Assignment of paper No.1

Assignment of Paper No. 1

Department of English,M. K. Bhavnagar University     

Name :-  Chudasama Nanditaba kishorsinh

Roll No :- 13

Department :-M. A.English department

Submitted to :-  Dr. Prof. Dilip Barad

Semester :-  3

Paper No :-  1. Indian English Literature - Pre Independence

UNIT - 1  The Home and The World by Rabindranath Tagore

ASSIGNMENT TOPIC -  Nationalism In The Home and The World

Nationalism In The Home and the World

Nationalism In The Home and the World The hungry self of the Nation shall burst in a violence of fury from its shameless feeding. For it has made the world its food. And licking it, crunching it and swallowing it in big morsels, it swells and swells. Till in the midst of its unholy feast descends the sudden shaft of heaven piercing its heart of grossness. - Rabindranath Tagore , The Sunset Of The Century In Tagore’s novel, The Home And The World, there is a strong criticism of nationalism by taking the view point of the three main characters: Nikhil, Bimala and Sandip.  

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.

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 support 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 “Bande Mataram” (a song composed by Tagore’s 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 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 swadesM  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.

Thank you...