Her A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields and Le Journal are clear indications of her deep love for French literature and people. Similarly, Bianca and Ancient Ballads attest her fascination for the English, though the letter is also a fine fragrant flower of her fertile imagination fed on native sources. Toru interplayed the culture of her land with that of England and France. She was in fact a connoisseur of the languages of both these countries, but an Indian at heart in her imagery, her thinking and her personality. Her precocious artisanship was amazing and she taught the world that it belonged to one family of God. In this context Toru’s French friend Mile Bader remarks: “If the remembrance of her own life belongs to her parents, the fame due to her works belongs to the literary world. England and India claim her glory, and I like to believe that France also will keep ever green the memory of the young foreign girl who, when our country was humiliated, wished to belong to her in language as well as in heart.”
She delved into the treasures of English and French literatures, the two foreign tongues in which she was educated, and acknowledged without reserve her debt to the countries, which inspired her. She cannot forget the beloved west, the enchantments of frost and snow, the delicate landscape of France, the vivid, eager college life at Cambridge. In comparison with the stir and bustle of the West, the days in India seemed monotonous and without event. Therefore, in the midst of the profuse splendors of the East, her thoughts continually reach out to that other home beyond the Ocean. Which travel and study had made so dear to her.
Toru’s conversion to Christianity, her profound knowledge of Sanskrit and Indian philosophy, and her voyage out to Europe, helped the poet to build a spiritual bridge between East and West. This attitude of Toru Dutt can be better appreciated today for the simple fact that the two poles of the globe have now come closer than ever before. There are obvious points of contact between them. They are co – operating with each other in matters of trade and commerce, science and technology, politics and economics, cultural and educational exchanges have become the order of the day. Such an atmosphere is certainly conducive to promoting universal goodwill and international citizenship.
Her literary works themselves are a solid proof of the fact that she stood all for East – West understanding. Her loved and learned father, her own vast reading and her wide sympathies for the entire humanity; these were the possible factors for fashioning her mind to this kind of understanding. She was a shinning example of an Indian Christian who had taken the best of Indian culture and mingled it with European learning to present a beautiful picture to the world. In the legend of Savitri, Toru uncritically embraced and deposited Post Enlightenment Western Values. Unlike the women of Toru’s time, who are ‘pent /In Closed zenanas’, her Savitri comes and goes as she pleases; she chooses her own husband; and even when she obeys the rigors of tradition, she does so of her own volition.
Her writings give voice to the aspirations of a sensitive young woman trying to negotiate the cross-cultural complexities and nuances of an Indo-European encounter. In essence, Toru’s outlook is cosmopolitan and the spirit of her poetry proves the emptiness of Kipling’s well known and oft quoted statement:
East is East and West is West
And never the twain shall meet.
Though she was always identified with India, and as a daughter of the ‘green valley of the Ganges’, her mind was unclouded by narrow national or linguistic inhibitions or mental barriers. It was a privilege to Toru to be the first of her sex to interpret the soul of India to the West, and as such, she struck a genuinely Indian note that reveals the sincerity of a mind proud of the intellectual traditions of its native land.
Toru believed that an ideal world order could be shaped out of the good and healthy ideas and cultural and oral features of the East and the West. However, while she stood for the world order, she did not cast aside the good points of her native land. She was, like her successor Sarojini Naidu, “autochthonous” and one with India’s women singers of the past. There is no room now for ‘artificiality or stimulated hothouse efflorescence’.
Her short poetic career may be interpreted as the process of evolution from a translator into a poet. The poems from her two volumes fall into convenient groups that mark the stages of the evolution. If the Sheaf holds out a promise for an upcoming poetess, Ancient Ballads is in a way, the fulfillment of that promise. This naturally leads us to construe that Toru Dutt’s art constantly grew and was on trial until it gained in scope and depth towards the close of her life on earth.
Her Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan is considered as one of the best work in English by an Indian. It shows how Toru’s intellect, while thoroughly assimilating the spirit of French and English literature found eventually its truest expression in Sanskrit literature; and this was the final phase in the evolution of the mind of this sensitive, intensely Indian poet. It’s Indianness and technical excellence is quite admirable.
Toru never attempted any personal utterance nor is there any indication that she would have grown in such wise as to express herself as Emily Bronte. A few of the Miscellaneous Poems do suggest that if she had secured greater confidence in herself as an individual and considered her own thoughts and feelings worthy of commemoration and if they had become so intense as to compel expression she might have written beautiful lyrics
Toru Dutt was a poet with a rare genius for the acquisition of languages not her own. In her all, too brief life she mastered Sanskrit and wrote in French and English with a grace, a facility, and an individual distinction, which have given her rank among the authentic voices of Western literature. Her ear, indeed sometimes betrayed her, on points of diction she was not always beyond reproach. Here and there in the Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan or in her amazing renderings from the French poets, we come across a word, a phrase, a discord, which reminds us that the poet was not of British origin and much the some has been said of her French prose romance by those best qualified to judge of it. Yet when every deduction has been made for unessential blemishes, ‘the child of the green valley of Ganges’ has by sheer force of native genius earned for her the right to be enrolled in the great fellowship of English poets. Her versification is generally good and the translations are intelligent and faithful. She handled English verse with ease, freedom and command. Her achievements both linguistic and technical were of an excellent order.
