DOCSLIB.ORG

Unit 4 Toru Dutt: Assertions of Indian Life

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Unit 4 Toru Dutt: Assertions of Indian Life UNIT 4 TORU DUTT: ASSERTIONS OF INDIAN LIFE Structure Objectives Introduction The Dutt Family Album The Life Of Tom Dutt Tom Dutt's literajCareer Tom Dutt as the Earliest Indian English Woman Writer Let Us Sum Up ,Questions 4.0, OBJECTIVES In this unit we shall attempt a reading of the life and works of one of the earliest Indian English women writers - Toru Dutt. She was born into the Dutt family of Calcutta, f&ous even then for their literary accomplishments. The unit will also offer a comment on her literary importance amongst other Indian English Women Writers. 4.1 INTRODUCTION The Rambagan Dutt family were converts from Hinduism to Christianity. Toru - Dutt's father Govin Chunder Dutt was a good poet and a linguist who had published The Dutt Family Album (1 870), The Loyal Hours (1 876) and Cherly Stones (1 881) along with his brother Greece Chunder, while her mother Kshetramoni had translated The Blood of Christ £tom English to Bengali. Apart from her parents, even her uncles were prolific writers. Mention of their contributions will be made in the next section of this unit. 4.2 THE DUTT FAMILY ALBUM Around the middle of the nineteenth century, a Bengali family by the name of Dutt, residents of Rambagan, Calcutta, came into literary prominence by virtue of their published writings in English. The Dutts were an extremely kell - connected family within the top echelons of Calcutta socieiy. Nilmoni Dutt, Toru D(1tt7sgreat- grandfather, had belonged to a tiny group of English educated Indians in the eighteenth century, even as the East India Company consolidated its hold over Bengal. Along with Raja Rammohum Roy and others, Nilmoni Dutt befriended certain Chnstian missionaries from England who had arrived recently in India. One of these Christian missionaries was Father Carey who subsequently founded the Serampore College, an institution next only in importance to the historic Hindu College. The Hindu College influence impinged itself on the Dutts through the office held by Rasomoy, Nilmoni's eldest son. Rasomoy's eldest son, Govin, in turn, was a star pupil of Hindu College, who studied under the legendary Professor David Lester Richardson, a teacher too of Michael Madhusudan Dutt and a colleague of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio. Under the tutelage of Richardson, Govin Chunder Dutt Toru Dun: Assertions learnt to recite Shakespeare and to participate in theatrical performances at Hindu of Indian Life College. 1 Govin's younger brothers, Hur Chunder Dutt and Greece Chunder Dutt, were similarly brought into the ambit of English Studies. The fascination for English language and English literature which was a shared trait of all the Dutt brothers, each ;j(I of whom attempted to write in English as well, partly stemmed from a cultural milieu in which Bengali was not perceived as a classic language and English was regarded as the only authentic medium of self-expression for educated Indians. Writing in the wake of the writings of Raja Rammohum Roy, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio and Michael Madhusudan Dutt, the members of the Dutt family of Rambagan, Calcutta, felt that English was, by right, their most natural vehicle for expressing themselves. Apart from the sons of Rasomoy Dutt, their cousins, Shoshee Chunder Dutt and Ishaan Chunder Dutt were avid writers in English. Of them all, Shoshee Chunder perhaps had the most impressive array of productions in prose and verse ranging from Mzscellaneous Verses (1 848) to Bengaliana, A Dish of Rice and Curry and Other Indigestible Ingredients (1892). One of his most significant productions was A Vision of Sumeru, in A Vision of Sumeru and Other Poems (1 878) the spirit of Jesus is . shown to overcome the pantheon of Hindu gods, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva and others. In another production, Realities of Indiafi Life, or Stories Collectedfrom the Criminal Reports of India, to Illustrate the Life, Manners, and Customs of its People, the dominant perspective is again that of the western colonial gaze looking down upon the Eastern colonised subject; with an attitude of disdain mixed with disgust. The same attitude, more or less, may be discerned in the Essay and Poems (1872) published by his brother Ishaan Chunder. In the writings of Govin Chunder, Hur Chunder, Greece Chunder, Rasomoy's sons, there is likewise not only a complete dependence on English cultural models, notably the Romantic writers, in matters of form, but in matters of content also there is a debasing exhibition of servility towards the English political masters of India. The most extreme example of the Dutts' devoted Anglophile nature is of course the book brought out by Greece Chunder in