The Home and the World

Rabindranath Tagore is one of the most significant figures in Bengali literature and was known not just as a poet and novelist but also as a composer, a painter, a social reformer, and a linguist. Born as the youngest of 13 surviving children, he came from a wealthy Bengali Brahmin family (a high caste of Hindus) that played a large role in what would eventually become known as the Bengal Renaissance. Tagore began publishing his first serious poems at 16 and is perhaps best remembered worldwide as a poet. He received the Nobel Prize in 1913 for his poetry collection Gitanjali (“song offering”), which he published in Bengali in 1910, then in his own English translation in 1912. His novels Gora and The Home and the World are also some of his best-known works, both published in the 1910s and exploring issues of Indian and Bengali identity during the period of British rule. In the following years, Tagore traveled widely and was known as a public intellectual, all while writing prolifically. He was chronically ill for the last few years of his life but continued to write, dying in 1941.

The Home and the World is inspired directly by the Partition of Bengal in 1905. Bengal is a historical region where both Muslims and Hindus have lived at different times. Starting in the mid-1800s, much of India was colonized and controlled by the British Empire. The Partition of 1905 split the region of Bengal into two separate regions, with primarily Hindu areas in the west and with primarily Muslim areas in the east. Many in Bengal felt that the partition was a deliberate move to divide and conquer people of the region, and so the partition ended up having the opposite effect of uniting the region’s residents against British rule. The British government reunited Bengal in 1911 to appease protestors, but by then discontent had spread, helping galvanize the larger Indian independence movement. Tagore wrote this novel 30 years before India eventually achieved independence, although the questions he raises in the novel about nationalism (Tagore was a critic of it) were an important debate within the independence movement, and nationalism remains an ongoing debate in Indian politics today. One European critic claimed that the character of Sandip was inspired by Gandhi. This is very unlikely, since Gandhi had little public profile until 1919, after the novel was published. Still, it is true that Tagore disagreed with Gandhi on several policy issues, even though they agreed broadly on the issue of Indian independence. Unlike Nikhil and Sandip, however, Tagore and Gandhi’s relationship was mostly cordial, and they corresponded regularly in letters.

Although Rabindranath Tagore is arguably the best-known Bengali author of his era, the Bengali language has a long literary history, and other writers in the language have achieved fame across the Indian subcontinent and the world. The very oldest Bengali literature is the Charyapada, a collection of religious poems, and in many ways, Tagore’s own work is an extension of Bengal’s ancient and medieval poetry traditions. More recently, one of Tagore’s best-known contemporaries was Kazi Nazrul Islam (author of Bidrohi), who was born a little later and looked to Tagore’s works for inspiration. Nazrul Islam did not have the same formal training as Tagore, but his more rebellious style had its own admirers, and he has gone on to be remembered as the national poet of Bangladesh. Another well-known contemporary of Tagore was Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, a novelist and short story writer who remains one of the most popular and widely translated Indian authors of all time. His novel Devdas has been adapted into film at least 20 times, most notably by Pramathesh Barua in 1935, by Bimal Roy in 1955, and by Sanjay Leela Bhansali in 2002, showing the wide influence of Bengali literature on Indian culture as a whole through the decades. Finally, the phrase “Bande Mataram” that appears in The Home and the World originally comes from a song in the novel Anandmath by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee.