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
| Author | Rabindranath Tagore |
|---|---|
| First published | 1916 |
| Original language | Bengali |
| Translated by | Surendranath Tagore |
| Genre | Classic |
| Type | Fiction |
| Pages (approx.) | 230 |
| Setting | A 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.