Toru Dutt
Page 12
Mlle Baders book arrived from France on her birthday and the Sheaf was out on March 24. A copy was sent to Mary with the remark -“I wonder what the papers will say of my book. Of course they will be for and against, and I have already armed myself with Stoicism.”33 This stoicism has become a natural trait of her character as tragedies in her life, taught her to remain indifferent to the vicissitudes of fortune and to pleasure and pain. In her translation, Advice To A Young Poet written by Augusta Vacquerie Toru expressed this stoic philosophy, in fact she was much impressed by the thoughts expressed in this poem:
FRIEND, care for art, and care not for success,
It matters not if fools insult or bless;
Doubts, fears for thee would in my breast prevail,
If from the outset thou didst spread full sail,
And no wind adverse, quick sands, battles hard,
And death fears even, crossed thee to retard,
Those who are great pass not, though every door
Open before them. 34
This is a wonderful piece and perhaps Toru followed each and every line of this peace whole-heartedly. To the end of her life she was busy in literary studies notwithstanding her weak physical status.
Toru was interested, but not to a very great extent, in the position and status of Indian women. It is obvious that her short life, so absorbed in writing and scholarship, could spare little time for social reform and work.
Toru herself was protected from the orthodox world’s rigid rules in the freedom, which her community enjoyed. France, she loved second to India, and England she wished to settle in because she felt women were allowed more freedom there than in India. Most of the women in Bengal in the middle of the nineteenth century were very much in purdah, and Toru often felt the restrictions hampered the freedom she so appreciated when abroad. She could not mix much with Bengali society because the existing Sabhas were only for men, and women in general were kept in the seclusion of their homes. Another reason of her isolation from the rest of the society.
Her last days were approaching and Toru was not allowed to sing any more. ‘Papa is so careful,’ she wrote, ‘I tell him he should keep me under a glass care, for I am not half so delicate as he makes me out to be, 35 or as he is afraid that I am:
An exile from my earliest prime,
Benumbed and chilled with cold,
I long to warm myself again,
Beside the hearth of old.
Arise each day – my native land.
In memory’s longing eye!
In thee began my course of life,
In thee I wish to die. 36
In order to warm her up and to infuse new life in Toru, Papa had brought Victor Hugo’s books for her and Toru started translating more French poems, as the Sheaf was in great demand, and she hoped for a second edition. The Calcutta Review had accepted some of her verses and Papa was very pleased and ‘So was she, for Calcutta Review was the best of its kind in India.’
What a struggle and what a victory –for Toru! The Bengal magazine asked Toru to send more contributions and Toru sent translations of Soulary, Sainte Beauve, Comte de Gramont, Auguste Vacquerie, Theophile Gautier, Voltaire, Marnier, Hugo and others. Govin Chunder, in an article to the Bengal Magazine, remarked that the only English translations of Salary’s works were to be found in the Sheaf.
By December of 1876 Toru was really ill, as her own doctor was away. Dr. Smith from the Medical College came to attend on her. ‘When Dr. Smith first came to see me’ she wrote to Mary: ‘he wore a very professional air, and only asked professional questions. Suddenly his eyes fell on the table, where the Sheaf lay in all its orange colored glory; a light dawned upon the doctor, ‘Are you the author of this book?’ said he. You should have seen his redoubled interest in my health! ‘This poitrinare is then the author of this book!’ 37He was surprised, interested, and pleased, as he couldn’t imagine that Toru would have written such a wonderful piece. She was almost secluded from the literary world or literary fame because of her ill health.
One of the most beautiful episodes of Toru’s life was her deep friendship with Mlle Clarisse Bader. Toru’s wish to see Clarisse never materialized, for on April 13, 1877, she informed her French friend that she was indeed very ill. ‘A letter from you with your portrait will do me good. All our plans are changed. We shall not be able to go to Europe in April. “Man proposes and God disposes?’ Greatly concerned with this news, Clarisse replied the next month that she was indeed disappointed at not seeing Toru whose works and letters reveal ‘a refined and charming soul.’ She further wrote ‘What! Can your illness have lessened in any degree the virility of the nature you reveal in your portrait? Are those beautiful eyes full of fire languishing? Ah! But that can just be a passing phase.’38
In the last year of her life many renowned friends came to pay their homage to Toru, including Sir William Hunter and Ananda Mohan Bose and her reading was becoming more and more absorbing for she was pursuing Saint Beuve and Victor Huge. But Toru was now too ill and in June she wrote Mary about her falling health. The next month she wrote ‘May God helps us to bear our Crosses patiently; and she quoted Newman’s hymn: ‘I would not miss one sigh or tear.’ This was the 53rd and last letter received by Mary after the return of Toru to India in 1873.
Toru died with books strewn all around her. Govin writing of her death to Mary, said that Toru had read all her letters up to July and that they have been a source of great comfort to her. The end came on August 30, at Rambagan. Toru was twenty-one years and four months.
