Rabindra Nath Tagore’s Novel ‘Home and the World’: A Powerful Political Novel

 Name – Hinaba Sarvaiya

Roll No.: 09

Enrollment No.: 4069206420210032

Paper no: 201

Paper code: 22406

Paper name: Indian English Literature (Pre- Independence)

Sem.: 3 (Batch 2021- 2023)

Submitted to: Smt S.B. Gardi Department of English, M.K. Bhavnagar University

INTRODUCTION

The Home and the World (in the original Bengali, Ghare Baire) was one of the last (1984) in a long line of extraordinary films by the Bengali director Satyajit Ray, who died in April 1992. The film recapitulates many of the central themes in Ray's cinematic worldview as well as in that of the work of Rabindranath Tagore, Ray's frequent source of stories and inspiration. The Home and the World contains many echoes from Ray's earlier Charulata; both films are based on stories by Tagore. The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore. In this novel, Tagore brings about the nationalist topic related to the swadeshi movement which was popular in that era. Rabindranath Tagore, like Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, rejected Gandhi’s vision on modernity. Gandhi saw modernity as a threat for the nation and culture, yet Tagore saw it as a provider of the ideological basis for the critique of foreign domination.

Rabindra Nath Tagore’s Novel ‘Home and the World’: A Powerful Political Novel :-

The novel The Home and the World focuses on the narrative of three different characters: Nikhil, a wealthy landlord, Bimala, Nikhil’s wife, and Sandip, a radical nationalist leader. At the beginning of the novel, the story is told from Bimala’s point of view. In the novel, we can see that the narration is given alternately by those three main characters. This novel tells about how Bimala and Nikhil have so many different views of gender, relationship between husband and wife, education, freedom, and national identities. The conflict between this couple emerges after the arrival of Sandip. Bimala is impressed by his charisma and supports his view on nationalism and the swadeshi movement. This novel ends tragically, in which Nikhil is shot in the head.

Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World (1915) is usually read in terms of an allegory, either on the historical event of partition of Bengal in 1905 or on the nationalist worship of Mother India around the turn of the twentieth century. Such allegorical readings are possible for obvious reasons: the novel is set at the time of the Swadeshi movement, which emerged as the radically nationalist response to the Act of Partition, engineered by the British colonial administration, at a time when “Vande Mataram” (a song composed by Tagore senior contemporary in Bengali literature, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay) had become a much used rallying cry among the nationalists. The Home and the World challenges the notion of India as an exclusive Hindu nation. It questions the validity of a nationalism that focuses on emotion rather than on economic self-sufficiency and social justice. It takes exception to the aggressive masculinity of the nationalist project. 

As an intense literary text, The Home and the World could be read in yet other ways, in terms of other allegories. This paper offers an alternative reading, inspired by comparing the novel with early twentieth century Vietnamese novels. The Home and the World is a novel that reads like an allegory on the failure of the Indian nationalist projects, circling around the issues of “Home” versus “World,” tradition versus modernity, created by the active involvement of the colonisers in the cultural, economic and administrative life of the colonised. It could be read as an allegory on the failure of Indian nationalism to accept tradition and modernity, home and the world, together. In addition, the novel offers an alternative nationalist project that could free India from its obsession with the colonising powers: true freedom of the nationalist imagination will be gained by going beyond every form of ideological prejudice and separation and by synthesising every conceivable value that could be useful for the development and maintenance of the nation. And as a concrete implementation of his alternative nationalist project, Tagore founded Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan in 1921. 

The Home and the World was published ten years after the vexing partition of Bengal and the beginning of the magic incantation of “Bande Mataram,” first in Bengali (1915), and then in English (1919). The Swadeshi movement, which emerged in the wake of the Partition, did not only mobilise Bengal but also spread throughout India as the “beginning of a truly national movement and a struggle between the men and methods that were to lead it” (Rege 39). “Bande Mataram” became the “war cry” of the opposition against the Partition; just like the Swadeshi movement, it spread “over the entire subcontinent” (Iyengar 366). Conflicts within the Indian Congress about the role and function of Swadeshi led to divisions within the movement: the extremists adopted the Swadeshi , claiming the superiority of the Indian economy, politics and arts while the moderates wanted to dedicate themselves to social reform. After a decade of challenging and fighting each other, the conflicting nationalist projects seemed to be neutralised when the so-called 1917 Declaration made India a more directly ruled colony in terms of administration and economy. However, once Mahatma Gandhi gained control over the Indian National Congress in the early 1920s, the movement of non-cooperation gained strong footholds all over India again; the ideas of Swadeshi were revived; the economic system was reorganised; and government schools and colleges were boycotted. By January 1921 when virtually all the colleges in Calcutta, the administrative and intellectual centre of Bengal, were closed, Tagore, unhappy with Gandhi’s “narrowness of aims,” complained in a letter to Charles Freer Andrews, a professor at Santiniketan, that the non-cooperation movement was opposed to his own notions of the nation which, in his opinion, should be based on cooperation: 

What irony of fate is this, which I should be preaching cooperation of cultures between East and West on this side of the sea just at the moment when the doctrine of Non-Cooperation is preached on the other side? 