Toru has left behind her a body of achievement to which it will be difficult to find a parallel in the history of English literature. She was the first of our modern artists who have transmuted the nervous tension of adolescence into the saner idiom of art. In the incredibly short spell of her life, she successfully crystallized the diverse ways of innocence and experience into the supreme moment of Art, which is brief, yet abiding.
No doubt, Toru has given us some wonderful blossoms of her genius and had she lived longer she might have rivalled with great masters of English verse. Dutt’s writing played a suggestive role within late-century understandings of “British literature.” Indeed, even now, growing attention to her work is helping extend our conception of the geographical origins of ‘Victorian’ poetry from Britain to Bengal. Still, if we are to develop a full exploration of Dutt’s cultural presence, we may need to move further as well, connecting Indo-Anglian literature to that of France.
In one of her poem Buttoo of Ancient Ballads and legends of Hindustan, the master Dronacharya was profoundly touched by the matchless loyalty of the pupil and before he left he blessed Buttoo as under:
…. Fame
Shall sound thy praise from sea to sea,
And men shall ever link thy name,
With self – help, Truth and Modesty.
Thus perhaps has Toru earned a name, which has lived a hundred years and will continue to be renowned for many more years to come. In her ‘pride in her country’s great inheritance, she was Indian to the core’. And she herself has became a heritage of India bringing renown to her motherland through the arche
s of the years – a name ever to be remembered. Toru a frail and exotic blossom that bloomed but for a short while, has left a fragrance, which will never die.
She is one of the poignant examples of those who before their proper time pass through the door of darkness. Her life is a mixed story of sunshine and sorrow laughter and pathos, beauty and tragedy success and regret. If her literary work fills us with joy and awes her premature death leaves us sad and repenting. She has placed her country on the international map of letters. A linguistic prodigy she wrote creatively both in English and French neither of which was her mother tonque. Her roots were, however, planted deeply in the traditions and culture of India and in Sanskrit literature.
Toru Dutt has earned the appreciation of almost all critics and condemnation of none. Her shortcomings have certainly been aired out only to indicate the immaturity of her years and the great promise that she showed. Even amid the many marks of immaturity and haste, there are signs that she would have escaped before long from many of her prosodic limitations. Her greater faults would have been removed by experience for they were not too deeply rooted. Her minor blemishes have been overlooked by critics, which would have gone with the growth of age and with greater practice in poetic art.
In the final evaluation of her poetic talent, it should however be noted that her poetic work does not communicate most of the poetically potential experiences of her personal life as a young educated girl of 19th century Bengal with an unusually intense emotional life because of the early deaths in the family and the premonition of her own death. Yet her poetic sensibility achieves the miraculous harmony of the two entirely different phenomenons of the Indian poetic psyche on the one hand and the English medium on the other. It is this that Sir Edmund Gosse means when he says that “mellow sweetness” was all that Toru Dutt lacked to perfect her as an English poet and of ‘no other Oriental who has ever lived can the same be said’.
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 lived a longer life? Putting to creative uses three languages – French, English and Sanskrit – Toru was indeed a pioneer of the Indo- Anglian literature, a harbinger of a new era in Indian writing in English. It is sad that this “Fragile Blossom” withered so fast. Fragile blossom she was a rose bud half bloomed, filling the little world of her Indian home with fragrance.
As far as her contribution, it can be said that with her the real beginning in this branch of Indo-Anglian poetry begins. This ‘fleeting Visitant’ to our sphere attained that perfection in poetic art, which can hardly be attained even in a full lifetime. Toru also was one of those leaders of literature who, at a time when Bengal was held in low esteem in Europe, raised it high among the nations of the West. In days when Bengalis were losing heart and despairing of themselves and their country, she turned deliberately from the paths of foreign song to write of the stories of her own motherland.
Toru Dutt, Rabindranath Tagore, Shri Aurobindo and Sarojini Naidu, these four may be regarded as the “Four wheels” of Indian English literature. Toru showed the direction to her successors; Tagore and Shri Aurobindo endowed depth and scope to Indo – Anglian literature; and Mrs. Naidu enriched it with her delightful songs. So all these four have their own importance in Indo – Anglian literature, but Toru enjoys the privilege of precedence over them.
The influence of Browning, Tennyson and the Romantic poets, is noticeable on her poetic art, as she wrote under the dictates of no single poet or school. There is also a deep nostalgic strain in her poems. Toru’s treatment of the myths and legends of ancient India has a romantic suggestion and her fondness for this may be said to have introduced a kind of medievalism into Indo – Anglian verse. She found in the Romantic school that which her countrymen have always loved, viz. the lifelike and dramatic reproduction of the sentiments of the heart, as well as wealth of imagery and warmth of colour. At places we find Jane Austenean calm in her poetry. Even B.N. Seal has called her ‘the first neo romantic Bengali writer’.
