Born: 4 March 1856, India
Died: 30 August 1877
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Tarulatta Datta
The following is excerpted from “400 Outstanding Women of the World and the Costumology of Their Time” by Minna Moscherosch Schmidt, published in 1933.
Toru Dutt was born in Calcutta on the fourth of March, 1856. She was the youngest of three children (two girls and a boy) of a high caste Hindu couple in Bengal. Her father who survived them all, the Baboo Gavin Chunder Dutt, is himself distinguished among his countrymen for the width of his views and the vigor of his intelligence. With the exception of one year’s visit to Bombay, the childhood of these girls was spent in Calcutta, at their father’s garden house. Toru was a pure Hindu, full of the typical qualities of her race and blood, and, according to her poems she preserves to the last her appreciation of the poetic side of her ancient religion. At the age of thirteen, her father decided to take the two daughters to Europe to learn English and French. Toru was a better French scholar than English. She loved France and she loved its literature. She wrote French with a near perfect elegance. In 1873 Toru, her father and sister returned to Bengal.
The store of knowledge she brought from Europe would have sufficed to make either a French or English girl seem learned, but which in her case was simply miraculous. She mastered Sanskrit also. Her first published essay was a monograph on LeConte de Lisle, a writer with whom she had a sympathy. This study was followed by another one, Josephin Soulary. In 1874 her only sister Aru died at the age of twenty. Both sisters were well-trained musicians with full contralto voices. In 1876 Toru’s first volume Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields was published. It seemed for a time after her death that she had written but this single book. But as her father examined her papers he found one completed work after another. Magazine articles, a French romance, Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers, and English poems which are her chief legacy to posterity. Among her works are Prehlad, Saatri and the ballad Jogadbya Uma. Toru Dutt breathed her last on August 30, 1877 at the age of twenty-one years. Among “last words” of celebrated people, that which her father has recorded, “It is only the physical pain that makes me cry,” is not the least remarkable, or the least significant of strong character. If Toru Dutt were alive she would still be younger than any recognized European writer, and yet her fame, which is already considerable, has been entirely posthumous.