I think the fact that Rabindranath Tagore was so heavy handed in mobilizing his writing to political ends in The Home and the World demands, a reading that never strays away from the relationship between the work’s literary elements and the political ends they serve. It's difficult to read any of Tagore’s three narrators as anything but caricatures that serve as conduits for Tagore’s worldview. Nikhil’s character is the archetype of the benevolent aristocrat. He holds universalized rational morality dear, which he uses to espouse a tenderly “progressive” politics that does nothing to change the oppressive structures of the status quo. He reconciles the morality of simple living and renunciation with the possession of immense power and wealth; he reconciles progressive notions of freedom with the maintenance of systems of patriarchy. Tagore’s representation of the freedom fighter, Sandip, cannot hold his own in a reasoned discussion against Nikhil. After brief argumentation he falls back to the retort that “this is all merely dry logic. Can’t you recognize that there is such a thing as feeling?” (37). In his first narration, he is quick to proclaim that “moral ideas remain merely for those poor anaemic creatures of starved desire whose grasp is weak” (45). He goes on: “What I desire, I desire positively, superlatively. I want to knead it with both my hands and both my feet; I want to smear it all over my body; I want to gorge myself with it to the full” (46). He is a caricature of a nihilist; he is animalistic and virile in his desires. The majority of the book's narration, though, is by Bimala: the reader is made to perceive each of these two masculinities through Tagore’s imagination of a woman's eyes. Their gaze on Nikhil is one of devotional worship; their gaze on Sandip is one of impassioned fascination.
The book doesn’t stray away from these archetypes for a second. Every moment of evocative metaphoricity, every meditation on a theme outside this, and every flash of poetic beauty feels inseparable from that core part of the work.
This sense has pushed me towards a reading of the work that seeks to think about what it means for Tagore’s creative endeavors as a whole. This feels particularly important given Tagore’s profound influence on Bengali culture. As Anita Desai put it in the introduction, his revival of folk traditions “has sung Bengal into a nation” (xxii). His experimentation with form gave birth to a distinctly modern Bengali artistic tradition. His pedagogical experiments at Visva-Bharati and emphasis on independence through rural development came to be an essential part of Bengali conceptions of self-determination to this day. The question of how one should look at the rest of his artistic output having read The Home and the World means more than what a reading of the book in itself. This is especially true for me, having spent the better part of the past month hanging out with performing artists in Shantiniketan whose relationship with folk forms, art, and themselves are inseparable from Tagore.
With that being said, I’ll offer a brief reading that begins with the place of nature in Sandip’s worldview. For both of them, nature is beautiful. Sandip’s mind, though, nature exists in relation to man, and that relation reads like a rape fantasy: “Nature surrenders herself, but only to the robber. For she delights in this forceful desire, this forceful abduction” (45). Sandip’s feminine, anthropomorphized Nature “spreads out” not for the “ascetic” or the “impotent” or the “weak” but for the “flesh-eaters of the world” (46). Nature, for Sandip, does not only enjoy this virile extraction:
[Nature’s] one delight… is to fulfil the claims of those who are men. She has been made fertile and beautiful and complete through her endless sacrifices to them. But for this she would be lost in the wilderness, not knowing herself, the doors of her heart shut, her diamonds and pearls never seeing the light. (116)
He goes on, revoltingly, to claim that men’s relationship with women is the same. We can’t dismiss this as Tagore constructing a strawman in Sandip. He reproduces gendered subjugation Bimala’s narration. Even before her passion for Sandip changes her views, her monologue reads: “devotion is beauty itself, in its inner aspect… my woman’s heart… must worship in order to love” (18). Like Sandip’s claims about nature being somehow elevated by its devotional servitude and bondage to man’s desires, Bimala sees herself as being elevated in her devotion to Nikhil. Tagore even rationalizes this with the progressive discourse of equality: “My husband used to say, that man and wife are equal in love… but my heart said that devotion never stands in the way of equality; it only raises the level of the ground of meeting” (20). Sandip and Nikhil’s disposition towards the figure of the woman in devotional servitude is different. Sandip’s is one of indulgent violence, whereas Nikhil “loved my [Bimala’s] body as if it were a flower of paradise” (20). But the fundamental logic of a woman being elevated by her servitude to a man remains. This subjugation is so embedded in Tagore’s worldview that it is reproduced at a metaphysical level: devotion is beauty itself. Therefore, beauty is inextricable from subjugation. It is inextricable from the subjugation of women by men, of the feminine by the masculine, and of nature by men. What do we make of the poems of a man who thinks like this?!