In 1876 the London literary critic Edmund Gosse was given what he described as “a thin and sallow packet with a wonderful Indian postmark on it” by William Minto, the editor of the Examiner. It contained, he later recounted, “a most unattractive orange pamphlet of verse, printed at Bhowanipore, … [a] shabby little book of some two hundred pages, without preface or introduction, [which] seemed specially designed by its particular providence to find its way hastily into the waste-paper basket” (Ancient Ballads viii-ix).

The book, A Sheaf Gleaned in Foreign Fields (1876), was a collection of translations into English of French works; its authors were sisters Toru and Aru Dutt, members of a Bengali family already active in the local literary community, though set apart to a certain extent by their conversion to Christianity in 1862. Toru and Aru's mother Kshetramoni published Bengali translations of Christian tracts (tract writing was something she had in common with Gosse's formidable mother Emily). And The Dutt Family Album, a collection of poems by their father Govin Chunder Dutt and his brothers, had been published in London in 1870 with a preface which describes the authors as “foreigners, natives of India, of different ages, and in different walks of life, yet one family, in whom the ties of blood relationship have been drawn closer by the holy bond of Christian brotherhood” (Preface).