One of Rabindranath Tagore’s most controversial novels, Ghare Baire (1916), (The Home and the World) continues to be read, taught and discussed with passion because the issues it unravels are pertinent to the literary and social concerns of our times. The tale revolves around Nikhilesh, a benevolent zamindar, Bimala, his wife, and Nikhilesh’s friend Sandip. While Bimala falls in love with the dynamic and ruthlessly fanatical Sandip and identifies in him the nationalist cause in flesh and blood, he configures her as a comprehensive icon of the nation as mother. The interactions among the three lead to an explosive situation. The Novel fictionalizes the tragic predicament of a woman who is exposed to a remarkable freedom in her personal and political choices. It also experiments with a narrative mode that concurrently deploys three autonomous autobiographical voices. Finally, the novel dramatizes a volatile debate between a recklessly militant nationalism and a more considered stance in the wake of the partitioning of Bengal in 1905. It thus not only lends itself to scholarship on gender and genre, but simultaneously offers its discursive representation of the nation as a subject for inter-disciplinary study.
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