Analyzing Toru Dutt’s Oeuvre Today: How a Transnational Literary-Educational Case from Colonial India Can Enrich Our Conception of Transnational History

Abstract

Bagchi argues that our conceptualization of the transnational in educational history is enriched by examining the multicentric histories and educational trajectories of Toru Dutt. She analyzes the transnational educational history of Dutt’s life as writer-in-the-making. A teenage prodigy who produced an astonishingly varied and rich corpus in a life that spanned India and Europe, before dying at the age of twenty-one, Dutt created a transnational literary and cultural space for her own work. Bagchi demonstrates that, using a feminist lens, we can recognize the character and enriching quality of such transnational female friendships and networks. While Dutt can be situated in the concepts of imperial as well as critical and vernacular cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitanisms need to be seen as important in our conceptualization of the transnational.