Life & Background
Toru Dutt was born in Calcutta in 1856 into a Bengali family that converted to Christianity when she was six; her father Govin Chunder Dutt was himself a poet, and the household was unusually literary and cosmopolitan. In 1869 the family travelled to Europe, and Toru and her sister Aru studied in France and then attended lectures for women at Cambridge — among the first Indian women to be educated in Europe. She returned to Bengal in 1873 and began learning Sanskrit with her father, translating from it and drawing on the Ramayana, Mahabharata, and Vishnu Purana. Her sister Aru died in 1874 and her brother earlier; she herself died of tuberculosis in 1877 at twenty-one. Almost all her important work was published posthumously by her father, and Edmund Gosse's admiring essay carried her reputation in England.
Our Casuarina Tree
The poem opens with the casuarina in the garden of the family house, a huge tree wound about by a creeper like a python, its boughs full of birds and bees, a grey baboon sitting on the crest at sunrise. The speaker loves the tree not for its own beauty alone but because those she played beneath it with as a child are dead — and when she hears its lament, even in far-off France or Italy, she is returned to her lost childhood and her lost companions. In the closing stanzas she consecrates a verse to the tree in love, as Wordsworth consecrated the yew trees of Borrowdale, and asks that it may live long, sheltered from the curse of oblivion by her verse.
The poem is the standard example of what Indian English poetry achieved in its first generation: a strictly conventional English lyric — eleven-line stanzas, an ababccddee rhyme, a Wordsworthian invocation named openly — carrying material that is specifically and locally Bengali, from the casuarina and the baboon to the domestic geography of a Calcutta garden. The elegiac turn from tree to dead siblings gives the poem its force and is biographically exact. Her Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, published posthumously, does something more ambitious: it retells Sanskrit narrative in English verse — Savitri, Sita, Prahlad, Buttoo — making her the first Indian woman to bring the classical Indian repertoire into English poetry.
Why Toru Dutt Matters
Toru Dutt is a fixture of the Indian English syllabus and the earliest significant woman poet in the tradition, standing between Derozio's borrowed Romanticism and Sri Aurobindo's philosophical ambition. Her Ancient Ballads established the practice of retelling Sanskrit material in English that runs through to A.K. Ramanujan's translations. She was also an accomplished French writer — her novel Le Journal de Mademoiselle d'Arvers was the first French novel by an Indian — and her range in three languages before the age of twenty-one is itself the point.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields1876
- Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan1882
- Our Casuarina Tree1882
- Le Journal de Mademoiselle d'Arvers1879
- Bianca, or The Young Spanish Maiden1878