemblances
those of the creator of the romance.
About her French novel Govin Chunder wrote in his
'Prefatory Memoir' : 'The great ambition of the sisters was to
publish a novel anonymously, which Toru should write, and
Aru, who was far more adept at the pencil, should illustrate.
Toru's part of the contract has been faithfully fulfilled. I
have before me the manuscript. It is in the form of diary
written in French by a young lady. The scene is laid in
France, and the characters are all French men and women.
I shall publish it probably hereafter.' Le Journal de Made
moiselle d'Arvers was published in 1879 by a Paris firm, Didier.
Mile Ciarisse Bader, whose La Femme dans Vlnde Antique Toru
had wanted to translate and whom she had come to know
through correspondence, looked the book through the press.
She also wrote a preface introducing Toru to the French
reading public. It must have been considered an amazing
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 TORU DUTT

feat for a foreigner and that too, for a young 'Hindu' wom
from Calcutta, to have written a novel in French, and th
was no doubt the reason why the fact was boldly display
on the title-page, just below the title; 'Nouvelle écrite
fran5ais par Toru Dutt, jeune et célebre Hindoue de Calcut
morte en 1877.' The book attracted considerable notice and
was commented upon by some critics with admiration and
wonder.

It is noteworthy that in recent years two complete

Bengali translations of this novel have appeared—one in 1949
by Rajkumar Mukhopadhyaya, who has also published a
study in Bengali, Kavi Toru Dutt (1959), and another in 1958
by Prithwindranath Mukhopadhyaya.
However, Ancient Ballads and. Legends of Hindustan, by
which Toru Dutt's poetic achievements are now mainly
judged, was not published by London's Kegan Paul & Co.
till 1882. Apart from nine ballads and legends, this volume
also contains a number of sonnets and, in a separate section
called 'The Miscellaneous Poems', a few personal verses,
including her masterpiece, Our Casuarina Tree, which has
been acclaimed by a discerning English critic as 'the most
remarkable poem ever written in English by a foreigner'.
Mr Edmund Gosse in his famous introduction to this volume
expressed the opinion that this collection of poems 'will be
ultimately found to constitute Toru's chief legacy to posterity'.
A reprint of this book was issued in 1927 by the same publishers.
Among the books in which representative selections from
Toru Dutt's poetic writings have appeared two may be
mentioned here: the third volume in the Oriental Literature
series, entitled The Literature of India (1900), published by the
Colonial Press, in which ten of her poems from the Ancient
Ballads, together with Gosse's introduction, were included in
a separate section; and a number of her poems were included
in Bengali Book of English Verse (1919) edited by T.D. Dunn,
to which Rabindranath Tagore contributed a preface. Her
poems have also been included in a number of publications
designed mainly for the use of students.
In Bengal perhaps more people have read her Jogadhya
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 INDIAN LITERATURE

Urna in Satyendranath Dutta's beautiful Bengali rende

than the original in English included in Ancient Ballads
Harihar Das's Life and Letters of Toru Dutt, now ou
print, is the principal, and almost only, known source o
details of her life. It contains, in addition to biogra
information, all the 53 letters Toru wrote to Miss
Martin, in addition to those written in French to Mile Clar
Bader, with their translations. The book has a valuable
Foreword by H.A.L. Fisher and includes a candid review of
Toru Dutt's achievements by E.J. Thompson. Harihar Das
also published in the October 1931 number of the Asiatic
Review a paper, 'Classical Tradition in Toru Dutt's Poetry'.
'Both the sisters,' we read in Govin Chunder's 'Prefatory
Memoir', 'kept diaries of their travels in Europe.' It is a
pity that no portion of these diaries have ever been published.
They would no doubt be delightfully revealing of this period
of their lives, of which so little is known. Another unfortunate
thing is that almost all letters Toru wrote from England and
France were destroyed.
The following books, among others, have taken serious
critical notice of Toru Dutt's contributions to literature.
Indian Writers of English Verse (1933) by Latika Basu has a
chapter on her poetry. There is a short section on her in
The Indian Contribution to English Literature (1945) by K.R.
Srinivasa Iyengar, whereas in his later and larger Indian
Writing in English (1962) he has devoted to her a complete
chapter, giving lengthy extracts from her poems.

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