Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870–1920

Ellen Brinks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317180906
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

The result of extensive archival recovery work, Ellen Brinks's study fills a significant gap in our understanding of women's literary history of the South Asian subcontinent under colonialism and of Indian women's contributions and responses to developing cultural and political nationalism. As Brinks shows, the invisibility of Anglophone Indian women writers cannot be explained simply as a matter of colonial marginalization or as a function of dominant theoretical approaches that reduce Indian women to the status of figures or tropes. The received narrative that British imperialism in India was perpetuated with little cultural contact between the colonizers and the colonized population is complicated by writers such as Toru Dutt, Krupabai Satthianadhan, Pandita Ramabai, Cornelia Sorabji, and Sarojini Naidu. All five women found large audiences for their literary works in India and in Great Britain, and all five were also deeply rooted in and connected to both South Asian and Western cultures. Their works created new zones of cultural contact and exchange that challenge postcolonial theory's tendencies towards abstract notions of the colonized women as passive and of English as a de-facto instrument of cultural domination. Brinks's close readings of these texts suggest new ways of reading a range of issues central to postcolonial studies: the relationship of colonized women to the metropolitan (literary) culture; Indian and English women's separate and joint engagements in reformist and nationalist struggles; the 'translatability' of culture; the articulation strategies and complex negotiations of self-identification of Anglophone Indian women writers; and the significance and place of cultural difference.

Chapter 1
Translating Hindustan: Toru Dutt’s Poems and Letters

[My room] is furnished very strangely, half in the English and half in the Bengali style … A small desk at one corner, covered with sundry English, French, Bengali, and Sanskrit books.

Toru Dutt, Letter of August 28, 1876

There is a past to be learned about, but the past is now seen, and it has to be grasped as a history … It is narrated … It is grasped through reconstruction.

Stuart Hall

My study begins with Toru Dutt, whose surviving works position her as one of the first, if not the first, Anglophone woman writer from the South Asian subcontinent. Hailing from Calcutta and spending her last years there, Dutt’s brief life (1856–77) was anything but rooted: from 1869 to 1873, Toru and her sister Aru traveled with their family in England and Europe, laying claim to being the first Indian women ever to travel there for pleasure and further schooling (they were educated first in Nice, France, and later in Cambridge, England, attending “higher lectures” addressed specifically to women).1 Such distant travel, for Indian middle-class women, was rare yet momentous, according to historian Meredith Borthwick: “Only a very few … were able to travel beyond India’s borders, but this minority had significance beyond its numbers. They performed the function of intermediaries, as informants for English women wanting to know more about the women of India, and for Indian women curious about the lives of women abroad.”2 The mobility of Dutt’s young adulthood, her exposure to different cultures, the expectation that she and her sister would become authors, and her fluency in multiple languages – all left a formative mark on her writings. Not only did she constitute her authorial persona through diverse languages and literatures, primarily French and English; this mediation of self via other cultures also redirected Dutt’s attention in the last two years of her life to an engagement with Indian literary cultures of the past, through her study and translation of Sanskrit tales. Her life was cut brutally short by tuberculosis, at the age of 21. Despite her illness, she managed to be incredibly prolific. From 1874 onwards, her critical essays on literature and poems in translation appeared regularly in The Bengal Magazine, and in 1876 her volume of poems translated from the French into English, A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields, was published simultaneously in Calcutta and London. An unfinished historical romance in English, Bianca, a Spanish Maid, and a complete epistolary novel in French, Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers, were discovered after her death and published posthumously (1878 and 1879, respectively). A few of her translated Sanskrit tales, as well as her original poems, were published during her lifetime; these, with some unpublished translations and original poems, were collected by her father and published posthumously in a final volume entitled Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (1882).

Toru Dutt’s cosmopolitan perspective and creative output are rare for one so young from any background. Yet her development as a writer, from writer/translator of French and English works to a writer contributing to cultural nationalism via her translations of a Hindu past, is also strikingly representative of her contemporary Indian milieu and her family’s social position in colonial Bengal. Dutt was the daughter of one of Calcutta’s most renowned and respected families, and her father and his brothers were all English-educated, Christian converts (interestingly, none of their wives converted except Toru’s mother, and then very reluctantly, at first).3 They belonged to the bhadralok, the class of Bengali elites serving within the colonial administration. While her experience as a colonized subject is worlds apart from that of the majority of Indian women, Dutt deserves a place within any critical exploration of Indian women’s condition under colonialism and discursive resistance to the colonial order. She shared her family’s passion for English literature, which was gradually transformed into an interest in versifying Indian history in English – a critical shift that defines Toru’s late work. Her father, Govind Dutt, his brothers Girish and Hur, and cousin Omesh published a volume of English poems, along with translations from the German and French, entitled the Dutt Family Album (1870). Though their defense of a British presence in India is largely unwavering in the volume, their poems inaugurate a rediscovery of an idealized Indian past, a dominant strain in emergent cultural nationalism of the era. To get a sense of how the reconstruction of an Indian past could be crucial to the development of a proto-national identity (full-blown nationalism did not exist until the mid 1880s), consider the following words of Bankim Chandra, one of Calcutta’s most prominent writers during the same period. In an essay written in English, he asks, “‘Why is India a subject country’? … [Because] there is no Hindu history. Who will praise our noble qualities if we do not praise them ourselves? … When has the glory of any nation ever been proclaimed by another nation?’.”4 (Bankim Chandra’s song, Bande Mataram (“Hail, the Motherland”), couched within his historical novel Anandamath (1882), eventually became the national song of India). Sharing a similar interest in Indian history, the Dutt Family Album’s many historical poems celebrate heroic, medieval India. In the preface to a subsequent volume of poems, Lotus Leaves (1871), Toru Dutt’s uncle, Hur Chunder Dutt, writes: “We have many histories of India from school-histories up to elaborate treatises, but no work embodying Indian historical incidents and characters and older traditions in a poetical form.”5 Mirroring this familial interest in the Indian past, Toru Dutt loosely translates tales from the Sanskrit tradition; what she adds is a dialectical sensibility toward history that is largely lacking in her father’s generation.

