The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume XIV. The Victorian Age, Part Two.
§ 6. Torulata Dutt
In Torulata Dutt, however, we meet a different order of intellect. The daughter of Govind Chandra Dutt, who himself wrote tasteful English verse, and related to Sasi Chandra of the same family, a voluminous writer of English, she was in close contact with English or continental culture throughout most of her short life. She wrote a novel in French, which was published posthumously in Paris. Her English poetry displayed real creative and imaginative power and almost faultless technical skill. In her English translations (A Sheaf gleaned in French Fields), and in her Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, she so nearly achieved a striking success as to make one regret that our language is essentially unsuited to the riot of imagery and ornament which form part of the natural texture of the oriental mind. Her early death in 1877 at the age of twenty-one was a loss both to her own and to our race, but her life and literary achievements were an earnest of the more remarkable results which were likely to ensue, and are ensuing, from the fusing of western and eastern culture. The educational policy of the government of India is destined, given continuity of development, to react upon English literature in a manner realised even now by but a few, and certainly undreamt of by those who entered upon it. But, until its full results are made manifest, Anglo-Indian literature will continue to be mainly what it has been, with few exceptions, in the past—literature written by Englishmen and Englishwomen who have devoted their lives to the service of India.