Toru Dutt - The First Indian Poetess In English

"Absurd may be the tale I tell,

Ill-suited to the marching times,

I loved the lips from which it fell,

So let it stand among my rhymes".

   

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 deeper cords of her emotions. It stayed in the unconscious 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 synthesise Indian lore and the English language for her poetry.

Tour Dutt was born on March 4, 1856 in Bengal and she 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. 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". The same "might have been" stands as a question mark when we think of
Toru and her contribution to literature: What Toru "might have been" had she had a longer life? Putting to creative use three languages - French, English and Sanskrit - Toru was indeed a pioneer of the Indo-Anglian literature, a harbinger of a new era in Indian writings in English. It is sad that this "fragile blossom" withered so fast.

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".

A precious child, Toru was steeped in an intellectual atmosphere of her home with a linguist-poet father, Govin Chunder Dutt, and a highly cultured mother, Kshetramoni. 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 - Abju and Aru being the other two - was perhaps the most frail and the most intelligent. Her father gives a graphic picture of her as