page_title: Toru Dutt
section_title: Later life
hierarchical_section_title: Toru Dutt / Biography / Later life
caption_attribution_description: English: Toru dutt grave
context_page_description: Toru Dutt was a Bengali translator and poet from the Indian subcontinent, who wrote in English and French, in what was then British India. She is seen as one of the founding figures of Anglo-Indian literature, alongside Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, Manmohan Ghose, and Sarojini Naidu. Dutt is known for her volumes of poetry in English, A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields and Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, and for her novel in French, Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers. Her poems revolve around themes of loneliness, longing, patriotism and nostalgia. Dutt died young, at age 21, which has influenced some comparisons of her to poet John Keats.
context_section_description: When Toru Dutt returned to Calcutta in 1873, at age seventeen, she found it challenging to re-integrate with a culture which now seemed like "an unhealthy place both morally and physically speaking" to her Europeanized and Christianized eyes. Her sister Aru died of consumption in 1872, aged twenty. Three years after returning to Calcutta, she wrote to her friend Mary Martin: "‘I have not been to one dinner party or any party at all since we left Europe," and "If any friend of my grandmother happens to see me, the first question is, if I am married," both statements expressing a frustration with what she saw as a restrictive and conservative society. However, she also recognized that Europe could not replace India as her true home. She took consolation in reinvigorating her studies of Sanskrit with her father, and hearing her mother's stories and songs about India.
  Like both of her siblings, Toru Dutt died of consumption at a young age (twenty-one), on 30 August 1877.
caption: Grave of Toru Dutt at Maniktala Christian Cemetery
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