Its time to take Toru’s work one by one in the light of the theme of isolation and alienation. First, we take A Sheaf Gleaned in French fields, which is her book of translation from French poets. Earlier in many places the instances of the feeling of loss and lonesomeness taken from the Sheaf, have been given in order to prove that Toru was much interested in this seamy side of life.
The sheaf, contains poems The Death of a Young Girl, The Fall of Leaves, What the Swallow Says, The Captive to the Swallow, Dost Thou Remember Mary, O Desert of the Heart, The Tears of Racine, Sonnet-Isolation, loneliness, The Death of the Wolf, Le fond De La Mer, The Lost Path,Autumn Sunset, The Sleep of the Candor, Les Hurleurs,The Sword of Angantyr, and Sonnet-Autumn. All these poems deal with the theme of alienation and loneliness, sense of loss and depravity.
The poem My Village presents a deep nostalgic strain and a sense of longing. Just as has been experienced by Toru herself while living in foreign countries:
O fair sky of my native land.
How much I miss thee here!
And thee, O home- O sweet retreat!
I ever held so dear
Canst thou not, Sun, that openest now
The summer’s treasures free,
Give back to me my sky and home
My life and gaiety?39
Another example is taken from F. De. Gramont’s sonnet, Isolation. How magnificently Toru accepts the feeling of isolation on her part as God’s grace:
Blest isolation from the world, I see
Herein thy emblem; may thy winding sheet
Guard my soul likewise till its latest hour,
That so through all its journey it may be
Patient, until God’s love with generous heat
In heaven unfolds the blossom into flower. 40
The Captive to the swallows is the well-known song of Beranger named Les Hirondelles. Again a sense of longing and desire as well as a sad feeling of being detached from her loved ones is presented in this song. The theme of the poem is the captivity of a soldier, who is alone and therefore, welcomes the swallows from afar. He speculates that some of them might have been born upon the roof, beneath whose shade he first beheld, the light of morn. He asks them to impart information to him about his motherland, and his dear people:
Who live there yet? and who have died?
O speak, dear birds, for ye must know, -
Who slumber happy side by side?
And who,
as exiles, live in woe?
My country’s birds, your tidings tell,
As high ye circle in the air,
Though never heart for me may swell
Nor ever rise the mother’s prayer. 41
At times Toru felt herself confined, chained and depressed. Examples are frequent and one can easily find them in The Sheaf Gleaned in French fields. The Solitary Nest written by M. D.Valmore, depicts aptly Toru’s desolate state of mind which is very touching:
Go my soul; soar above the dark passing crowd,
Bathe in blue ether like a bird free and proud,
Go, nor return till face to face thou hast known
The dream – my bright dream- unto me sent alone.
I long but for silence, on that hangs my life,
Isolation and rest – a rest from all strife;
And oh! From my nest unvexed by a sob
To hear the wild pulse of the age round my throb. 42
Here her yearning to get rid of her long- drawn illness, her pain, suffering and her triple alienation comes out with sincerity. In many of her translations, as we read them, we get a sense of her nerve, and quite sometimes we find our self on her place.
When Toru wrote her Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan a hitherto half open lotus was now able to blossom out in the rays of the Oriental sun in full bloom. However much Toru loved England and France, she was subconsciously never at home in writing about these countries or in translating their literature and it was when she gathered A Sheaf in Sanskrit Fields that her real poetic worth awoke. As far as the theme of isolation and alienation is concerned, each and every ballad of this book, and the miscellaneous poems, more or less give expression to it.
Savitri, the first legend of the Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, deals with the theme of victory of love over death. Savitri, the heroine of the poem after her name and the only issue of Madra`s wise and powerful king, chose Satyavan as her ‘life partner and willingly accepted the life of isolation and started to live in the hermitage without any mark of suffering or pain. The fears of many that Savitri could not live in a hut proved false and Savitri liked her new life very much. Still she was haunted by the prophesy of death of Satyavan, made by Narad Muni :
And yet there was a scepter grim,
A skeleton in Savitri`s heart,
Looming in shadow, somewhat dim,
But which would never thence depart. 43
The same fear Toru also felt after the untimely death of her brother and sister. Just like Savitri, Toru herself bears all the sufferings and waits for that fateful day. Thus in Savitri, Toru identified herself, in some places, with Savitri, on account of her stoic resignation to the supreme will of God. She expected:
No help from man, well, be it so!
No sympathy, - it matters not!
God can avert the heavy blow!44
Like Savitri, Toru a firm believer in God passed away from the earth firmly relying on her Saviouer Jesus Christ, and in perfect peace.
The next ballad Lakshman, tells us about Lakshman, the younger brother of Rama, the king of Ayodhya, who has left his princely pleasures and comforts, on account of his love for his brother. Lakshman lived in the forest with his brother Rama, and his wife Sita. He was alienated from the rest of the society because he wanted to serve his brother. His alienation was self-imposed and deliberate.
