Page:Sketches of some distinguished Indian women.djvu/104

92 tian, and was well known and respected in Calcutta, where he filled the position of a magistrate. In Calcutta Toru Dutt was born in 1856, and, with the exception of one year spent by the family in Bombay, it was in Calcutta that her early life was passed.

From her childhood she enjoyed educational advantages such as were very unusual in the case of Bengali girls; her father took great pains to instruct her himself, and she and her sister Aru, who was two years older than she was, both shared the English lessons given to her brother Abjie by Babu Shib Chunder Banerji, for whom she always entertained a grateful affection, and who seems to have been the first person to instil into her mind a love for the study of English literature, together with the thoroughness of application so remarkable in her subsequent studies. The stern, grand poetry of Milton is hardly what one would expect to find as the chosen study of young Indian girls, yet these two sisters knew large portions of "Paradise Lost" by heart, and apparently understood and appreciated it far more thoroughly than most English girls of the same age. In 1869 Babu Govind Dutt determined to take his two daughters to Europe and to give them the best education he could. His only boy had died a short time previously, and he felt that the hopes of his life now depended on his girls. They went first to Nice, where for a few months the sisters