Toru Dutt wrote her final letters at 21, wracked by the same cough that had taken her brother and sister. She wrote in French, to her closest friend in Europe, Mary E.R. Martin; one of the few people outside her family who knew of her work. It’s a pained letter, and yet she had accepted her fate, invoking the image of Sita wandering alone in the forest. She died on August 30, 1877.
Her life was a series of lonely achievements. She was the first female Indian poet to compose both in English and in French. The first Indian woman to study at Cambridge (at a time when the university was only beginning to open its doors to women). The first Indian to write a novel in French. Perhaps she was also the first example of an emigrant returning to India and pining for another land, knowing not fully which is home. And for all her achievements, the latter part of her works were published and received only posthumously.
Toru’s biography was written 43 years after her death.
Toru’s family house in Calcutta, where she returned after some years spent in Europe, was a place for her to throw herself into writing and translation. It was here that she finished ‘A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields’, a collection of more than 150 poems she had translated from French to English. It was printed in Bhowanipore, Calcutta, with no introduction, on basic, orange-hued paper; that was then sent to one of the finest literary journals in Britain at the time – the Examiner. There, the sheaf was gleaned and nearly binned for its presentation– until it reached critic and poet Edmund Gosse.
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