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Elective English—IV

Notes
of his own. When the son is grown, the servant brings him to the wealthy couple claiming
that he had in fact kidnapped their infant son years ago and is now returning him. Tagore’s
short stories often focus on the struggles of women and girls in traditional Indian society.
Many of these tales are concerned with marital relationships and the various forms of
estrangement and conflict between husband and wife. “A Wife’s Letter” is narrated by a
woman writing to her husband describing the many injustices imposed upon married
women. In the tale “Vision” a woman goes blind after which her husband begins to
neglect her and falls in love with a young girl. “Number One” depicts a woman who
commits suicide in order to escape the conflict she feels between her sense of duty to her
husband and her love for another man. In “Punishment,” a man kills his wife in a fit of
rage; his brother, wishing to save him from punishment, convinces his own wife to testify
that she is the murderer. Several short stories by Tagore involve elements of the supernatural
and contain qualities of the eerie or weird tale, thus inviting comparison to the fantastic
tales of Edgar Allan Poe. “The Hungry Stones” is about a man staying in an old palace who
becomes enchanted by invisible ghosts; in “Living or Dead,” a woman, thought to be
dead, regains consciousness during her funeral only to be regarded by her family as a
phantasm, and to prove that she is truly alive, she drowns herself; and “The Skeleton”
portrays a man who engages in dialogue with the ghost of a skeleton used in classroom
demonstrations.

Critical Reception

“The modern short story is Rabindranath Tagore’s gift to Indian culture,” observed Vishwanath
S. Naravane in 1977. Of Tagore’s two hundred short stories, Naravane asserted, “about twenty
are pearls of the purist variety.” Many of Tagore’s short stories became available in English after
he had gained international acclaim as the Nobel Prize-winning poet of Gitanjali. Early reviewers
in English received Tagore’s stories with mixed appraisal; while some applauded his short
fiction, others found them of negligible quality. Later critics have commented that these early
reviewers were ignorant of the context of Indian culture in which the stories are set.
Commentators have praised Tagore for his blending of poetic lyricism with social realism, as
well as the way in which his unearthly tales maintain psychological realism within an atmosphere
of supernatural occurrences. Scholars frequently praise Tagore’s short stories for the deeply
human quality of the characters and relationships. Mohinder Kaur commented of Tagore, “

10.1.4 Latter Life of Rabindranath Tagore: 1932–1941

Tagore’s life as a “peripatetic litterateur” affirmed his opinion that human divisions were shallow.
During a May 1932 visit to a Bedouin encampment in the Iraqi desert, the tribal chief told him
that “Our prophet has said that a true Muslim is he by whose words and deeds not the least of his
brother-men may ever come to any harm ...” Tagore confided in his diary: “I was startled into
recognizing in his words the voice of essential humanity.” To the end Tagore scrutinised
orthodoxy—and in 1934, he struck. That year, an earthquake hit Bihar and killed thousands.
Gandhi hailed it as seismic karma, as divine retribution avenging the oppression of Dalits.
Tagore rebuked him for his seemingly ignominious inferences. He mourned the perennial
poverty of Calcutta and the socioeconomic decline of Bengal. He detailed these newly plebeian
aesthetics in an unrhymed hundred-line poem whose technique of searing double-vision
foreshadowed Satyajit Ray’s film Apur Sansar. Fifteen new volumes appeared, among them
prose-poem works Punashcha (1932), Shes Saptak (1935), and Patraput (1936). Experimentation
continued in his prose-songs and dance-dramas: Chitra (1914), Shyama (1939), and Chandalika
(1938); and in his novels: Dui Bon (1933), Malancha (1934), and Char Adhyay (1934).

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