celebration of the visits to India in 1869 and 1875 respectively of the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh, The Loyal Hours: Poems Welcoming the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh on their Advent to India in 1869 and 1875. The patriotic passion of this panegyric is over- shadowed by the loud loyalism of a shorter text by Greece Chunder, To Lord Canning, During the Mutzny: Though a thousand pens condemned thee, mine still should wrzte thy praise ; Though a thousand tongues reviled thee Mine still should paeans raise; For factious clamours heed~ngnot, That only call for blood, True to thy duty and thy race, Lord Canning, thou hast stood. It is not for her trampledjlag, That England bares her sword; It is not for just revenge Upon a murderous horde; It is to prove to blood-stained men, Self-blinded of their sight, That evil hath no chance with good or darkness with the light. Greece Chunder and his brother Govin Chunder Dutt published two volumes of poetry, Cherry Stones (1881) and Cherry Blossoms (1889). Hur Chunder also published Fugitive Pieces (1851) and Lotus Leaves Or Poems Chiefly On Ancient I Indian Subjects (1871). The preoccupation with Ancient Indian history was a Beginnings of Indian common feature in the writings of the Dutt siblings and in keeping with much of the English Writing writing in Bengal in the nineteenth century as a whole. The eldest of the Dutt brothers, Govin Chunder, himself published only one volume of poetry, but played a crucial role in integrating these poems along with others written by his brothers and his nephew Omesh Chunder Dutt in the Dutt Family Album (1 870). The Dutt Family Album comprises an assortment of poetic genres - lyrics, sonnets, ballads, narrative poems and even translations of French and German poetry. The authorship of individual poems in the Album is not revealed and the Album is presented to readers as a corporate family venture, though without any obvious sequence or structure. The importance of the Dutt Family Album in the history of Indian English writings is, as Theodore Dunn remarked long ago, that it remains: A memorial of a gifted family, and ... a testimony to the influence of those English teachers who were thejrst to encourage higher learning in the city of Calcutta. Let us now examine Toru Dutt's life in some detail. 4.3 THE LIFE OF TORU DUTT Toru Dutt was the;oungest of the three children born to Govin Chunder Dutt and Kshetramoni on March 4, 1856. As mentioned earlier they were converts to Christianity and the family were baptised in the Chnst Church, Cornwallis Square, Calcutta, in 1862. The oldest among the three children was Abju (the son) followed by a daughter Aru and then the youngest was Toru. Private tutors taught the three children at home and the little Dutt girls even had an English Governess who taught Aru and Toru how to sing and to play the pianoforte. This small and happy family life was to be disrupted rather suddenly by the death of Abju (1851- 1865) at the tender age of fourteen years. Though broken -hearted and deeply grieved by the death of his first-born, Govin Chunder Dutt never lost faith in God. It was this same faith that was to sustain his wife and daughter Toru, when tragedy struck the Dutt household once again in later years. After the death of Abju the Dutts' spent four more years in Calcutta shuttling between their two houses in Ram Bagan and Baugmaree. Finally, in 1869 Govin Chunder Dutt made up his mlnd to move away from the city that caused him and his family so much pain. Moreover being an enthusiastic admirer of the western way of life, of education and culture, he was determined to give his surviving children (Aru and Toru) the advantages of foreign travel and education. The family set sail for France in 1869. Aru and Toru were then mere children and the first Bengali grls to cross the seven seas and to sail abroad. They landed at Marseilles and set off for Nice where Aru and Toru attended school at a pensionate in which they studied French and were to become proficient in the language. Both the impressionable young girls were fascinated by the French way of life and by the intellectual currents of French enlightenment. From Nice, they w6nt on to Paris, the cultural hub of France and then onto Boulougne in Italy before their final destination - England. But England never grew upon Toru's heart in the way that France had done. She wrotC in her journal dated 29 and 30' January 1871: During the fav days we remained in Paris, how beautiful it was! What streets! What a magnificent army! But now how fallen it is! It was the first amongst the cities and now what misery it contains! Toru Dutt attributed the degeneration of France to its divorce from God: Oh France, how art thou brought low! Mayest thou, afier this humiliation, serve and worship God better than thou hast done in these days..
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Indian Angles
    Introduction The Asiatic Society, Kolkata. A toxic blend of coal dust and diesel exhaust streaks the façade with grime. The concrete of the new wing, once a soft yellow, now is dimmed. Mold, ever the enemy, creeps from around drainpipes. Inside, an old mahogany stair- case ascends past dusty paintings. The eighteenth-century fathers of the society line the stairs, their white linen and their pale skin yellow with age. I have come to sue for admission, bearing letters with university and government seals, hoping that official papers of one bureaucracy will be found acceptable by an- other. I am a little worried, as one must be about any bureaucratic encounter. But the person at the desk in reader services is polite, even friendly. Once he has enquired about my project, he becomes enthusiastic. “Ah, English language poetry,” he says. “Coleridge. ‘Oh Lady we receive but what we give . and in our lives alone doth nature live.’” And I, “Ours her wedding garment, ours her shroud.” And he, “In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.” “Where Alf the sacred river ran,” I say. And we finish together, “down to the sunless sea.” I get my reader’s pass. But despite the clerk’s enthusiasm, the Asiatic Society was designed for a different project than mine. The catalog yields plentiful poems—in manuscript, on paper and on palm leaves, in printed editions of classical works, in Sanskrit and Persian, Bangla and Oriya—but no unread volumes of English language Indian poetry. In one sense, though, I have already found what I need: that appreciation of English poetry I have encountered everywhere, among strangers, friends, and col- leagues who studied in Indian English-medium schools.
    [Show full text]
  • An Analysis of Toru Dutt's Approach to the Ancient Indic Mythological
    INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH CULTURE SOCIETY ISSN: 2456-6683 Volume - 2, Issue - 12, Dec – 2018 Monthly, Peer-Reviewed, Refereed, Indexed Journal Impact Factor: 4.526 Publication Date: 31/12/2018 An analysis of Toru Dutt’s approach to the ancient Indic mythological characters in her corpus Swarnadeep Sen Guest Faculty, Department of History, Naba Ballygunge Mahavidyalaya, University of Calcutta (affiliation), Kolkata, West Bengal, India Email – [email protected] Abstract: The figure of Toru Dutt (1856-77) contains within it the sheer affect of an emergence of new possibilities in the enunciation of new paradigms towards a fresh understanding of the cultural and literary scenario in nineteenth century Bengal under the full impact of colonialism. In this instance, it has been endeavoured to delve into the life and works of the Bengali Christian writer Toru Dutt to show how religious identity and the colonial connection collectively shaped her oeuvre. The attempt here is to enunciate and envisage a distinct kind of Christian consciousness as can be gauged from her writings and show how that Christian approach influenced her poetical works which represented Hindu mythological characters. Along with the colonial connection, the question of religion (Christianity, in this instance) also assumes cardinal significance because of the author’s personal conversion to that creed and also because of the rich allusions to that creed’s doctrines, ideas and theological notions which can be discerned throughout her corpus. This article examines the manner in which Toru Dutt’s sensibility encouraged the absorption of new ideas and trends which gave birth to a conscious endeavour to study foreign (primarily European) cultures.
    [Show full text]
  • Literary Herald ISSN: 2454-3365 an International Refereed/Peer-Reviewed English E-Journal Impact Factor: 3.019(IIJIF)
    www.TLHjournal.com Literary Herald ISSN: 2454-3365 An International Refereed/Peer-reviewed English e-Journal Impact Factor: 3.019(IIJIF) An Analysis of the Christian Ethos in Toru Dutt’s Corpus And Its Co-Relation with Her Depiction of the Ancient Indic Past in Her Works Swarnadeep Sen Guest lecturer in History Naba Ballygunge Mahavidyalaya Kolkata. Abstract The figure of Toru Dutt (1856-77) contains within it the sheer affect of an emergence of new possibilities in the enunciation of new paradigms towards a fresh understanding of the cultural and literary scenario in nineteenth century Bengal under the full impact of colonialism. In this instance, it has been endeavoured to delve into the life and works of the Bengali Christian writer Toru Dutt to show how religious identity and the colonial connection collectively shaped her oeuvre. Hitherto, most of the scholarship pertaining to Dutt has largel attempted to situate her in the category of the „Indo-Anglian‟ literary realm, which in some respects acts as a deterrent towards a more inclusionary understanding of Dutt because the „Christian religious‟ and the „western cultural‟ elements are not often perceived as separate categories, but rather clubbed together under the broad purview of South Asian women writers. The attempt here is to enunciate and envisage a distinct kind of Christian consciousness as can be gauged from her writings and show how that Christian approach influenced her poetical works which represented Hindu mythological characters. Along with the colonial connection, the question of religion (Christianity, in this instance) also assumes cardinal significance because of the author‟s personal conversion to that creed and also because of the rich allusions to that creed‟s doctrines, ideas and theological notions which can be discerned throughout her corpus.
