Toru Dutt’s Savitri: A Great Poetic Work

Abstract

The place of Toru Dutt in Indian Poetry in English is very great and admirable. Though, like the lily flower of Ben Jonson, she lived in the world for a very short period of time, her brief contribution in both theme and technique is still being read and enjoyed by the lovers of art and beauty. She was very much influenced by the poetry  of the Romantic and the Victorian poets. It is her extraordinary credit that at the age of eighteen, she had a great command over the French and English language. She made India acquaint with the poets of France in the rhyme of England, who blended in herself three souls of three traditions and presented in the history of English literature a phenomenon without parallel. She is today known to the world by her immortal work Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan which contains a number of great epical poems on the life and contribution of ‘Savitri’, ‘Lakshman’, ‘Sita’, ‘Sindhu’, ‘Prahlad’ and Dhruva. Her poems “Baugmaree” “The Lotus” and “Our Casuarina Tree” are often anthologized for courses of studies in various universities.