GitanjaliandBeyondIssue4Typeset_Gitanjaliandbeyondissue3typeset30/01/202018:44Page11 Gitanjali and Beyond Issue 4, (2020): Critical Essays on Ghare Baire DOI: doi.org/10.14297/gnb.4 https://gitanjaliandbeyond.co.uk ISSN: 2399-8733 : Ghare Baire Gitanjali and Beyond Revisiting Tagore Critical Essays on Issue 4 GitanjaliandBeyondIssue4Typeset_Gitanjaliandbeyondissue3typeset30/01/202018:43Page2 Revisiting Tagore: Critical Essays on Ghare Baire A Journal of the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs) Edinburgh Napier University Edited by Md Rezaul Haque and Gillian Dooley GitanjaliandBeyondIssue4Typeset_Gitanjaliandbeyondissue3typeset30/01/202018:44Page3 Editorial Team Editor-in-Chief Prof Bashabi Fraser Emeritus Professor; Director, Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs), School of Arts and Creative Industries, Edinburgh Napier University, United Kingdom. Associate Editor Dr Kathryn Simpson Lecturer in Information Studies, University of Glasgow Associate Editor: Dr Saptarshi Mallick Assistant Professor for English Sukanta Mahavidyalaya, University of North Bengal Editorial Board Dr Christine Kupfer Tagore Scholar, United Kingdom. Prof Fakrul Alam Retired Professor of English, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Prof Elleke Boehmer Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford. , United Kingdom. Prof Imre Bangha Department of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. Professor Ian Brown Retired Professor of Drama and Dance, Kingston University, London, United Kingdom. Mr Colin Cavers Department of Photography, Edinburgh Napier University, United Kingdom. Mr Amal Chatterjee Writer, Tutor in Creative Writing, University of Oxford, based in the Netherlands. Dr Debjani Chatterjee MBE, Royal Literary Fund Fellow, De Montford University, United Kingdom. Prof Rosinka Chaudhuri Director, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, India. Prof Uma Das Gupta Historian and Tagore Biographer, India. iii GitanjaliandBeyondIssue4Typeset_Gitanjaliandbeyondissue3typeset30/01/202018:44Page4 Prof Sanjukta Dasgupta Dept of English Calcutta University India. Dr Gillian Dooley Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Flinders University Adelaide Australia. Dr Stefan Ecks School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. Prof Mary Ellis Gibson Arthur Jeremiah Roberts Professor of English, Colby College, USA. Professor (Dr) Tapati Gupta Retired Professor of English, University of Calcutta, India. Prof Kaiser Haq Retired Professor of English, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Dr Michael Heneise University of Tromso, Norway. Dr Martin Kämpchen Tagore Scholar, Biographer and Translator, Santiniketan, India. Mrs Usha Kishore Poet and Critic, Isle of Man, United Kingdom. Mr Debasish Lahiri Lal Baba College, University of Calcutta, India. Professor Ananda Lal Retired Professor of English, Jadavpur University, India. Prof Nigel Leask Regius Chair of English Language and Literature, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom. Professor Somdatta Mandal Department of English, Visva-Bharati University Santiniketan -731235, India. Prof Murdo Macdonald Retired Professor of History of Scottish Art, University of Dundee, United Kingdom. Dr Christine Marsh Tagore scholar, critic and environmental activit, United Kingdom iv GitanjaliandBeyondIssue4Typeset_Gitanjaliandbeyondissue3typeset30/01/202018:44Page5 Prof Martha Craven Nussbaum Ernst Freund Distinguished Service professor of Law and Ethics, University of Chicago, USA. Dr Nigel Planer Playwright and Actor, United Kingdom. Professor Stephen Regan Professor of Poetry, Durham University, United Kingdom. Dr M Relich Poet and Critic, United Kingdom. Prof Alan Spence Makar of Edinburgh, Retired Professor of Creative Writing, University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom. Chrys Salt MBE, Director, The Bakehouse, Gate of Fleet, Scotland, United Kingdom. Prof Carla Sassi Associate Professor of English Literature, University of Verona, Italy, Italy. Liz Adamson Artist and Curator, East Lothian, United Kingdom. Typesetting and Website Management Alex Dunedin, Ragged University v GitanjaliandBeyondIssue4Typeset_Gitanjaliandbeyondissue3typeset30/01/202018:44Page6 Special Issue Guest Edited by MdRezaulHaqueandGillianDooley vi Revisiting Tagore: Critical Essays on Ghare Baire Edited by Md Rezaul Haque and Gillian Dooley Contents Foreword: Revisiting 2 Professor Bashabi Fraser, Director, Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs), Edinburgh Napier University Introduction: Ghare Baire: Then and Now 5 Dr Md Rezaul Haque, English Department, St. John’s University, New York The Home and the World: A Critique of Violence 16 Debamitra Kar, Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, Women’s College, Calcutta, India Critiquing Nation as a Goddess: A Study of the Representation of 33 Nationalism in The Home and the World Dr Joyjit Ghosh, Professor, Dept of English, Vidyasagar University, India Sexual/Textual Insurgence: The Politics of the Body in Ghare Baire 46 Srinjoyee Dutta, PhD Scholar, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India The Woman Question: Politics of Gender and Space in Rabindranath 59 Tagore’s The Home and the World (Ghare Baire) Dr Paromita Mukherjee, Assistant Professor of English, Amity University Kolkota, India The Portrayal of Intersectional Masculinity in The Home and The World 73 (Ghare Baire) Dr Rifat Mahbub, Research Programme Manager, National Institute of Health Research, UK Cultural Hybridity and (Dis)location of Female Agency in Rabindranath 85 Tagore’s Ghare Baire or The Home and the World Umme Salma, PhD Student, School of Languages & Cultures, University of Queensland, Australia Feminist Appropriation of a Tagore Classic on the Screen: The Case of 102 Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) Dr Md Rezaul Haque, English Department, St. John’s University, New York The Home and the World in Mansfield Park and Ghare Baire 116 Dr Gillian Dooley, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Flinders University of South Australia Author biographies 131 2 Foreword: Revisiting Professor Bashabi Fraser Rabindranath Tagore’s fourth novel, Ghare Baire (1916, The Home and the World, 1919, published the same year as Chaturanga), has had its centenary in 2016 and still continues to remain relevant and of scholarly interest. It is his first political novel and with its scathing critique of narrow nationalism which Rabindranath saw as dangerously and easily sliding into what was to become fascism, it speaks to many people who believe in societies where social justice needs to be upheld today, faced as they are by the rising tide of right wing ideology in a world where minority communities feel vulnerable/threatened by populist divisive politics. In this novel Rabindranath, for the first time, experiments with three voices, written in the form of diaries, the intimacy of the first person narratives giving legitimacy to diverse opinions. Written in chalit bhasha, conversational Bengali, it has the accessibility of contemporary speech and embodies Rabindranath’s modernity in its style and language. Also, for the first time in his fiction, Rabindranath gives primacy to the female voice as Bimala is given 10 chapters against Nikhilesh’s 8 and Sandip’s 4 chapters. There have been chapters in several edited anthologies of essays on the novel and critical editions of The Home and the World, including Rama Kundu’s Critical Perspectives (2001) and Pradip Kumar Datta’s Critical Companion to The Home and the World (2005). This volume comes as a timely intervention incorporating postcolonial, feminist, postmodern and gender studies, reaffirming the novel as a classic which invites continuous interest and fresh reflections, beginning with a comprehensive Introduction by one of the editors, Rezaul Haque. The first partition of Bengal in 1905 by Lord Curzon, ostensibly for more efficient governance of a large Province, but in reality to curb the rising aspirations of the Hindu bhadralok for greater political representation and divide allegiances along communal (religious) lines, saw Rabindranath putting his strength behind the Swadeshi (meaning indigenous, homegrown) Movement. He wrote 23 patriotic songs in a frenzy of composition during this period and led processions (including a historic one on Friendship Day – Rakhi Bandhan Day- signified by tying the friendship band to indicate harmony between Hindus and Muslims), singing his songs. However, as the Introduction by Reza and the essays by Debamitra Kar and Rifat Mahbub discuss, the recourse to violence that marked the Swadeshi Movement as it espoused boycott and burning of foreign cloth, drove a wedge between Hindu landlords and revolutionaries and the poor Muslim vendors and peasants, unleashing communal tensions. The spectre of communal violence made Rabindranath withdraw from this nationalistic tide and engage his energies in what he believed were more effective nation building projects in his educational institution in Shantiniketan and his cooperative and rural reconstruction projects in his family estates. Rabindranath continued to believe in non-violence as the way forward for a sustainable future for a nation, and this is why he felt the need to make Nikhilesh his spokesperson in the novel, as he symbolises the counter-tide to Sandip’s brand of unconscionable instigation to violent action in a fiery brand of nationalism that is conflagrational in its outcome. However, far from vindicating Tagore’s model of constructive nation building, the novel was vilified by many critics as evidence of what they perceived as Rabindranath’s unpatriotic stand. What remains