In the shadow of death

Toru Dutt (1858-1877) has been a well-known Indian English poet of the nineteenth century whose early death cut short what might have been a brilliant literary career.

While her poetry is fairly well-known, not many know that she wrote Bianca, perhaps the first English novel to have been authored by an Indian woman, and Le Journal de Mademoiselle D'Arvers, the first novel written by an Indian in French.

The Diary of Mademoiselle D'Arvers, the book under review, is the novel rendered into English very sensitively by N Kamala and introduced by G J V Prasad, well-known poet and fiction writer (and Kamala's husband""one must appreciate their team effort).

In her "Translator's Note", Kamala tells the reader that she has attempted to strike a fine balance between "a domesticating approach and a foreignising one".

The text is made accessible to the reader in its target language version but its foreign (read French) ambience is retained to convey the flavour of the original.

In his Introduction, Prasad raises the question of Toru Dutt writing her novels in secret. He connects this with the fact that both are set in the west and have European characters.

While it is not clear when she wrote the two novels, Prasad feels that they were written in Calcutta after she and her family returned from Europe, perhaps after Aru's death, the French one following the English "... since Bianca begins with the death of the elder sister of the heroine, and ... Le Journal has the long shadow of the heroine's death visible in its latter half."

The novel itself is highly romantic""the story of young Marguerite, who is beautiful, pious and good. She gets married to Louis, who loves her deeply and they have a baby boy, everything to suggest a "they lived happily ever after" ending.

But that is not to happen. In true classical manner, the reader has an inkling of the dire happenings when Marguerite has bad dreams even at the height of her marital bliss.

These are not vague fears but a premonition of her death, dreams that ultimately come true. Toru, as well as her sister Aru, died of TB in an age when there was no streptomycin to fight it. One could go to a sanatorium or a warmer place if in Europe.

The death wish that accompanies imminent death in a sensitive person pervades the novel, perhaps the whole of the young novelist's psyche as well though she might have been brave enough not to show it to all and sundry.

A discriminating reader might like to compare this to Keats' death wish that pervades most of his poetry as he was in a similar situation to Toru Dutt (Keats died in 1821). His brother Tom Keats had died of consumption and he himself knew that he was afflicted with the same disease and would die sooner or later.

She died single but must have had a young girl's yearnings about love, marriage, and motherhood, which she was never to experience. Her description of the love between Marguerite and Louis has nothing sexual or physical about it as she herself was a stranger to these things.

In her Introduction to the French version, Clarisse Bader (to whom Toru Dutt had sent the manuscript to be published) says, "Toru Dutt, having died a young girl, did not experience either the conjugal love or the maternal love that she so delightfully made her heroine express, and that she only knew it with the prescience of her heart", but it seems just a romanticised notion. This reviewer has not read Bianca, and it would have been interesting to look at the two novels together, not necessarily compare them.

Anyone attempting a biography of Toru Dutt would have to speculate on or find answers to a number of questions that strike the reader of The Diary of Mademoiselle D'Arvers. Why did she write the novel in French? Did she have a target readership in mind? Who were they?

Why did she not show the novel (and the English one) to her father, to whom she was very close? Why did she not get it published in her lifetime? To find answers to these questions, one has to read her letters, get acquainted with her life, and speculate on the incidents in it.

THE DIARY OF MADEMOISELLE D'ARVERS

Toru Dutt
(Translated by N Kamala and introduced by G J V Prasad)
Penguin
Price: Rs 200; Pages: xviii+147