REASEARCH PAPER: PORTRAYAL OF WOMEN IN LITERATURE AND MEDIA 1

“Rabindranath Tagore’s Portrayal Of Aesthetic And Radical women”

-Shilpa Dwivedi, Muskan Mutreja

Maitreyi College, University Of Delhi

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Table of Contents

Abstract............................................................................................. 3

Rabindranath Tagore's Portrayal Of Aesthetic And Radical

Women

References ...................................................................................... 17

Footnotes ........................................Error! Bookmark not defined.

Figures ............................................................................................ 20
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Abstract

Rabindranath Tagore was not an outright social reformer. Still, Women

hold a special place in his writings. They are at times a puppet in the

hands of patriarchy and at other times are a transgressor of patriarchal

norms. However, there is always a highly ironic tone about the

expectations from feminine roles and about definition of feminity. The

essay covers the idea of feminine power portrayed by various women in

the fiction of Rabindranath Tagore, connect it with the political

happenings and illustrate how they are different from other portrayals of

women by other male and female writers like R.K. Narayan and

Rassundari Debi.

Keywords: feminine delicacy, social fabric.

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“Rabindranath Tagore’s Portrayal Of Aesthetic And Radical women”

“Women, with the grace of your fingers you touched my things and

order came out like music.”

-Rabindranath Tagore

The time during which Rabindranath Tagore wrote his fiction and

poetries was an important era in the history of India. It was a time when

India was on the verge of being formed or united on the basis of fighting

against one single enemy; the Britishers. However, one section of the

country was completely excluded from this struggle of change, reform

and freedom. Women’s struggle in the 19th century was described as “a

struggle within struggle”. Worldwide, where men were dealing with the

wider ideas of renaissance, enlightenment, western arts and sciences; a

woman of the 19th century was still struggling to break the shackles of

her inner, domestic sphere and get basic rights to education, financial

freedom or even life. At few places like Bengal, where little education to
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women was given, it only contributed to their submissiveness and

unquestioning figure to authority. Moreover, their early marriage meant

less education.

Such tensions between the outer world of men and inner world of

women was apparent as an anxiety amongst the psychology of

philosophers and thinkers of the contemporary times. Several journals,

magazines and feminist literature were published in 19th C. The most

popular philosopher of the time, Raja Ram Mohan Roy started a weekly

newspaper which voiced against the torturous plight of women like

Satipratha or widowhood. Similarly, Umesh Chandra Datta started

“Bamabodhini Patrika”, a journal in which the Bengali women for the

first time published their own writings.

There were dynamic portrayals of women characters in fictional

world. Somewhere, she was holding an important role in social fabric

while on the other places in literature, she was fighting to surpass her

domestic roles. On one hand, a realist depiction of women was seen in

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literature as someone caught between the sorrows of love and society.

On the other hand, some painters like Abindranath Tagore painted

images of chaste, morally upright and delicate women. Mother India

who underwent changes with changing times; from clothes in saffron to

white saree; from upper class Hindu Brahmin to an embodiment of

peace. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee portrayed women as full of

sentiments in his writings, while paintings, they would be seen as rigid

characters.

Out of all those chaotic, ambiguous and anxious discourse of

bringing an end to women’s plight, a major part can be seen as left

behind; the woman herself. All the ideas of depicting woman as

emotional,chaste,moral, nourishing motherly figures, domestic queens

and magical lovers was a burden of morality put on her shoulders,

unasked. Were the ‘male’ philosophers and ‘reformers’ not bringing out

women from physical torture and strict religious strictures and putting

them under the burden of their own strictures?

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Also, the fact that these were the portrayals given by men to

women cannot be disregarded. The consent of women in being such

idols of chastity was quite ambiguous. The very fact that there were very

few women who could read and write and be heard at that time, let alone

publish hints about the severity of situation. Some of them were like

Rassundari Debi and Swarnakumari Debi who would bring out the

situations faced by women in reality.

Around this discourse of painting the right image of woman, so

that she could be brought on a higher pedestal, if not on equal footing

with importance of men, one can say that the literature of Rabindranath

Tagore; the Gurudev of India in terms of literature , the aspiring and

unattainable figure of a writer, painter and man; can be read as the

microcosm of the macrocosmic world. Rabindranath Tagore depicted

women with aesthetic feminine delicacy in most of his fictions.

Although he supported the emergence of women as a social power, he

also believed that woman’s domain was different than that of men. He

condemns the status of women as an object of gaze. Instead, he sees an

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eternal beauty in her, an essence that is universal amongst all women.

We can say that in his literature, there is too much focus on defining her.

“Women are of two types- they are either mother or lovers.”( Two

sisters) by Tagore depicts how a woman is and how she should be; what

are her virtues and what a man desires her to be. Rabindranath Tagore

sees in her a regeneration of modern society. Be it a devoted wife like

Sharmila or a woman with independent thoughts like Urmila in Dui

Bon , there seems to be a sentimental touch associated with every

woman of his fiction. While attributing the role of either mothers or

lovers to women, they seem to lose the touch of humanity and seem

divine. The aesthetic description of women is given in the lap of nature.