Tagore argued that the radicalism of nationalist self-reliance, based on the principle of boycott, the central idea of the Swadeshi movement, “uprooted students” and “tempted them away from their career before any real provision was made”; his The Home and the World should be read as an alternative to the spirit of non-cooperation which was “electrical,” “the spirit of sacrifice [that] was in the very air we breathed”.

The Home and the World has not received especially kind treatment from the critics; perhaps most damning is George Lukacs's characterization of the novel as "a petit bourgeois yarn of the shoddiest kind." It is true the novel has its shortcomings: it gets dangerously close at times to political allegory, and its characters, especially the radical leader Sandip, are exaggerated and one-dimensional. At the same time, the novel has a staunch defender in Anita Desai, who, while admitting that it is too often weighed down with ponderous rhetoric, praises its "flashes of light and colour" and its "touches of tenderness and childishness."

Despite the literary shortcomings of 77K Home and the World, it is an important work for understanding Tagore's views on the dangers of political extremism. The novel focuses on the swadeshi movement in Bengal, which demanded an exclusive reliance on Indian-made goods, and a rejection of all foreign-made products. Tagore's representation of swadeshi typifies his attitude towards any sort of organized political activity as something over which one has little, if any, control. Swadeshi is described in The Home and the World as "a flood, breaking down the dykes and sweeping all our prudence and fear before it." 

The novel focuses on three characters, each of whom speaks in the first-person in recounting how they interact with one another. Nikhil is Bimala's husband; Sandip is Bimala's would-be lover. Nikhil epitomizes the unselfish, progressive husband who wishes to free his wife from the oppressiveness of a traditional Indian marriage. In contrast, Sandip is a man who thinks only of himself, and who reduces man-woman relationships to brazen sexuality; he is interested in "blunt things, bluntly put, without any finicking niceness" (85). Bimala is represented as an innocent who, at least initially, is completely subservient to her husband. But Bimala is also much more than this. She is referred to as Durga, the female goddess of creation and destruction, and as Shakli, the ultimate female principle underpinning reality. In being so described, she represents the beauty, vitality, and glory of Bengal.

The Home and the World is pivotal in Tagore's rejection of mass action as a force destructive to freedom and individuality. As well, the novel clearly anticipates his eventual rejection of nationalism as a frightening expression of this mass action. Finally, the book is important in laying the groundwork for Tagore's call for a new international order, which allows for the mutual interaction of all people. The message of The Home and the World is clear: to deny distinctiveness and individuality is to deny diversity, and to ignore the fundamental nature of the world. Political boundaries presume to limit and define a world that is fundamentally limitless and beyond definition. Political boundaries confirm exclusivity, and they hinder sharing and oneness in the face of difference.

Tagore is firmly rooted in the Indian philosophical tradition; he is concerned with darsana, with "seeing" truth. He views the human desire to define the world as a dogmatic assertion of ignorance. Virtually everything we do is an expression of this dogmatism, a manifestation of the ego-centeredness that drives it. So it is that in The Home and the World, Tagore issues a call to return to sanity. He recognizes that the pride that comes with nationhood can only lead to arrogance and to the repression of others. His message was true for his time, and it is still true today.

THE HOME AND THE WORLD: MAKING OF THE INDIAN POLITICAL NOVEL

With the rise of political consciousness in India, political ideas were put forth in the novels. So far, these were termed as social or historical novels. Indulekha, a significant Malayalam novel by Chandu Menon, is a typical example in this regard. Menon concluded his novel with a chapter containing conversation on the political situation of India after the first session of the Indian National Congress. In the preface to the novel, Chandu Menon admitted that inclusion of the last chapter was redundant but unavoidable. It happened so because of the political consciousness that was gradually gaining ground in public mind.  

