Through this essay I am exploring Tagores powerfully convincing

women characters, him being one of the earliest to describe them in such
exquisite social and psychological detail. Throughout human history, the
woman has been portrayed as a symbol of fertility, a Goddess representing
the Motherland, or even as a class of people whose best place is in the
kitchen and within the house. The woman was never viewed as an individual
but she is always represented in opposite extremes only. iIn the then
patriarchal Bengali society, Tagore did something unheard of before. He
reconstructed the traditional stereotypical feminine figure in his works. This
reveals the vast and humane philosophy that lies at the base of Tagores
writing. As Humayun Kabir has stated, Rabindranath remained fervently
committed to a universal humanism and the individuals freedom to choose
his own way of serving the cause of social and political emancipation. ii I will
also try to draw a comparison between the women characters in Bankims
novels and those in Tagores.
Rabindranath Tagore is considered the apostle of the Bengal
Renaissance. Born in 1861, he was a prodigious mind since childhood and by
the turn of the century had become a household name in Bengal as a poet, a
song writer, a playwright, an essayist, a short story writer and a novelist.
Tagore gives feminism a meaning of his own; he provides his leads to
find themselves in the face of society without hurting others. In Gora we see
Tagores philosophy that if the educational approach is right and imaginative
and if there be a spirit like Tagore to inspire and guide, there is no height that
the individual may not reach. Under Poreshbabus guidance, we see both
Sucharita and Lalita emerge through their struggles to become, in addition to
a domestic being, an independent intellectual being. Tagore introduces
Sucharita, a central female character as a symbol of nature, and as the novel
progresses, slowly but imperceptibly. He transforms this symbol into a form
and figure, and provides her with a very independent and individual mind.
The aggressive Gora is offset against the quieter and more humane
Sucharita, a symbol of female power, who herself can bring a man to his
knees and change the society with her innocent charm. Then there is the
free spirited Lalita, who is not shy of revolting against her own family and
society, for following her hearts desires and true calling. Goras idea of
womanhood is extremely stereotypical and is prevalent until this day. The
Mother is the highest pedestal offered to a woman under such scheme. The
Feminine Individual is not given the individual status. The Indian woman
could be at best be the home-maker or a force like Kali, ready to step out and
destroy all evils, but never as an ordinary woman in the then educated

Bengali society. Gora preaches the ideology of placing women at a Mothers

mantle, yet he forgets to pay his respects to a woman, Lachmiya who
mothered him along with Anandamoyi. As the narrator notes, The
statement of a concept no longer has the same certainty when applied to
a person. We see Tagores vision of Bharatvarsha in the noble hearted, allforgiving, liberal minded Hindu mother, Anandamoyi. She was much ahead of
her time and society in understanding the spirit of humanism in the Hindu
way of life, in which there had been a liberal streak, always trying to
assimilate other ways of living, thinking and relating. She conducted herself
as one who desired to enhance and enrich our growth as human beings,
without which religions, societies, customs, ideologies with all progressive
or reactionary ideas can become a terrible bondage.
Most of Tagores women protagonists exhibit the womans intellectual
dilemma. Literature is the key to liberation and the protagonist is consumed
by a longing for literacy and for books. Sucharita, in Gora, resorted to
reading whenever she felt restless or disturbed. In A Wifes Letter Mrinalini
finds in the writing of poetry a refuge from her in-laws petty persecution and
their jealousy of her superior education. The accuracy of Tagores
descriptions of these heroines and their struggles is the fruit of long years of
observing the consequences of Indias failure to make use of her womens
talents.
Another noteworthy observation is that it is always a man, or a social
situation that ratifies male domination of home and community, which is
seen precipitating or perpetuating intolerable situations. The man is always a
destroyer (esp. in Chokher Bali, Mahendra creates a lot of trouble in his
household all because of his spoiled and self centered nature), but seldom
destroys out of malevolence or sheer wickedness; he does so as the result of
a mode of behavior that is expected, or that he thinks, by the men (and
sometimes by the women as well) around him. Sometimes out of sheer
pompous stupidity, vanity, triviality men destroy the hopes for a new life of
their women. The husband of Mrinalini, the wife of A Wifes Letter,
diminishes her respect for him by sheer callousness with which he takes her
for granted and by his obliviousness to both the cruelties of his relatives and
to what poetry means to her. The weakness and obtuseness of Tagores male
characters, in contrast to such women, has been frequently commented
upon; what makes the men in these stories so hard to forgive, whether they
act from admirable or despicable motives, is their mindlessness. They
behave like automations, plugged into a social system that they do not
question until, having ignored the first faint signals of something short

