Life and Letters of Toru Dutt

About This Work

A beautifully written biography that brings to life the extraordinary story of Toru Dutt, who achieved literary greatness in multiple languages before her untimely death at twenty-one. This work includes her personal letters, scholarly analysis, and a touching foreword by H.A.L. Fisher that celebrates her remarkable contributions to English and French literature.

Original Source

I've made this book readable using AI (Claude Haiku 4.5 and Gemini Flash 2.5) to extract text from scanned PDFs. In my experience, accuracy is typically around 85–95%. Since I run Akshara entirely on my own, I can't promise perfection, but I do run multiple passes to catch as many errors as possible.

A few things to keep in mind:

I maintain this project solo, so full manual verification just isn't feasible.
Someday I hope to make Akshara crowdsourced, so readers can help improve things.
Each book goes through 2–3 processing passes. I have no backers or sponsors, so I pay for all the API costs myself.

Known issues:

Text: missing chunks, repeated paragraphs, footnotes in wrong places, occasional AI hallucinations
Formatting: tables may be missing or poorly formatted, poetry may lose its structure
Languages: Sanskrit, Hindi, or other Indian language text may be missing or corrupted
Sections: indices, appendices, or end matter may be incomplete

If something feels off, please check the original PDF on Archive.org.

This book is also on Google Docs. If you spot errors, leave a comment there and I'll fix it.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for visiting Akshara.

Life and Letters of Toru Dutt

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Original Source