    [Show full text]
  • On the Late Style of a Species: Confronting Eco-Anxiety in the Poetry of Toru Dutt and Emily Brontë
    ON THE LATE STYLE OF A SPECIES: CONFRONTING ECO-ANXIETY IN THE POETRY OF TORU DUTT AND EMILY BRONTË A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English By Elizabeth George, B.A. Washington, DC March 20, 2020 Copyright 2020 by Elizabeth George All Rights Reserved ii This project is dedicated with gratitude to my advisors, teachers, classmates, and friends— and with hope and care to my students. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1 ​ Chapter I: Scales of Death and Resistance in Toru Dutt’s “Tree of Life”……………………….18 ​ Chapter II: Figuring Anticipatory Trauma: Late Style and Apocalyptic Form in Emily Brontë’s ​ “Why ask to know what date what clime” ………………………………………………………35 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………….53 ​ Works Cited ……………………………………………………………………………………61 iv INTRODUCTION [...T]he disturbed timeline of bourgeois modernity is an uncanny, traumatic history. This history connects the emergent fossil capitalism of the mid-Victorian moment to the postwar Great Acceleration, and then to our own post-peak moment of exhaustion, tight-oil, and mass extinction, in the ruins of the liberal project, when 75% of all insects measured by weight – at least those in industrialized areas— seem to have died in the past 25 years. The total number of nondomesticated vertebrate animals alive in the world – individual animals, I mean, not species – dropped by 52 percent over the period 1970-2010 alone. This means that, in a forty year window . half of all wildlife on earth has been lost.
    [Show full text]
  • ENGLISH-LANGUAGE POETRY, 1820-1920 Natalie Phillips Hoffmann
    ABSTRACT Title of Document: COSMPOLITANISM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY: ENGLISH-LANGUAGE POETRY, 1820-1920 Natalie Phillips Hoffmann, Doctor of Philosophy, 2015 Directed By: Professor Jason R. Rudy, Department of English Through readings of English-language poems produced in Britain, Italy, India, and South Africa, my dissertation argues that poetry functions as an especially powerful tool for resisting and reshaping nineteenth-century nationalist and imperialist discourses. In the project, I examine the various poetic strategies— particularly the use of affect to promote cross-cultural sympathy and the blending of Eastern and Western forms—that transnational, English-language poets used to interrogate dominant understandings of nationality. Poets studied include Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, Toru Dutt, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sarojini Naidu, and Rudyard Kipling. I contend that a school of English-language poets—men and women from diverse backgrounds working in Europe and the colonies—together played a special role in nineteenth-century culture by presenting to their global readership a cosmopolitan alternative to traditional nationalist narratives. Key to English-language poets’ ability to offer such a radical reimagining of nationality was their ability to subvert, both through form and content, the imagined divisions among people upon which nationalist narratives rely. I understand environments rife with nationalist fervor—the Risorgimento period in Italy, the ascendency of Indian nationalism, and the Boer War years in South Africa—as locations of parallel experience for these poets. I read their work as foregrounding in important ways the increasingly global nature of the lived experiences and intellectual projects of nineteenth-century elites in both Eastern and Western cultures.
    [Show full text]
  • Selections from Prose and Poetry
    UNIVERSITY OF MYSORE YUVARAJA’S COLLEGE (A Constituent Autonomous College of the University of Mysore) MYSURU DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH SELECTIONS FROM PROSE AND POETRY (For the students of I Semester B.Sc/BBA/BCA) (CBCS) (2019-2020 onwards) 13th October 2020 1 I SEMESTER B.Sc/BBA/BCA Marks : C1+C2 =20 C3 – 80 English (AECC – 2A) Credits – 3 Teaching hours: 4 hours/week POETRY 1. On His Blindness – John Milton 2. The World is Too Much With Us – William Wordsworth 3. Opportunity -John James Ingalls 4. Our Casuarina Tree – Toru Dutt 5. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening – Robert Frost 6. No Men are Foreign – James Kirkup 7. Your Attention Please – Peter Porter PROSE 1. Origin of Science – Will Durant 2. The Best Investment I Ever Made – A.J. Cronin 3. My Greatest Olympic Prize – Jesse Owens 4. The Town by the Sea – Amitav Ghosh LANGUAGE COMPONENT 1. Articles 2. Prepositions 3. Verb – Tense and Subject-verb Agreement 4. Punctuation 5. Synonyms and Antonyms 2 ON HIS BLINDNESS John Milton John Milton (1608-1674) , one of the greatest poets of the English language, is best-known for his epic poem Paradise Lost (1667). Milton was born in London. His father, John Milton, the elder, had risen to prosperity as a scrivener or law writer and his mother, Sarah Jeffrey, was a deeply religious person. Milton's powerful, rhetoric prose and the eloquence of his poetry had an immense influence especially on the 18th-century verse. Besides poems, Milton published pamphlets defending civil and religious rights. His political opinions stirred much controversy.
