Gifts from Utopia: The Travels of Toru Dutt's Poetry

Abstract

Born in Calcutta in 1856 and dying only twenty-one years later of tuberculosis, the young Bengali writer Toru Dutt wrote novels and poems in English and French, translated French poetry into English, and toward the end of her life revisited Bengali myths and tales from the Ramayana in her poetry. Her multilingual poems and translations have traditionally been interpreted as seeking to dissolve or fragment cultural differences. This essay instead argues for Dutt seeking to consolidate difference, reconceived as possibility: by distributing her poems to friends in England and receiving gifts of poems in return, Dutt sought to create a transnational friendship economy involving the material exchange of poetic texts. She then theorises this exchange in the work itself, arguing in novels, poems and inexact translations for regarding the resistant materiality of poetry and language both as imperfect tools that can nonetheless be utilised to forge community and understanding – however utopian, however fragile and temporary – across seemingly incommensurable cultural differences, perhaps even across the inequities of imperial history.