CHAPTER VII

THE CHARACTER OF TORU DUTT AS REVEALED IN HER LETTERS

‘THIS fragile blossom of song’ is the beautiful, descriptive phrase which Edmund Gosse applies to Toru, and it is a phrase which one involuntarily calls to mind after reading her letters. A fragile blossom she was, a rose-bud half-unfurled, filling the little world of her Indian home with fragrance.

It may be still an open question how far our public education mars or enhances the beauty of real, feminine nature; but that real education enhances, rather than spoils, can be seen in the letters of Toru. She is throughout a woman-child, pure, sweet, modest, and essentially lovable, with a real Indian’s love of home and country.

The woman-child! The two aspects run right through the letters. The child—full of Stevenson’s ‘Happy Thought’:

The world is so full of a number of things, I am sure we should all be as happy as kings!

the woman—as Wordsworth pictures her:

A being breathing thoughtful breath, A traveller between life and death.

It is as a happy child we see her getting up very early in the morning, ‘so as to be able to pat and caress the horses;’ running gaily along at their side when they are being exercised; brimming over with delight when they learn to come at her call, or take a fancy daintily to eat the roses at her belt, playfully bestowing fine French names on them and on the favourite cat.

It is a child’s tender heart that demands a mosquito-curtain for the poor little canaries, and is at rest when they, like herself, are safe from their bloodthirsty tormentors. Eagerly as a child, too, does she go every day to her uncle’s garden to play with ‘Day’ and ‘May’, the cats.

In her actual childhood, at night, just before

Each little Indian sleepy head Is being kissed and put to bed,

she turns to her mother with the eternal cry of the child: ‘Mother, tell me a story.’ Then she listens, eyes wide with wonder, or wet with tears, to the old stories from the Ramayana, thrilling like the strings of the Aeolian harp in the wind to every call of beauty and pathos. A tender-hearted little maid, indeed, merging imperceptibly into the woman! a woman still of tender heart, seeing eye, and listening ear, but a woman made thoughtful by seeing ‘into the life of things’.

She moves in a circle where the beauty of the home-life is apparent to all, where even that greatest barrier of all—differing faiths—fails to spoil the tender affection between Toru and her Hindu grandmother.

So it is always when Toru writes of her relations; she reveals the spirit of love, which was the life of that little circle.

The supreme love in her own case seems to have been that which she bore her father, whose unwearying, thoughtful care of her is referred to again and again. His eyes seem to have followed her movements the livelong day, and it is he who orders wraps for her at the slightest cold breeze, and tells her when it is time for the busy pen to rest awhile, till she laughingly protests at times that he had better keep her in a glass case. Her father, however, did much more than look after her physical well-being. It was from him that she learned to plant her childish footsteps in the right road to literary art.

It is obvious, then, that an education begun on such sound lines should continue, as all true education does, throughout the whole of Toru’s brief life. Father and daughter continued their studies together—in French, English, and Sanskrit. Only when it got to a suggestion that they should proceed with Algebra and Geometry did the daughter confess her dislike of mathematics by declaring herself ‘too thick-headed’ for them!

Their fondness for, and acquaintance with French literature is attested by the constant references to their reading. Toru was, in fact, in a position to act as counsellor and guide to her English friend, Miss Martin, in that matter.

There are constant records of the arrival of books containing the latest French literature; a Life of Napoleon, sold by an itinerant bookseller, is a source of great delight, and attests Toru’s admiration for that great general.

