She: A Collection of short stories of Rabindranath Tagore

In this collection of short stories we get a glimpse of some of the women in Rabindranath Tagore’s writing. Through these stories we also come to know the social conditions in which women were placed, almost always the victims, and more interestingly, responding differently yet with the same dignity, how each handled the pressures associated with it. The treatment of women and their position in society was of serious concern to Rabindranath Tagore. Being a sensitive man and the supreme romantic poet of Bengal, he understood women in all their joy and sorrow, hope and despair, their yearnings and their dreams. The violence, both psychological and physical, against women in Bengali society was all-pervasive, cutting across class, caste, rural and urban divide. Its functioning was sometimes blatant but often subtle, insidious and invisible. What was worse was that the society as a whole, even the women, seemed to have got used to this slow poisoning without realizing the effect it cumulatively had on it. There was very little protest and the poison gradually had settled in the ‘body-society’. Tagore saw in the women of his country an immense wealth-their courage against all odds, their power of survival under the worst possible conditions and oppression, their forbearance, their self-sacrifice and gentleness. It pained him to see such colossal waste of so much human treasure. Through his stories and novels he wanted to shape public opinion, personal beliefs and the society’s self-perception. He wished to bring out into the open, and consciously and critically look at the position of women in our society. He wanted these stories to be the mirror in which men would see themselves and would want to change, for it was necessary to bring about a change in the way men looked at themselves in order to change the lives of women.