ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Toru Dutt, whose surviving works position her as one of the first, if not the first, Anglophone woman writer from the South Asian subcontinent. Toru Dutt's cultural and linguistic in between's, 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. The chapter also focuses on the significance of Toru Dutt's translations from the Sanskrit in Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan. Toru Dutts generation returned to myths from the epics The Ramayana and The Mahabharata and shaped them into a heroic counter-history to the demoralizing historical accounts of India written by the British. 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.
