Toru Dutt’s approach to Indian myths

Toru Dutt’s approach to Indian myths

This blog is a part of a thinking activity given by Megha Ma’am From The English Department, MKBU, Bhavnagar.

Toru Dutt

Toru Dutt (1856–1877) was an Indian poet who wrote in English and French during the 19th century. She was born in Rambagan, Calcutta, to a Bengali family that had converted to Christianity. Toru Dutt, along with her sister Aru, is considered one of the earliest Indian poets to have written in English. Her works are characterized by a blend of Indian and Western themes, reflecting her multicultural upbringing.

One of Toru Dutt's most notable works is the collection of poems titled "A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields." This collection showcases her proficiency in the French language and her deep appreciation for both Indian and Western cultures. Her poetry is often marked by a sense of nostalgia, a longing for her homeland, and a celebration of the cultural diversity she experienced.

One of Toru Dutt's famous poems is "Our Casuarina Tree," which is a lyrical expression of her attachment to her childhood home. In this poem, she vividly describes the Casuarina tree and its surroundings, using it as a metaphor for her memories and emotions.

Toru Dutt’s approach to Indian myths

The manner in which Toru Dutt’s sensibility encouraged the absorption of new ideas and trends gave birth to the conscious endeavour towards the study of foreign (primarily European) cultures. The colonial European influence in Bengal which prompted Dutt (or to a greater extent the Dutt family) to westernise mentally, socially, and also in terms of religion - whereby Christianity was held to be based on a more elevated and sublime plane of morality and worthy of being emulated and practiced  becomes evident especially in the depiction of Marguerite and Bianca in her novels.

Toru Dutt’s approach to the ancient Indian mythology, being the central theme of consideration here, deserves a closer inspection because of her own preparatory literary and social background when she prepared herself to devote her life to this task of writing Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan. Dutt’s initial interest into Indian mythology largely grew out of her ardent curiosity when she had, as an infant, beheld her mother recite stories from the Hindu scriptures and whose recitation, brought forth tears, simply due to the irresistible charm which lay in the ancient lays of India.

The ballads primarily deal with common legends of Hindu mythology  those of Savitri, Bharata, Dhruva etc. Toru's own readings in Sanskrit enabled her to perceive the ethical meaning with which many of these ancient legends were charged. On studying these poems individually, one would perceive that Dutt, in selecting these particular characters of Indian mythology, has a perception of the distant Indic past and how to present the characters from Hindu mythology. Also, Dutt has sought to renew her understanding of these mythological characters through a reinterpretation which reflected her Christian convictions and the literary taste which she had assiduously cultivated through her study of English and French literature. An outcome of this assessment was that the poet confirms the immortality, the permanence of these representatives of Hindu mythology and the qualities they stand for.

     The translations from the Sanskrit were done by Dutt and her elder sister, Aru, though Toru herself played the major part in this translation venture. Without any explicit avowal, Toru's translations assume the character of a kind of transcendence for the distant Indic antique past which is not surprising because of her own temperament being attuned to that of French - a temperament that expresses one's unceasing quest for love, freedom and beauty. There would definitely arise the question about the conflict between ‘Indian’ and foreign affiliations in her poems and whether such rigid dichotomies were indeed viable and present and if so, were they often at variance with each other, or lay converged under a common framework. Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan is an eloquent testimony to Toru’s ‘Indianness’. 

      Toru’s ardent love of Indian’s glorious past is reflected in her ballads. Her conversion to Christianity, her European visit and her English education could not lessen her love for India’s ancient religion and mythology. Despite her stay abroad and the peculiarity of her education and the fact of her sojourns to the West, she always nourished herself an inborn love for the Indian scene. This latent sympathy towards the Hindu mythological characters needs to be brought forth because of her extraordinary favourable portrayal of them. 5 Edmund Gosse in his Introductory Memoir to Dutt's posthumous Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan declared:

“Here, in a mystical retirement more irksome to an European in fancy than to an Oriental in reality, the brain of this wondrous child was moulded. She was pure Hindu, full of the typical qualities of her race and blood, and as the present volume shows us, for the first time, preserving to the last, her appreciation of the poetic side of her ancient religion, though faith itself in Vishnu and Shiva had been cast aside with childish things and been replaced by a purer faith.” For instance, in the poem, ‘The Legend of Dhruva’, she introduces her theme in the following verses:

“Sprung from great Brahma, Manu had two sons,

Heroic and devout, as I have said,

Pryavrata and Uttanapado, - names,

Known in legends; and of these the last

Married two wives, Suruchee, his adored,

The mother of a handsome petted boy

Uttama; and Suneeetee, less beloved,

The mother of another son

Was Dhruva.” 

The poet is retelling the well-known story of Dhruva in English from the original Sanskrit and it bears a striking similarity in tone and tenor to the rustic recitations of identical mythological tales in the Indian context. In ‘The Legend

of Dhruva’ we find the sense of duty prevailing when Dhruva declares that the throne should be given to Uttama. Dutt has imbibed the spirit of her subject well because without some form of intellectual sympathy for the religion whose

mythological characters she is translating and rendering into English verse, this kind of apt yet sonorous description of a character does not seem feasible.

 CONCLUSION:

 In conclusion, it can be said that despite her Christian upbringing, she never completely tried to engage in any kind of self-isolation from the cultural milieu of his times. The best testimony to that was in her endeavours to learn the Sanskrit language. From a purely Christian point of view, all pre-Christian mythologies are merely heathenish and only fit for intellectual enquiry but any kind of devotional interest in them was unbecoming of a devout Christian. Toru Dutt succeeded in transcending the purely Christian milieu and this enabled her to treat with sympathy and gusto the characters from the mythological characters from the Puranas.