Toru Dutt was an Indian poet who wrote in English and French, and made a mark in literature in spite of her premature death.
After publication of several translations and literary discussions, she published A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields, a volume of French poems she had translated into English, with Saptahiksambad Press of Bhowanipore, India in 1876. Eight of the poems had been translated by her elder sister Aru. This volume came to the attention of Edmund Gosse in 1877, who reviewed it quite favorably in the Examiner that year. Sheaf would see a second Indian edition in 1878 and a third edition by Kegan Paul of London in 1880, but Dutt lived to see neither of these triumphs. she wrote many poems for the rank and the file.
At the time of her death, she left behind two unpublished novels— Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers (thought to be the first novel in French by an Indian writer) and Bianca, or the Young Spanish Maiden (thought to be the first novel in English by an Indian woman writer)—in addition to an unfinished volume of original poems in English, Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan. Her father, Govin Chunder Dutt, ensured that these works would be published posthumously: Bianca in Calcutta’s Bengal Magazine (1878), Le Journal by Didier of Paris (1879), and Ancient Ballads with Kegan Paul (1882).
Gosse wrote an Introductory Memoir for Ancient Ballads. There he observed, “Her name . . . is no longer unfamiliar in the ear of any well-read man or woman” (vii). Indeed, according to Gosse, “It is difficult to exaggerate when we try to estimate what we have lost in the premature death of Toru Dutt. Literature has no honours which need have been beyond the grasp of a girl who at the age of twenty-one, and in languages separated from her own by so deep a chasm, had produced so much of lasting worth” (xxvi). Gosse thus concludes the Introductory Memoir by insisting, “When the history of the literature of our country comes to be written, there is sure to be a page in it dedicated to this fragile exotic blossom of song” (xxvii).
Prithwindra Mukherjee translated her famous novel Le Journal into Bengali, serialised it in the monthly Basumati, before bringing it out in a book form in 1956, with a foreword by Premendra Mitra. Once again, Prithwindra Mukherjee serialised its English translation in 1963, in the Illustrated Weekly of India with line drawings by Mario. Her Ancient Ballads was a great beginning in Indo-Anglian writing. She also knew German.
