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Tag: 1910s

  • Gitanjali

    Gitanjali began as a Bengali collection of devotional songs published in 1910. Two years later Tagore produced an English selection, Song Offerings, drawing on that book and several others, and recasting the songs as short prose poems. Read aloud in London literary circles, the English version drew admiration from W. B. Yeats, who wrote its introduction, and it led directly to the 1913 Nobel Prize.

    The poems are addressed to a divine presence that is never named in doctrinal terms. That presence is met in ordinary things: a boat on the river, a lamp at dusk, a traveller on a dusty road, the labourer breaking stones. The speaker longs, waits, offers himself, feels unworthy and then finds the beloved already near. Death is approached without dread, as a guest or a homecoming.

    Much of the collection's appeal lies in its simplicity of image and its refusal of ritual or priestly mediation. Tagore draws on the Upanishads, Vaishnava devotional poetry and the Baul singers of Bengal, yet the result feels personal rather than scholarly. For many readers it remains the doorway into Indian spiritual poetry, and several of the original songs are still sung across Bengal today.

    Book details

    AuthorRabindranath Tagore
    First published1910
    Original languageBengali
    Translated byRabindranath Tagore
    GenrePoetry
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)100
    AwardsNobel Prize in Literature 1913 (awarded to the author)

    Themes

    • Devotion
    • Union with the divine
    • Nature
    • Death as homecoming
    • Humility

    Who should read it

    Anyone wanting a short, meditative introduction to Indian devotional poetry that can be read a page at a time.

  • The Home and the World

    Published in Bengali as Ghare Baire in 1916, this novel is set on a zamindar's estate in Bengal around the time of the 1905 partition and the boycott of British goods. Nikhilesh, the liberal and gentle landowner, encourages his wife Bimala to step out of purdah and meet the wider world. The world arrives in the form of Sandip, a charismatic nationalist orator who is Nikhil's old friend.

    Bimala is dazzled by Sandip's rhetoric and his claim that she embodies the motherland, while Nikhil refuses to force Swadeshi on poor Muslim traders who cannot afford costlier Indian cloth. The story is narrated in turns by the three of them, so the reader watches each misread the others. Sandip's private self-justifications reveal a man who treats people and ideals as instruments for his own appetite.

    Tagore wrote the book partly as a reckoning with the movement he had once supported, and it was attacked at the time for seeming to belittle nationalism. Read now, it is a sharp study of how political passion can curdle into coercion, and of a woman discovering desire and agency in a society that granted her little of either. Satyajit Ray filmed it in 1984.

    Book details

    AuthorRabindranath Tagore
    First published1916
    Original languageBengali
    Translated bySurendranath Tagore
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)230
    SettingA zamindar's estate in Bengal during the Swadeshi movement, c. 1905-1908

    Themes

    • Nationalism and its excesses
    • Women's emancipation
    • Marriage
    • Moral courage
    • Communal tension

    Who should read it

    Readers interested in how Indian nationalism looked from the inside, and in novels that weigh ideals against their human cost.

  • Gora

    Gora is a tall, fair, fiercely argumentative young man in late nineteenth century Calcutta who has made himself the champion of orthodox Hinduism against both British contempt and the reformist Brahmo Samaj. His closest friend Binoy is gentler and more open, and when Binoy is drawn into the household of Paresh Babu, a wise Brahmo elder, the two friends start to drift apart.

    Paresh Babu's daughters and ward, especially the thoughtful Sucharita and the spirited Lalita, challenge Gora's rigid views in long conversations about caste, ritual, women's freedom and what it means to love a country. Gora's own mother, Anandamoyi, quietly ignores the purity rules her son preaches. A walking tour through rural Bengal shows Gora how caste and colonial power actually grind down poor villagers.

    Serialised between 1907 and 1909 and published as a book in 1910, the novel is a sprawling novel of ideas, dense with debate yet driven by its romances and by a secret that the reader senses long before Gora does. It is Tagore's fullest argument for an inclusive Indian identity that rises above sect, and it repays readers willing to follow its long arguments.

    Book details

    AuthorRabindranath Tagore
    First published1910
    Original languageBengali
    Translated bySujit Mukherjee
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)480
    SettingCalcutta and rural Bengal, 1880s

    Themes

    • Religious orthodoxy
    • Indian identity
    • Caste
    • Friendship
    • Brahmo Samaj reform

    Who should read it

    Readers who enjoy novels of ideas and want to understand the debates over religion and nationhood in colonial Bengal.

  • Devdas

    Devdas Mukherjee is the son of a wealthy zamindar in the Bengal village of Talshonapur, and Parvati, called Paro, is the daughter of a modest neighbouring family. They grow up inseparable, quarrelling and making up by the village pond. When Devdas is sent to Calcutta to study, Paro assumes that their bond will one day become marriage, but caste rank, money and family pride stand in the way.

    Devdas proves unable to defy his parents at the decisive moment, and his hesitation sets off a chain of regret. In Calcutta a worldly friend introduces him to drink and to Chandramukhi, a courtesan who comes to love him with a devotion he can hardly accept. The novel moves between the village and the city, between the two women and the man who cannot choose a life.

    Written in 1900 and published in 1917, the book is brief, plain in style and unsentimental about its hero's weakness, even though later film versions turned him into a tragic romantic icon. It is a critique of feudal family authority and social hierarchy as much as a love story, and its pull on Indian popular imagination has lasted more than a century.

    Book details

    AuthorSarat Chandra Chattopadhyay
    First published1917
    Original languageBengali
    Translated bySreejata Guha
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)140
    SettingTalshonapur village and Calcutta, Bengal, early twentieth century

    Themes

    • Unrequited love
    • Class and family pride
    • Self-destruction
    • Alcoholism
    • Social hierarchy

    Who should read it

    Anyone who knows the film versions and wants the spare, original story behind them.

  • The Metamorphosis

    Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman who supports his parents and younger sister with a job he hates, wakes one morning to discover that he has turned into an enormous insect-like creature. His first worries are not about his body but about missing his train and angering his employer, whose chief clerk soon arrives at the family flat to ask why he is late.

    The story then follows how the Samsa household reorganises itself around Gregor, who is confined to his room. His sister Grete at first brings him food and tries to understand what he likes, while his father reacts with violence. As money grows tight, the family takes in lodgers and returns to work, and Gregor listens from behind his door as their feelings toward him shift.

    Kafka tells the bizarre premise in a calm, matter-of-fact style that makes it more unsettling. Published in German in 1915, the novella has been read as a parable of alienation, of the dehumanising effect of work, of family duty and of illness and disability. It is one of the most influential short works of the twentieth century.

    Book details

    AuthorFranz Kafka
    First published1915
    Original languageGerman
    Translated byWilla and Edwin Muir
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)70
    SettingThe Samsa family flat in an unnamed city, early 20th century

    Themes

    • Alienation
    • Family duty
    • Identity
    • Work and dehumanisation
    • Absurdity

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a short, strange and haunting classic that rewards rereading and discussion.