Home and the World: A Look at the Gendering of Indian Nationalist Politics Through a Literary Lens

Abstract

Works of literature are not often given much credence in terms of their value or use in the writing and interpreting of history. However, it is important to realize the potential for novels to illuminate and give new meaning to particular historical issues and events. Rabindranath Tagore, renowned Indian author, Nobel Prize winner, and independence activist, in his novel, The Home and the World provides us with a good case and point. This influential work of fiction, published in 1916, offers an intriguing look at the way that the nationalist identity of India became highly gendered and sexualized as various nationalist groups attempted to confront the building conflict between tradition and modernity. My presentation will discuss the idea of the woman as the mother goddess of the nation, as well as the role of masculine insecurity in the unfolding of nationalist political action, through Tagore’s fictional depiction of the Swadeshi movement in early twentieth century India. Along with this artistic depiction, I will discuss a number of important historians of Indian nationalism to expose the numerous contradictions within these nationalist programs and how those contradictions manifest themselves in increasingly gendered trends such as a greater push for masculine aggression and a redefinition of the ‘ideal woman’. What The Home and the World exposes is that, despite the efforts of nationalists to keep the inner domain of the home unaffected by modernity, their tactic of placing women at the symbolic head of the nationalist movement had broken down the traditional boundaries of the home.