    [Show full text]
  • 9. Applied-English Poetry and Poets-Pavan
    IMPACT: International Journal of Research in Applied, Natural and Social Sciences (IMPACT: IJRANSS) ISSN(E): 2321-8851; ISSN(P): 2347-4580 Vol. 2, Issue 2, Feb 2014, 57-62 © Impact Journals ENGLISH POETRY AND POETS OF PRE-INDEPENDENT INDIA PAVAN G. K Student, BA Literature, KLE’s JT College, Gadag, Karnataka, India ABSTRACT The Indian Poetry in English started with verse romances, melody, and lyrics. The Indian Poetry matured in the mid 19th century. The famous poets were mainly from Bengal and most of them were highly educated. The poets were mainly influenced by Victorian and romantic strain. They started imitating the western poets like Keats, Eliot, Pound etc. Poets were influenced by culture, environment, tradition, struggle for Independence etc. Women poets like Toru Dutt and sarojini Naidu constituted a kind of watershed between the two phases, In that they have shared their Predecessor’s nostalgia and successor’s sense of crisis and quest of identity. To conclude, Indian English poetry is a mixture of Africa, America, British and Australian English. The poets being influenced by various conditions have contributed immensely to the field of English literature. KEYWORDS: Romanticism, Indianess, Socio-Religious, Influences INTRODUCTION The Indian English Poetry began with romanticism. It started with verse romances and lyrics written in romantic verse. The origin of Indian poets in English have shrouded the dim pre-history of the Indo-Western encounter centuries prior to the birth of derozio. The first of these two conditions, the Indianization of the English language, began much before the Anglicization of Indians. The Indians writing in English can be dated from the landing of Vasco Da Gama in kerala in 1498.
    [Show full text]
  • Duty and Rebellion in Three Indian Novels
    Beloved Daughters and Liberated Mothers: Duty and Rebellion in Three Indian Novels The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Bammi, Reena. 2016. Beloved Daughters and Liberated Mothers: Duty and Rebellion in Three Indian Novels. Master's thesis, Harvard Extension School. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33797299 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use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
    [Show full text]
  • Shoshee Chunder Dutt Selections from 'BENGALIANA'
    Shoshee Chunder Dutt Selections from ‘BENGALIANA’ Edited by Alex Tickell Shoshee Chunder Dutt Selections from ‘BENGALIANA’ Edited by Alex Tickell Published by Trent Editions, 2005 Trent Editions School of Arts, Communication and Culture Nottingham Trent University Clifton Lane Nottingham NG11 8NS http://human.ntu.ac.uk/research/trenteditions/mission.html © This edition: Trent Editions 2005 © Introduction: Alex Tickell 2005 ISBN 1-84233-049-7 Contents Introduction By Shoshee Chunder Dutt Reminiscences of a Keráni’s Life Shunkur: a Tale of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 The Street-Music of Calcutta The Republic of Orissá; a Page from the Annals of the Twentieth Century By Kylas Chunder Dutt A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945 Notes Glossary Acknowledgements A number of people have helped me with this project. I would like, firstly, to thank Stephen Minta for arranging a York University travel grant that enabled me to carry out research in India. I also want to thank Elleke Boehmer for her enthusiasm and editorial advice. In the early stages of research Meenakshi Mukherjee and Shubhendu Kumar Mund were both valuable sources of information about Kylas Chunder Dutt. Special thanks go to Amina Yaqin and Peter Morey for discussion and careful assistance with some of the Hindi/Urdu terms in the text. I am also exceptionally grateful to Md. Mahmudul Hasan, who painstakingly looked up many of the Bangla words in the glossary. Yet again, I am indebted to Bodh Prakash and Sucheta Mahajan and family for their hospitality, friendship, and help with research on Bengaliana in India. In both Delhi and Calcutta, members of the Dutt family were very generous with their assistance, and I would like to thank Malavika Karlekar and Kalyan Dutt in particular.