We have already referred to the fact that even the household pets were given French names, but it appears also that Toru’s absorption in her books or play was the subject of many a French couplet by her father. With all her love of French literature, she was, nevertheless, not blind to its faults, and she exercised the same fine discriminating taste in this, as in all her reading. This was by no means confined to French. Mrs. Browning, the Brontës, Byron, Thackeray, Coleridge, Tennyson, Carlyle—there are references to them all, which show an intimate acquaintance with their works, as with the works of many other English authors. ‘I was always a book-worm,’ Toru says of herself, and her verdict is true. If a complete list were made of all the books mentioned as read even in this one correspondence only, covering a period of about four years (1873–7), its variety and completeness for so young a girl would astonish all who reflect on it. Moreover, when health begins to fail, and she is compelled to desist from study, she has a mind so well stocked with treasures that she can accompany her father in ‘repeating pieces of poetry, English or French, or else it is a stray Sanskrit line’. A girl in her teens!

No less keen than her interest in contemporary literature is her interest in contemporary events, both at home and abroad. She has her own opinion on the Lieutenant-Governor’s fitness for his post, on careers for Indians, on sanitation, on Victor Hugo’s speech for the liberation of the French communists, on the Government of Turkey, Art, the Civil Service Examination, on the education of Indian girls.

There are criticisms of society, as in the controversy over the wearing of ladies’ trains at the parties at Government House, on which she writes:

‘People who could not afford trains might as well have stayed away from the lordly parties at Government House. What a fuss we make about nothing!’

Or again:

‘What on earth do we care to hear whether the Raja of Burdwan got a salute of twelve or thirteen guns, or who got certificates of honour or silver medals?’

There are stern criticisms of Bengali Christian Society, the manners of which, she says, ‘would sadden the merriest heart, and dishearten the most hopeful.’ The incident of the fine of thirty rupees being imposed upon the English lawyer who violently assaulted his Syce and caused his death, and the sequel to the case, are related with a moderation that makes the indictment all the more forcible and convincing. Her remarks on judicial matters are equally penetrating. Still more startling is the comment:

‘We have no real English gentlemen or ladies in India, except a very few.’

Nothing can escape the searching of those keen young eyes. Nevertheless, gifted as Toru was, with a fine power of discerning the true and the false in those around her, and in life generally, she was never bigoted, nor anything but modest in her own demeanour, and in her estimate of herself.

Her account of her interview with Sir William Hunter is characteristic:

‘Dr. Hunter wished to make my acquaintance and also that of my family. Just fancy! “My family!” Why, I am getting quite an important personage!’

When the visit had taken place, she wrote:

‘Dr. Hunter made much of me and my abilities. Indeed, I felt quite ashamed, for, after all, it is only a book of translations, and Dr. Hunter himself has written such a great number of books.’

It was in this modest way that she always spoke of her achievements.

So full of eager interest in all that goes on around her is the young authoress, so full of life, and joy in life, that it is with something of a shock we read such a sentence as the following:

‘I wonder if I shall live to be thirty?’

Or again:

‘I feel sometimes very tired and weary and lonely, and this illness has made me suffer very much.’

Her life was full of pain latterly, but as soon as any respite came, the old humour was flashing out again, as when, in the hot weather, she parodies the Psalmist’s wish for the wings of a dove: ‘Oh that I had the fins of a fish!’

Yet suffering could not have been easy to one as full of life and energy as was Toru, and perhaps it was after all a merciful thing that death ended her pain so swiftly.

With all her love of English and French literature, first and last her love is reserved for the great literature of her country’s past.

Many times she begs her friend to become acquainted with translations of the Ramayana; for

‘You would then see how grand, how sublime, how pathetic, our legends are. The wifely devotion that an Indian wife pays to her husband; her submission to him even when he is capricious or exacting, her worship of him “as her god”.’

In this love of, and pride in, her country’s great inheritance, she was Indian to the core. It was from this love that began her correspondence with Mademoiselle Bader, and it is to the latter that we owe, perhaps, the best possible summary of Toru’s character as revealed in her letters. We quote it again:

‘Her letters revealed a frankness, sensibility, and charming goodness and simplicity, which endeared her to me, and showed me the native qualities of the Hindu woman developed and transformed by the Christian civilization of Europe.’

True Indian as she is, yet the West, too, is proud to have a claim to her.