Rabindranath Tagore was the first Bengali writer to elevate the short story to a serious art-form. Tagore easily intermingled stark realism and poetic idealism in his stories which reflected the contemporary life in rural and urban Bengal. Many of the stories portray conflicts or tensions between the new and the old, cruelty and sensitivity, solitude and crowd, male and female. Many of his best stories were written during a period… Continue reading

The novel Shesher Kobita recounts the love story of Amit Ray (pronounced “amito rAy”), a barrister educated at Oxford, whose virulent intellectualism reveals itself in its opposition to all forms of tradition. He meets Labannya in a car accident and the romance builds up in the misty hills of Shillong. Though the novel is primarily set in Shillong, it was written when Rabindranath was in Bangalore. Amito’s iconoclastism meets Labannya’s… Continue reading

Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) is a 1916 novel by Rabindranath Tagore. The book illustrates the battle Tagore had with himself, between the ideas of Western culture and revolution against the Western culture. Set against the backdrop of the partition of Bengal by the British in 1905, Ghare Baire is the story of a young liberal-minded Zamindar Nikhilesh, his educated and sensitive wife Bimala, and Nikhilesh’s friend Sandip… Continue reading

Gora is the largest and one of the most complex novel written by Rabindranath Tagore. This epic type novel undoubtedly gives a classic impression. Gora is a story set in the disruptive times when the Bengali society in Kolkata was starkly divided into the traditional orthodox Hindus and the modernized, liberal thinking Brahmos instructed by the Brahma Samaj. The Hindus followed their renascent practices and ceremonials while the Brahmos were… Continue reading

Rabindranath Tagore was awarded his Nobel prize for Literature not just because of his quality of writing but because of his immense capability to think about situations that mere mortals like us cannot. He then makes us feel even closer to being just “mere” by weaving a story that is a myriad of complicated emotions way beyond our comprehension. And what probably makes us feel so regular is that we… Continue reading | 1 Comment