    [Show full text]
  • Issue 3.3 (Winter 2007)
    NINETEENTH-CENTURY GENDER STUDIES ISSUE 3.3 (WINTER 2007) Claiming Her Own Context(s): Strategic Singularity in the Poetry of Toru Dutt By Natalie A. Phillips, University of Maryland This daughter of Bengal…Hindu by race and tradition, an English woman by education, a French woman at heart, poet in English, prose writer in French; who at the age of eighteen made India familiar with the poets of France in the rhyme of England, who blended in herself three souls and three traditions . presents in the history of literature a phenomenon without parallel. – French critic James Darmesteter (qtd. Gupta 11) <1> One hundred and thirty years after Toru Dutt’s death, James Darmesteter’s eulogistic description remains riveting: Dutt was truly at the nexus of the many determining ideologies— nationalism, imperialism, gender binarism, and racism—that shaped the lives and literary work of indigenous female intellectuals in nineteenth-century British India.(1) In addition to capturing the difficulty of placing Dutt, who had no single nationality, in an appropriate literary school or context, Darmesteter describes in highly illustrative fashion Dutt’s “blend[ing] in herself” of these variegated identities. His rightful insistence on his conceptualization of Dutt as blending, rather than erasing or hierarchically positioning, different identities and on Dutt’s agency in acquiring and retaining her hybrid subjectivity separates his assessment from that of many nineteenth- century, and even some more recent, Dutt scholars. Building upon Darmesteter’s foundational notions of Dutt’s hybridity and authorial agency, this article aims to both continue the process of Dutt’s reclamation and contribute to ongoing efforts to create an appropriate critical context for her poetry.
    [Show full text]
  • “We, Who Happier, Live / Under the Holiest Dispensation”: Gender, Reform, and the Nexus of East and West in Toru Dutt
    DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION OF AUTHOR http://foss.elsweb.org/toru_dutt “We, who happier, live / Under the holiest dispensation”: Gender, Reform, and the Nexus of East and West in Toru Dutt Toru Dutt was born in Calcutta on March 4, 1856 and raised within a converted Christian family that moved to Europe when she was 13 so that she and her sister Aru might be exposed to Western culture. According to Chandani Lokugé, they were the first Bengali women to travel to England (xvii), and when she was 15 the family moved to Cambridge, where she attended the Higher Lectures for Women. They returned to India when she was 17; the next year, Aru died from consumption (as had their only brother, Abju, when Toru when 9). In 1876 Toru published A Sheaf Gleaned from French Fields, a volume of French poems she had translated into English, with Saptahiksambad Press of Bhowanipore, India. (Aru had translated a small handful of poems for this project before her death, so Toru included these as well.) 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. On August 30, 1877, she died of consumption at the age of 21, leaving behind two unpublished novels— Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers (thought to be the first novel in French by an http://foss.elsweb.org/toru_dutt 2 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.
    [Show full text]
  • Early Anglo-Indian Writers
    Volume 1 No.1 December, 2012 ISSN : 2320 –2645 EARLY ANGLO-INDIAN WRITERS Dr.Prince Dhanaraj Controller of Examiner, Periyar University, Salem Introduction In India, English journalism served as the fore-runner of Indo-Anglian literature. English journalism as started in India with the founding of Hicky’s Bengal Gazette by James Augustus Hicky in 1780; but indigenous journalism started to progress only in 1833 when liberty was given to the press. Indian journalism in English created a condusive situation for writings by Indians. Here we find the first germination of Indo-Anglian literature in the country. It should not be forgotten than Indo-Anglian literature started to develop in India, when the eminent fiction writers in England and Russia had already accomplished outstanding work in their country. Early Indo-Anglian fiction appeared when Jane Austin and Sir. Walter Scott had become classies and Dickens had written most of his novels in England. Even before the introduction of English as the medium of education in 1935, many Indian stalwarts like Raja Rammohan Roy, Henry Louis Vivian Derizio, Kashiprasad Gosh and many others acquired good command over English and enriched Anglo-Indian literature by their creative writing. Moreover one of the notable gifts of English education to India is prose fiction, for though India was probably the fountain-head of story-telling, the novel was an importation from the west4. The contribution made by the important pioneers to Indo-Anglian writing including the contribution made by Indo-Anglian writers to fiction and novel writing, upto the period of Tagore are precisely dealt with.
    [Show full text]