Sheshalatha Reddy
University of MaryWashington
Establishing an Epic Lineage: From Savitri to Toru Dutt to “Savitri”
This paper proposes to examine one of Toru Dutt’s most famous poems, “Savitri,” which was a retelling of a narrative digression from the ancient Indian epic, the Mahabharata. Nineteenth-century Indians often read the eponymous heroine of this legend, itself of an older Vedic provenance, as an example of the relatively exalted position of women in ancient times and thus as an indication of the glories of ancient Indian civilization. The Mahabharata and Ramayana, which were constructed as pan-Indian through their reconstruction as Sanskritic and Hindu by the mid-nineteenth century, were seen by Indians educated in English and familiar with colonial governance and Orientalism, as national productions. These texts took on—through a comparison to the Greek epics by both Orientalists and natives—a corresponding status as the epics of the Indian (Hindu) nation. During the nineteenth century, the Indian “epics” were thought to represent a glorious ancient India to a present India and thereby imply the possibility of a glorious future India. As such, the “epics” enabled the claiming of India as a nation situated both territorially (as a place) and historically (through time).
Toru Dutt’s poem “Savitri” is obsessed with the latter. “Savitri” narrates, if not the origins, then a primordial era remarkably advanced by the civilizational terms set by the West. “Savitri” emphasizes the importance of lineage and the propagation of family: the poem is set in a royal past where family is nation. Hence, nation is also a site of privilege, in which one’s family, one’s origins determine one’s place in the social economy. It reifies kinship as the basis of community and establishes a genealogy of rulers, originated by Savitri herself, as the basis of government. Toru Dutt’s poem “Savitri” thematizes lineage and inheritance as, indeed, epics in general and the Mahabharata in particular do, but it also concerns itself more specifically with the agential role of woman as propagator of race and family.
Toru Dutt, who in “Savitri” inserts women into the national imaginary, herself comes to take on the traces of the nation—she approximates the very heroines she writes about. As part of a highly educated, notably prolific Bengali Brahmin family that was converted to Christianity by its patriarch, Toru Dutt ironically stands outside the Hindu family she creates in “Savitri.” As such, she troubles nineteenth-century constructions of the nation as putatively Hindu. Yet both Toru Dutt, as a self-conscious poet of the epic, and her critics, as self-conscious perpetuators of her legacy as a native poetess, reincorporate her into the national imaginary through a genealogy of ideal Indian womanhood as told in English.I argue that both in Toru Dutt’s own construction as well as in the interpretation of her early nationalist critics, Savitri the character was seen as establishing a genealogy of ideal Indian womanhood that would and did flower again in the figure of Toru Dutt the poetess.