While discussing the Sheaf, it has been pointed out that Toru focused attention on the Romantics of French literature although she also included Chenier, Courier, Lamartine and few others of the transition period as well as Brizeux, Moreau, Dupont and Valmore who were not Romantics. In France, the Romantic school was born towards the close of the 18th century and in the beginning of the 19th as in England. The rules of Toru’s poetic translations are best described as arbitrary. If a word or idea sounded good and looked good, it went on.
It is quite clear that Toru’s selection of poets is wide-ranging and not limited, though it is a different matter that the Romantic poets have written the best of French poetry. They asserted the free play of imagination, simple and direct diction and freedom from any restrictions. Most of the poems that she translated were probably those, which could touch the cord of her imagination and sentiments– patriotism, loneliness, dejection, frustrations, illusions, exile and captivity. In her poetry, we find the facts of life and death, its mysteries, God, the finite and the infinite, the cohesion between human and divine everything that is related to human existence and its ultimate destination. Here as in other work of hers, her innate susceptibility to the pathos of life has manifested itself. We cannot, therefore, place, Toru Dutt in ‘any water – tight category or school of poets’.
Toru, in fact stands out as a pride of the nineteenth century India, illuminating her literary galaxy. She is a perfect fulfillment of the hopes and aspirations of noble English people who came out to India with a genuine desire to help this unhappy land of promise to reach her destined greatness, and a sure warning against the futile attempt of grafting an alien culture and civilization on a land grossly misunderstood. We cannot think of a greater fulfillment than in her of the high moral qualities of the unshakable faith in Jesus, of the intellectual attainments of Europe’s best minus her sciences.
Some critics, such as R. W. Frazer, feel that Toru was not able to reproduce the rich Sanskrit language in English. This is not true as, in the works of Kalidasa, Bana or any of the Sanskrit writers, there is a flowery phraseology, an excess of praise of the hero and heroine, a magnificence in the descriptions of the grandeur of the gods and kings, a profusion and splendour of nature, which Toru has not been able accurately to reproduce, for she has modernized and shortened her translations to suit a foreign audience.
With all the limitations of her Indian social environment, Toru was able to transcend all the inhibitions of her age. Even today, she is read with pleasure and profit. Although her archaic rhymes and rhythms, her persistence in out dated modes of punctuation which at times are ‘chaotic’, her old – world morals and insistence on the acceptance of the soul and god as the main themes of her verse, she would almost be able to hold her own even in the poetic world of today, for she has grappled with the truth as all poets of all ages do, and therefore she will live on.
Toru did not stop at merely producing pretty lyrics and concentrate on the beauty of the sound of words alone. Her poems that sometimes ignore the rules of prosody are classical in style, rich, and mellifluous. A glance at Toru’s use of language is enough to show the difference between her style and that of her predecessors. The poems her father and uncle wrote and before them Derozio, Kasiprasad Ghose and Madhusudan Dutt, all belong to a recognizable school of 19th century poetry. Toru Dutt’s poetry transcends that school, evolving a separate identity.
She has been characterized as a ‘great daughter of India, holy as a white lotus, sweet as a rose, who enjoyed
the beauty of the sky and air, redolent of myrrh instead of the tulsi. The only objection here is that Toru was as well a myrrh” as a ‘Tulsi’. The latter is taken, as a token of the soul of India and it is next to impossible that a person of Toru’s sensibility should remain oblivious of the soul that produced her.
Though Toru died at the age of twenty one it would not be correct to say, as one critic did, that all her writings being in English or French, ‘this bilingual spirit adds to her tragedy of being in a way outlandish as well as almost forsaken. If she deserves to be rescued from this oblivion, which she really does, it must be a careful task for her rescuer; for he would find that Toru herself chose an alien soil twice removed from her original motherland.
As a poetess, Toru has never been forsaken; there is hardly another English writer in India who is so regularly remembered in the journals and newspapers of the country. In India’s Who’s Who she is marked among the great. Neither are her biographers in Bengali, French and English scarce. She has passed the test of time, and is still very much alive, proving herself a ‘classic’ writer. Classic in a sense as she was a class in itself.
She has decidedly created a permanent place for herself in English poetry. It is therefore, difficult to agree with those who treat her as ‘a dead horse’ on the contrary she has almost always found a place in an anthology of Indo – Anglian poetry. Right from her own days, some of her poems, notably My Vocation, Our Casuarina Tree, The Lotus, The Sonnet – Baugmaree, Savitri, Lakshman etc. have been prescribed in the syllabi of schools, colleges and universities.
It is remorseful that time cut short prematurely a career of such promise and such early fulfillment. There were few poetic glories which given maturity, she could not have achieved; she could have interpreted to the West the spirit of India and could have brought about a closer and more sympathetic understanding. She might have developed into a novelist or a writer of lyrics breathing grace and sweetness. This was not to be. Let us be contented that we had this brief visitant in our midst and she remains eternally young, for ever fresh and for ever fair still dreaming the glittering dreams of youth.
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