Abstract
The aim of this article is to make a critical reading of the novella The Home and the World (1915), by Rabindranath Tagore, focusing on the emancipation of Bengal and the new role of women at the beginning of the twentieth century during the Swadeshi movement: the boycott to English goods to back up Indian industry after the arbitrary division of Bengal by Lord Curzon (1905). This discussion is based on Tagore’s book on Nationalism (1917) as well as Walter Benjamin’s considerations on allegory (1928).
Highlights
Rabindranath Tagore’s novella The Home and the World (1915) belongs to the trilogy formed by The Wreck (1906) and Gora (1909)
The aim of this article is to make a critical reading of the novella The Home and the World (1915), by Rabindranath Tagore, focusing on the emancipation of Bengal and the new role of women at the beginning of the twentieth century during the Swadeshi movement: the boycott to English goods to back up Indian industry after the arbitrary division of Bengal by Lord Curzon (1905)
Bearing the marks of orality, through the counterpoising of the stories of its main three characters, Bimala, Nikhil and Sandip, the novella functions at three levels, as it problematizes the concept of nation and nationalism, reviews the role of women in Indian society, and devises a literary form akin to the conflict he was bent on portraying
Summary
Rabindranath Tagore’s novella The Home and the World (1915) belongs to the trilogy formed by The Wreck (1906) and Gora (1909) It was Tagore himself who introduced the short story in Bengal from France in the second half of the nineteenth century.[1] This form of fiction, like the novella, was highly functional in the sense that it allowed the author to represent Bengal in an elliptical but focused manner that gained in strength and concentration. It allegorizes the crises that abated over India and Bengal brought about by the Swadeshi movement, the policy of boycotting British goods, in order to back up Indian industry, after the arbitrary partition of Bengal by Lord Curzon in 1905.2 It deals with the question of gender when it proposes the figure of the woman as the representative of the nation. In the case of The Home and the World, Tagore’s staunch views on Nationalism act as the ultimate referent for the Swadeshi movement, as will be discussed in this paper
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