Tagore’s exploration of Hindu identity in Gora

Abstract

Published between 1907 and 1910, Rabindranath Tagore’s novel Gora reflects its author’s evolving cultural, political, and ideological views in the first decade of the twentieth century. This period was significant not only for Tagore’s engagement in and disenchantment with the Swadeshi movement, but also in terms of his critical assessment of the viability of a Hindu cultural-national identity for India. Reading the novel in the light of some of his relevant writings in and around the 1900s, this essay puts Tagore’s exploration of Hindu identity into perspective in order to distinguish it from the exclusionary Hindutva ideologies later promoted and popularized in Indian politics. Using a dialogic method in the novel, Tagore pits a limited, divisive, and communalist Hindu ideology against an open, liberal, and alternative Hindu selfhood for India which is compatible with the universal-humanist perspective propounded at the end. Despite endorsing the latter perspective, Tagore nevertheless reveals his concerns and uncertainties about the position of minority communities and outsiders within that holistic paradigm of Indian identity.