Since the birth of Indian novels in the second half of the nineteenth century, national consciousness was reflected in the novels. Three distinctive ways of depicting national heroes or fleeting national awareness are discernible in the nineteenth century novels namely, historical novels, depicting national heroes, semi-historical novels depicting socio-political upheaval and satirical novels giving humorous portraits of pseudo-patriots. Rajsingha by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay exemplifies the first category. More examples of the type are Harinarayan Apte’s Marathi novel Rupe Nagarci Rajkanya and Ushakal, Chandi Charan Sen’s Jhansir Rani, Rajanikanta Bardoloi’s Assamese novel Manomati etc. As regards semi-historical novels depicting political upheaval in regional setting, there is a host of examples such as Anand Math by Bankim Chandra, Padum Kuani by Lakshminath Bezbarua, or V. Pattawardhan’s Hambir Rao ani putlibai (Marathi) etc. In the third category, we find a few satirical novels such as Model Bhagini by Jogendranath Basu or Khudiram by Indranath Banerjee and so on.  

If we minutely examine these three basic types of novels, we find three diverse motivations. In the first place, the writers of historical novel presented some role models of national heroes. In this way of presentation, role models are what may be called trickster heroes. All such heroes with their tricky as well as powerful means of defying their political opponents are portrayed as undaunted and invincible personalities. The portraits of Raj Singh, Jhansi Rani and Shivaji in various historical novels in Bengali, Marathi and other Indian languages are typical examples.  

Tagore took up a historical character, Raja Pratapaditya of Jassore (now in Bangladesh) as the central character of his novel Bou Thakuranir Hat. It was his avowed intention not to depict Pratapaditya as a national hero and hence there is no trace of a trickster hero in this novel Moreover, there is a note of sarcasm added to it. Pratap, as Tagore depicted him, was a loveless man blinded by his own might and folly. Pratap was a self-centred political character. This type of character is recast in The Home and the World’s as Sandip. Here the central character changes according to the need of the day, and one glimpses a political novel in the making.  

The Home and the World is a major political novel of considerable importance. It is not an exciting political novel like, for example, Sarat Chandra’s Pather Dabi. Sandip, the activist hero of this novel, cannot be compared with Sabyasachi, an extra-ordinary revolutionary hero of Pather Dabi. Sandip is unable to restrain his lust for money and woman. Of course he is gifted with flamboyance and casts a magic spell on his audience and thus wins the heart of Bimala, the heroine Nikhilesh, the husband of Bimala, accepts the challenge hurled upon him by his dear friend Sandip, and readily agrees to give Bimala the freedom to develop in her own way. Sandip wanted her to rebel against not only the foreign rule but also the domestic bond. Bimala stands confused between the two friends and for a time she seems to be on the verge of an emotional surrender to Sandip. Eventually, however, she gets disillusioned with Sandip. Her sense of value prevails and self-realization breaks the magic spell that Sandip cast over her. When Bimala returns to her patient and waiting husband, the spell has been over. Sandip stands exposed. He is no more a Swadeshi hero, but merely a villain with all his unbridled hedonistic activities, under the garb of patriotic postures.  

Tagore himself tried to offer an answer to these questions in a subtle manner. Tagore did not apply in The Home and the World the methods of creating a role model as available in Indian historical novels of the nineteenth century, though he had applied this in Bou Thakuranir Hat. Pratapaditya and Sandip are equally blinded by the selfish hedonistic impulse. Yet there is a mark of difference. Pratapaditya is apolitical, but Sandip is a deeply political man, an organizer and activist, who is quite involved in contemporary politics. Hence, the novel is very much related to the political atmosphere that prevailed in the country during the first decade of the twentieth century.

CONCLUSION

There are three distinctive views on nationalism presented in this novel through the key characters, Nikhil, Bimala and Sandip. Nikhil represents the moderate view on nationalism. He represents the ideology of Rabindranath Tagore. He carries the most perception of the nation in Tagore’s point of view. On the other hand, Sandip represents the extreme nationalist view. Between these two distinctive views, Bimalarepresents the dilemmatic view on nationalism. Tagore also depicts India in the form of a woman, Bimala. Bimala is portrayed as the physiological and psychological resemblance of the nation. This novel reveals several aspects of the conflict of ideologies including the conflict of gender and nationalism.

This novel represents Tagore’s perspective in seeing the effect of swadeshi to India. Furthermore, we can conclude that this novel reveals the ideological conflicts which are happening in the society as the result of modernization and British colonization. This revelation can be seen in the way Tagore contrasts the views of western ideology and eastern ideology through the characters Nikhil, Sandip and Bimala. It signifies that ideological conflicts could happen everywhere, even in the inside of a house.

Words:- 2,661

Works Citation:-

Rani, Bindu. “A Research on Rabindranath Tagore’s Novel ‘Home and the World’: A Powerful Political Novel .” Rabindranath Tagore’s Novel ‘Home and the World’: A Powerful Political Novel . 

Tagore , Surendranath, translator. The Home and The World. Macmillan &Co. Limited , 1921.