Abstract
Tagore’s women are distinguished for their radical worldview and actions, successfully heralding the ‘new Indian women’ of modern India. The women’s question that proves crucial not only for the colonial justification of a foreign rule over people who apparently ‘brutally’ treat their women but also for the nationalist discourse regarding the sacredness of space that women in India inhabit, gets a new dimension through portrayal of extraordinary women in Tagore’s fictions. His fictional writings foreground images of outstanding women as harbingers of the ‘new era’. Tagore’s strong belief in the potential of woman as the driving principle for meaningful change in the fossilized immobility of a rigid patriarchal society is evident in most of his remarkable female characters such as Chandara, Binodini, Mrinal, Kalyani, Damini, Bimala, Anila, Nandini, Kumudini, and Ela. These characters, projected as the catalyst for social transformation in terms of the woman question, are fervent advocates of women’s rights and caustic critique of social injustices that dehumanize and objectify women in society. This article attempts to explore how such women characters organically contribute, like the blocks of a jigsaw puzzle, to complete Tagore’s imagination of the ‘modern Indian woman’ and critique the nationalist discourse on the women’s question in the nineteenth century Bengal.
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Notes
- 1.
Achalayatan, literally “immobile space”, is a term that Tagore often uses in his critique of the Indian education system to represent its conservative as well as restrictive nature. It is a system that fears (and therefore resists) any attempt at change or modification.
- 2.
Sabujpatra was a literary magazine published during the first decades of the twentieth century under the editorship of Pramatha Chaudhuri. It is considered as a landmark period in the poet’s career. Buddhadeva Bose, renowned Bengali poet, literary critic and Tagore specialist notes “Rabindranath found freedom in Sabujpatra; though there was no gap in the free flow, yet the course of the river took a radical turn here; we can find two different Rabindranaths before and after Sabujpatra. He left his earlier strand, broke the shackle of his old habit, he did not return to the strand that he left behind” (Bose 1959, p. 15, translation mine).
- 3.
Though the literal English translation of the last utterance of Chandara, i.e. ‘maran’ is ‘death,’ in the cultural context in which it is often used, it has several layers of meaning. The sense that Chandara might have wanted to convey is ‘to hell with you,’ i.e. a sense of absolute rejection of Chhidam’s repentance at her doom.
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Sen, S. (2016). Tagore’s Women Heralding The “New Indian Woman”: A Critique of the Women’s Question in the Nationalist Discourse. In: Bhaduri, S., Mukherjee, I. (eds) Transcultural Negotiations of Gender. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-2437-2_16
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