Toru Dutt’s cultural and linguistic “inbetweenness,” symptomatic not only of her family but of the bhadralok class in Bengal, reveal her to be an Indian who loved European literature, adopted some English customs and liberal, modernizing attitudes, and one who, though converted, remained proudly connected to Hindu traditions. She combined these hybrid cultural leanings with a strong desire to improve social and political injustices in Bengal stemming directly from colonialism. As Meena Alexander’s dictum, “the habitations that language provides are always piecemeal,” illuminates, however, any stable or consistent perspective within Toru Dutt’s variegated body of work is difficult to locate.6 Her texts do not establish a permanent home but rather continually explore the vicissitudes of cultural alienation and belonging in multiple linguistic abodes simultaneously, as many critics have noted.7 All Toru Dutt’s writings, then, are “translations” in the broadest sense, by virtue of subject matter and intended audience: they intellectually range across multiple cultures and language traditions. Many are, more narrowly, translations from one language to another, whether strictly or loosely. In Dutt’s case, these movements are not simply between an imperial center and a colonized margin. For example, some of Dutt’s French translations, as Tricia Lootens deftly reveals, show her playing the imperial enemies England and France off one another.8 In fact, her linguistic hybridity can be read as an enabling condition that supports her translations and critical reflections on India’s cultural traditions, an important component of developing nationalism during a period of widespread reform movements. While Dutt cannot be identified politically as a nationalist, as we will see, her works participate in nationalist discourses in two ways.9 First, her subject matter reinforces cultural patriotism. Second, by reconstructing the Vedic past, Dutt lends her voice to indigenous reform projects and emergent cultural nationalism by rejecting Orientalist, colonialist readings of India’s history.

The significance of Toru Dutt’s translations from the Sanskrit in Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan is the primary focus of this chapter. To grasp their import, however, requires that the reader attend to multiple contexts: the cultural environment of translation and the translator; the history of translations from the Sanskrit during the colonial period; and the discrepencies that emerge between the ideological values inhering in the originals and those voiced in her loose translations (primarily, as asides by Dutt’s poetic speakers). Like any literary translations, Dutt’s operate within the conventions of her historical moment. Within this colonial setting, they do so across fascinating and intersecting divides. These include the temporal gap between the Vedic past and the colonized present; the religious divide between a complex Hindu tradition and Dutt’s Indian Christianity; the linguistic rifts between the Sanskrit language of sacred texts, the English of the colonizer and the Indian elite, and Indian vernaculars; and the ideological differences between Western Orientalist translators of Sanskrit and their bhadralok successors. A consideration of these divisions must also take into account the importance of gender, the fact that it is an Indian woman writer who returns to validate and rewrite an indigenous tradition.

Before turning to the volume Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, however, I want to begin with a look at some of Dutt’s letters to her English friend Mary Martin. In these letters, Toru fashions herself as a mediator of her culture and extensively chronicles her experiences during the final four years of her life. These letters to Martin comprise a kind of epistolary “translation” of her life in Calcutta as a young Bengali woman(-writer) and offer a very different perspective of her. Instead of being merely a “colonized consciousness” trapped in the “almost, but not quite” dilemma of colonial mimicry, these letters reveal Dutt as a pointed and passionate thinker about social reform and current politics.10 Especially in the letters she wrote during the last two years of her life, Dutt emerges as someone whose expressions of Anglophilia coexist with an increasing denunciation of British colonial policies and practices that betray a conviction of their inherent superiority. Her family’s elite position (in March 1877 her father was made Justice of the Peace and named an Honorary Magistrate), instead of making it difficult for Dutt to be critical of British or Anglo-Indian attitudes, gave her a privileged position from which to express her own convictions. Attuned to the racial inequalities and tensions between Indians, Anglo-Indians, and British surfacing in her immediate environment, Dutt aligns herself with a community of Bengali English-educated elites who were challenging the colonial double standard.

Racialized divisions were a prominent feature of India’s post-Mutiny landscape. After 1857, there was an increasing separation of Indians and Anglo-Indians, whether that took the literal form of discrete, demarcated spaces, e.g., the civil lines, cantonments, and hill stations versus the old cities, or as hardened mental attitudes concerning unbridgeable racial differences between two cultures. According to the historians Barbara and Thomas Metcalf, British arrogance and contempt were a primary cause of the Mutiny. In the post-Mutiny era, these attitudes rigidified into the belief that Indians were incapable of self-rule and thus conveniently ju...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Translating Hindustan: Toru Dutt’s Poems and Letters
• 2 Gendered Spaces and Conjugal Reform in Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Kamala: A Story of Hindu Life
• 3 Feminizing Famine, Imperial Critique: Pandita Ramabai’s Famine Essays
• 4 The Imperial Family Begins in the Nursery: Cornelia Sorabji’s ‘Baby-fication’ of Empire
• 5 The Voice of India: Sarojini Naidu’s Nationalist Poetics
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index