When Toru Dutt returned to Calcutta in 1873 at the age of 17, she found it challenging to return to a culture that now seemed "an unhealthy place both morally and physically speaking" to her Europeanized and Christianized eyes.[5][11] Her sister Aru died of consumption in 1872, aged twenty.[5]
Three years after returning, she wrote to Mary Martin, "I have not been to one dinner party or any party at all since we left Europe,"[12] and "If any friend of my grandmother happens to see me, the first question is, if I am married."[13]
Both remarks express frustration with what she found to be a restrictive and conservative society.[5] However, she also recognized that Europe could not replace India as her true home.[5] She took consolation in reinvigorating her studies of Sanskrit with her father and hearing her mother's stories and songs about India.[5]
Like both her siblings, Toru Dutt died of consumption (tuberculosis), at the age of 21 on 30 August 1877.[5]