circuited in their relations with the women in their lives, they receive a really
severe jolt, the reason for which they seldom understand and frequently do
not try to analyze. Tagore does not go out of his way to castigate these men.
His dismissal of them, his leaving them, so to speak, where they fall is more
eloquent than any authorial tirade. However, everything comes to a
concluding, socially right end.
On the other hand we have Bankim Chandra who used the other
extreme philosophy for women. Bankim Chandra Chatterji was the greatest
figure of the second phase of the Bengal Renaissance. This was just after the
first wave of the new movement had spent itself and when Bengal did not
merely look beyond the seas to the Western science and Philosophy, but also
look back to her own past heritage. He portrayed the country as his Mother
and some of his characters defied the stereotype for femininity prevailing in
those days. Devi Chaudhurani, provides a key insight into Chatterjis vision of
Indian womanhood, a vision that plays with the ideals of egalitarianism and
Hinduism.iii
In Anandamath, the Mother conceived by him engendered the nation
and she was made the poetic symbol of Bande Materam. Perhaps the most
evocative scene in the novel takes place when Mahendra is taken to the
hideout temple in the forest. Within this structure, Mahendra is shown
several different iconic images of India. Mahendra is puzzled at the
marvelous form of a female figure lying on Vishnus lap. He goes on to
another room where he sees a richly ornamented image of jagaddhtr, or
protectress of the world, also identified as mother of the Indian nation, as
she was in the past. Following this vision, Mahendra is taken to a room
housing the goddess of destruction, Kali, naked and garlanded with skulls,
mother of the nation as she is then portrayed to be. The mother has
assumed this malefic form given the ravaged nature of the country, which
currently resembles a burial ground. After this frightening vision of the
present, Mahendra visits a beautiful ten-armed golden goddess (Durga),
placed in the middle of a marble temple. This is what the mother will become
when the country is restored to its original grandeur. With Shantis character,
Bankim defies the then prevalent stereotype of wifehood and domesticity.
Circumstances in Shantis life cause her to be educated in Sanskrit, roam the
forests in the garb of a sannyasi and later train in marshal arts, she is selfsufficient, independent and capable of defending herself. The ease with
which Shanti unhorses the English Lindley and rides away on his horse could
put any modern feminist to shame. Shanti decides to perform her wife's role
by the side of her ascetic husband Jibananda by donning the male Sannyasi's

disguise and fighting by his side. Shanti is left free to contribute her full
strength to the heroic life of her sannyasi husband.
To sum up the main argument, it must be noted that Tagore had a
unique understanding of feminism, and was decades ahead of his time, as he
was in his views on education, politics, and agricultural economy. By painting
the stereotypical image of the woman, Tagore effectively highlighted the ill
effects of the society and how the women learnt to cope with it. Feminism at
an accelerated pace only annoyed the people of India then. The sudden
outcry for freedom and dissolution of woman from Hindu society would get
them very little real progress. Tagore is largely responsible for the growth of
a humane outlook in India. He believed that, only through the gradual
percolation of education and social freedom, would the women of India would
find their place in society.

Works Cited
Mary M Logo. : Tagores Liberated Women, Asian Studies Center, Michigan
State University, 17/03/2013
Christine Garlough (2007): Transfiguring Criminality: Eclectic Representations
of a Female Bandit in Indian Nationalist and Feminist Rhetoric, Quarterly
Journal of Speech, 93:3, 253-278, 12/04/2013
Jasodhara Bagchi : Positivism and Nationalism: Womanhood and Crisis in
Nationalist Fiction Bankimchandra's Anandmath, Economic and Political
Weekly, Vol. 20, No. 43 (Oct. 26, 1985), pp. WS58-WS62, 12/04/2013
Humayun Kabir: Mysticism and Humanity of Tagore, Istituto Italiano per
l'Africa e l'Oriente (IsIAO), 17/03/2013
Rajarshi Singh: The Feminine Individual in Tagores Gora, Web, 17/03/2013
Gender and Nationalism in Tagores Home and the World, Author: Indrani
Mitra, Modern Fiction Studies 41.2 (1995) 243-264
The Runaway and Other Stories by Tagore, Review by Massimo Scaligero

Gora, Trans: Radha Chakravarty, 2009, Penguin Books India, 2011

Home and the World, Trans: Sreejata Guha, 2005, Penguin Books India, 2011

Foot-Notes

i Quoted by Rajarshi Singh in his essay: The Feminine Individual in Tagores Gora, Web,
17/03/2013
ii See the paper by Humayun Kabir: Mysticism and Humanity of Tagore, Istituto Italiano
per l'Africa e l'Oriente (IsIAO), 17/03/2013
iii Christine Garlough (2007): Transfiguring Criminality: Eclectic Representations of a
Female Bandit in Indian Nationalist and Feminist Rhetoric