Rabindranath Tagore Was Certainly Not A Feminist

Rabindranath Tagore is a venerated figure in world literature for having conceived of certain progressive ideologies about the status and position of women through his works of fiction, drama, dance drama and poetry, however, a few of his earlier essays fail to bear these out. In 1891, Tagore had heard Pandita Ramabai say that women can do anything that men can, except drinking alcohol.

This statement provoked him so much that he immediately authored a short essay called Ramabai-er ‘Baktritar Upalakhse’ (With reference to Ramabai’s lecture).

In this, Tagore reiterated two long-held myths about the sexual division of labour. First, he said that women are born physically weak and also that “women are quick-witted but do not have a strong intellect like men.”

According to him, though most Western women learnt music, none of them had become a Mozart. The second myth he perpetuated was that since nature had shaped women to become mothers, this automatically decreed that outside work is beyond their world of work and life.

The logical extension of this is that as they have to stay at home to look after children, looking after the household becomes natural to women. Thus, this imposition on women to be confined to the home is designed by nature and not by men.

In other words, according to Tagore, the gender division of labour is merely a reasonable arrangement between consenting adults – man the provider, woman the nurturer. No force is involved.

But over time, his perceptions about the woman as an individual in her own right which some of them exercised freely without thinking about its repercussions on their lives come across strongly through his writings. His later writings reflect his struggle between the strong pulls of radical modernism at one end and traditionalism on the other.

One of his greatest contributions towards the evolution of a modern mindset lies in his concept of choice and his ability to create alternative spaces to choose from. This includes the metamorphosis in some of his memorable creations of female characters in his writing. In Ghare Baire (1916), a political novel, the personal liberation of Bimala, educated by purdah-bound zamindar’s wife, becomes linked to the Swadeshi movement and the national struggle.

There is a danger that both the woman and the country might mistake liberty for licence, being misled by a false leader, who is also an unscrupulous seducer.

Prakriti of the dance drama, ‘Chandalika’ (1933), for example, renounces the material world through her personal will, after she meets Ananda, the Buddhist disciple who is brought to her through her mother’s magic mirror.

She chooses to walk out of the destined trap of her birth, which includes withdrawing herself from Ananda who has already renounced the material world. Much earlier however, one sees him emphasising the inner strength of a woman.

In the dance drama ‘Chitrangada’ (1898), towards the end of the drama, a blend of history and mythology, Tagore invests Chitrangada, the Manipur princess, with the position of subject, free of ambivalence and confusion. Stepping out of her trappings of feminisation she had acquired to attain the love of Arjuna she introduces herself to him as a princess, yet neither a Goddess, nor an ordinary woman, ready to walk beside him in his times of stress but not behind or before him.

In ‘Streer Patra’ (Letter From the Wife), Tagore interrogated the system of arranged marriages and the entrapment and enslavement of women as wives. All three women – Mrinal, Boro Bou and Bindu have loveless marriages.

Their husbands provide them with shelter, security and sustenance. Adjustment and acceptance are the magic words that sustain the fabric of the patriarchal middle class family where there are no possibilities of equal partnership in this relationship between power and the lack of it.

Bindu and Mrinal have resisted this appropriation of their power in their own distinct ways. Bindu committed suicide as her protest against being married off to an insane man just because she happens to be an orphan and thus, a financial burden in the family of an elder cousin. Mrinal leaves in order to live the rest of her life on her own terms.

In 1902-03, when Tagore wrote his first work of long fiction, ‘Chokher Bali’ (A Speck of Sand in the Eye), serially in the revived Bangadarshan, once edited by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, he recalled that in its first incarnation, the periodical had carried Bankimchandra’s ‘Bishabriksha’ (The Poison Tree).

Maybe with that recall, some of the elements of another Bankimchandra novel, ‘Krishnakanter Will’, portraying the adulterous relationship between a beautiful widow and a married man, and its moralism made its way into Tagore’s novel. Tagore’s prose in the novel is generally stark.

But his use of the more distant and formal sadhu bhasha, (pure form of Bengali writing) allowed him the bite of irony mostly directed at Rajlakshmi and Mahendra, the mother and the son. Tagore allowed Binodini a freedom quite rare in Bengali fiction then. But poet-novelist Buddhadev Bose condemned her final withdrawal into Brahmacharya.

In ‘Haimanti’, Tagore takes on the institution of Hindu marriage. He describes ala ‘Strir Patra’, the dismal lifelessness of Bengali women after they are married off, the deep hypocrisies of the Indian middle class, and how Haimanti, a sensitive young woman, has to pay for her sensitivity and free spirit with her life.

In the last passage, Tagore directly attacks the Hindu custom of glorifying Sita's entering in fire to appease her husband Rama's doubts, as depicted in the epic Ramayana.

Like many other Tagore stories, ‘Jibito o Mrito’ provides the Bengalis with one of their more widely used epigrams “‘Kadombini moriya proman korilo shey more nai’ (Kadombini died, and thus proved that she hadn't)”. This is one among Tagore’s most celebrated and internationally acknowledged short stories.

A massive volume of scholarly treatises have and are still coming out on Satyajit Ray’s Charulata, based on Tagore’s novelette, ‘Nastaneer’. This has led to the creation of a completely new genre of writing on cinema – writing created from and by cinema centred exclusively on films based on Tagore’s works.

The debate on Ray’s films based on Tagore’s works goes on till this day. Ray’s ‘Charulata’ (1964) is based on ‘Nastaneer’ (The Broken Nest) a novelette of around 80 pages, written by Tagore in 1901. Its translator, Mary M. Lago describes it as “one of Tagore’s best works of fiction.”

The beauty of the home/space dyad created by Tagore in the novel and perpetuated/interpreted/relocated by Ray in the film is that Bimala is not posited as a victim in the narrative and cinematographic space of the story and the film. In other words, victimhood is not posited as an essential feminine quality which then needs a miracle of some kind to redeem the situation and ‘rescue’ her from her victim state.

Tagore's ‘Golpoguchchho’ (Bunch of Stories) remains among the most popular fictional works in Bangla literature. Its continuing influence on Bengali art and culture cannot be overstated; to this day, ‘Golpoguchchho’ remains a point of cultural reference.

‘Golpoguchchho’ has furnished subject matter for numerous successful films and theatrical plays, and its characters are among the most well known to Bengalis. Satyajit Ray based his film ‘Charulata’ (The Lonely Wife) on ‘Nashtanir’ (The Broken Nest).

The state of being victim as an essential quality of the feminine is never even hinted at in passing so far as Bimala of ‘Ghare Baire’ is concerned. However, questions remain about why he did not educate his own daughters.

This even though there was a regular system of home coaching in the Tagore household. He married them off to some unsuitable men while young, and to men whose families demanded large dowries which he paid out of the money his father had allotted for him for their dowries.