Rabindranath Tagore, Ghare Baire [The Home and the World]

Set against the backdrop of the swadeshi (home rule) movement in Bengal, following its sudden and arbitrary partition by the then British viceroy in India, Lord Curzon, in 1905, The Home and the World was originally published in Bengali (as Ghare Baire) in 1915. Later, it was translated and published in English by the author’s nephew, Surendranath Tagore (with active cooperation from the author himself), in 1919. The Bengali original was published two years after the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and the same year in which he received a knighthood from King George V of England – an accolade he came to renounce in 1919 in protest against the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre in Punjab, by the notorious General Dyer. It is perhaps the best known of Tagore’s novels outside Bengal, and received a lot of attention in Europe, particularly following the publication of its English translation, mainly due to the wide readership Tagore had gained in the wake of his Nobel award. The controversial nature of the subject matter, in which Tagore takes the opportunity to launch his fiercest attack yet against the ideology of nationalism, contrary to its rising popularity both in India and the West, was also a reason it drew much attention, mostly in the form of reprobation and scorn, from readers both in and outside Bengal. A third reason for the novel’s reputation is the successful movie made of it, in 1984, by another gifted scion of Bengal, and a student of Tagore’s university, Visva-Bharati, Satyajit Ray.