The Ghost of the Murdered Man in Toru Dutt’s “The Ghost!”

Record summary

Toru Dutt’s English poem “The Ghost!” presents an encounter with a returning dead figure and is one of the identifiable nineteenth-century South Asian literary treatments of apparition experience. It matters for comparison because it shows how colonial-era Indian authors adapted the ghost encounter into English verse, blending domestic emotion, memory and supernatural convention. The poem is a literary composition, not evidence of a reported haunting. Questions of publication venue, dating and interpretation should be settled through bibliographic work on Dutt’s collected poems and early editions.