After Lakshman, Toru wrote the ballad, Jogadhya Uma there is nothing much of this theme of alienation or isolation
The next ballad The Royal Ascetic and the Hind is the story of king Bharat, who reigned in Saligram. The king was dissatisfied with the muddy, mundane world. He renounced it, and went into the Woods to practice his severe penance and rude privations. Everything went well with him until, one day, he had to rescue a fawn struggling in the deep water for life. It became his only companion in his lonely life, and he loves it to such an extent that even at the time of his death ‘the hind was at his side, with tearful eyes watching his last sad moments like a child’ and
He too, watched and watched
His favourite through a blinding film of tears,
And could not think of the Beyond at hand,
So keen he felt the parting, such deep grief ” 45
Here Toru beautifully expresses the tender feelings of King Bharata, at the time of his departure from this world, for that fawn.
The feeling of alienation is once again evident in the legend of Dhruva, as Dhruva was denied paternal love because of a dominant step mother. She scolds him insolently:
Oh! Thoughtless! To desire the loftiest place,
The throne of thrones, a royal father’s lap!
It is an honour to the destined given,
And not within thy reach. 46
Deciding to seek the love of the father of the worlds Dhruva declared that I shall try to win the loftiest place which the whole world deems priceless and desires. Dhruva left his father’s palace and went into the woods to practice stern asceticism and at last he gained the ‘The highest heavens, and there he shines a star!’47
The next legend is about Buttoo (otherwise known as Eklavya), eager for apprenticeship in archery from the great Dronacharjya himself. He is scorned by the sage and his royal pupils and retires to a forest where he makes an image of Drona and learns his art with the help of his own devotion to the teacher and when the cruel demand is made he did not shrink from giving away his thumb as teacher’s fees. He :
Glanced the sharp knife one moment high,
The severed thumb was on his sod,
There was no tear in Buttoo’s eye,
He left the matter with his God. 48
The pupil, Buttoo`s self-sacrifice was commendable and reminds us of Toru`s own belief in God and resignation to the supreme will of God. Like Buttoo, Toru herself felt socially alienated, and this feeling finds expression in this ballad in a very remarkable manner:
My place I gather is not here:
No matter, - what is rank or caste?
The question is, -not wealth or place,
But gifts well used, or gifts abused.49
The next ballad, Sindhu, begins with a helpless and lonely picture of Sindhu’s parents:
Deep in the forest shades there dwelt
A Muni and his wife,
Blind, grayhaired, weak, they hourly felt
Their slender hold on life.
No friends had they, no help or stay,
Except an only boy,
A bright- eyed child, his laughter gay,
Their leaf -hut filled with joy.50
Perhaps the ballad for envisions Toru’s parents, who after her death became as lonely and shattered as Sindhu’s parents were at that time, when Sindhu was killed inadvertently by the thoughtless sport of King Dasaratha. In this ballad, Toru very tenderly expressed the deep sorrow and anguish of Sindhu’s helpless parents. The loss of their only son was unbearable for them:
Our hearts are broken. Come dear wife,
On earth no more we dwell;
Now welcomes death, and farewell Life,
And thou, O king farewell!51
Another ballad Prahlad, to some extent expresses the theme of alienation as he refused to live according to the will of his father, the demon Heerun Kasyapu and chose God as his protector and lord. He says firmly:
The gods that rule the earth and sea,
Shall I abjure them and adore
A man? It may not, may not be;
Though I should lie in pools of gore
My conscience I would hurt no more;
But I shall what my heart
Tells me is right, so I implore
My purpose fixed no longer thwart. 52
The last legend Sita is very touching and revealing. It brings into light the undeserved suffering of that queen in the forest after having been exiled from Ayodhya by Ram at a time when she was pregnant. Sita wept continually and her children also feel it. How can anybody estimate the sense of loneliness of her part as she was bor
n and bred in a royal family, but was exiled to the forest, without any proper reason. Her loneliness and suffering reminds us of the lonesomeness of Toru’s mother after the death of her three children. The most moving lines in the whole of the ancient ballads are the following from Sita:
When shall those children by their mother’s side
Gather, ah me! As erst at eventide? 53
In them we find a deep sense of pathos. Never had Toru written more emotionally or evoked a scene or an emotion as unforgettably as has been presented here in this ballad.
Now come to miscellaneous poems, of Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan. Near Hastings the first poem presents a feeling of being isolated on her part, as it presents the picture of an alien country. Mark this stanza :
Near Hastings, on the shingle-beach,
We loitered at the time
When ripens on the wall the peach,
The autumn’s lovely prime.
Far off, -the sea and the sky seemed blent,
The day was wholly done,
The distant town its murmurs sent,
Strangers, - we were alone.54
These lines clearly show that how so ever, Toru loved France or England, by heart she was Indian and she couldn’t forget her Indian origin.
Part-2
The Tree of life beautifully describes the feelings of Toru Dutt as she found herself in the midst of holy spirits. She was alone on her death bed and only consolation at that time was her father near her. Imagine the mental state of that girl who has already lost her siblings and having been alienated from the whole world, prepared for her last voyage:
Beside the tree an Angel stood; he plucked