In the novella ‘The Two Sisters’, Sharmila seems to be a portrayal

of the real condition of women; one who is ascribed a domain of

domestic space, religion home decoration and seen as an irrational entity

in public affairs . The act of returning money to Sharmila by Sasanka to

assert how woman being a financial asset is unacceptable in the market

economy. On the other hand, Urmi is an embodiment of romantic

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version of female in Tagore’s mind. Her development throughout the

novella seems to be a development of the female’s consciousness who

grows a dream of liberty and authority, faces subjugation, diversions and

finally reconciles with their aims . Nirodh objectified Urmi to attain his

own selfish needs. In this, Urmi seems to be oppressesd by various

forms of patriarchy: one binding her into the shackles of marriage, other

seeing her with a kind of responsibility and taking her so-cherished

freedom of thought and yet the last one, Sasanka as an enchanter who

deviates her from the desire of the financial independence. Here, Tagore

appreciatively reverses the role of enchantment from women to men.

Urmi and Sasanka engage in a two-sided act of deviating each other

from their socio-economic roles. Hemant is a voice of rebellion silenced

by death. He seems to be the omnipresent narrator of a silenced tale

within the tale. What could have happened if Hemant was alive?

Characters like Sharmila are quite common in Tagore’s fiction.

These types of women are defined by Malavika Karlekar as “enlightened

yet domesticated, by nature loving and devoted to the family’s well-

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being, her emancipation was to be viewed within the context of a

family’s situations.’ They were given the term Bhadramahila. There is a

pattern amongst these women in Tagore’s fiction which can be traced

when we open the layers of the narrative subconscious. One amongst

them is that all the women; be it in the novella “Dui Bon”, short stories

“The Wife’s Letter” and “The Exercise Book” or even Mini in

“Kabuliwala” are not mothers. In this way, when the times bound her as

a “child bearing chattel”, these motherless figures in the Tagore’s

fictional world reject the idea of a mother to be necessarily a good wife

and good woman. Instead of depicting them as a mothers, they are

mostly depicted as carrying a bond of homo-social or homo-humane

relations. This kind of sisterhood that Tagore imagined could be seen

much later in the Afro-American literature. In the short-story “The

Wife’s letters”, Bindu and Mrinal together create a feminine energy

which is virtuous as well as fierce. Their relationship is not based on

expectations of physical beauty but on the basis of humanity and

similarity of minds. Where Bindu is a symbol of oppressed, Mrinal is a

symbol of rebellion. Her decision to abandon her husband’s house and

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her wifely duties to assimilate with a higher reality of God shows how

the plight of women was so intense that it could only find repose in

ulterior heavenly world.

A similar preoccupation with God as a redeemer is visible in works

of women writers like Rassundari Debi. In “Amar Jiban” , she especially

gives credit to God for giving her courage to bear the ordeals of married

life. However, this idea of a God-fearing woman and portrayal of God as

a male supporter to let the woman stand amidst her torturous

surroundings is quite problematic. A woman must bear everything

without expression is an ironic concept in the feminine discourse. Thus,

God stands as an agent of silencing a lady towards her issues.

However, a spiritual awakening, in fact, presents God in a different

light. In “Amar Jiban” God becomes a form of moral support to the

protagonist in getting education. No doubt, while imploring God to

support her in bearing ordeals of life, later, she thanks him for providing

her courage to transgress a patriarchal boundary by self-education.

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Similarly, in the short story “The Wife’s Letter” by Rabindranath

Tagore, Mrinal finds repose in God only after physically overstepping

the boundaries of her household. Thus, from a “bird in a cage” to flying

openly, these women focus towards a higher wisdom or knowledge

which is given the name and authority of God. This dynamic role of God

acts as a catalyst in giving fire to the desires of women.

Where in “Amar Jiban”, Rassundari Debi gives the

autobiographical facts of her life with the slightest tint of emotions or

comments, Rabindranath Tagore involves in his writings a serious debate

about the women’s desires and their deploration. The various desires of

women are given extreme importance in his fiction, be it romantic affair

in “The Home And The World” or economic and social prosperity in

“The Two Sisters” and the educational desires in “The Exercise Book”,

Tagore especially talks about the degraded condition of a woman even

after she gets an education. The dawn of realization that follows after

one steps into the wider realm of opportunities and yet the impossibility

of that space induces claustrophobia. The emphasis here is not on the

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impossibility but on making that impossible as possible. The anxiety of

influence, thinking an educated woman as a leading factor to the

denigration of world, reconciling with western philosophy and equating

the position of Man is quite true of those times. The political times when

Britishers were termed as outsiders and Others and the idea of being

ruled by a country whose ruler was a queen was already a lump in the

throat of Indians. Where the demands from women’s side had already

begun a century ago in Europe and writers like Mary Wollstonecraft had

talked about it in great detail, India was still struggling to digest this

change. Thus, works like these by a male Indian writer were radical in

not just demanding educational rights for women but also envisaging the

next step of restriction on such women, that is, affirmations of these

rights as result of westernization or impurity.

Malashri Lal in her essay on Tagore comments that Tagore is

astutely able to enter the woman’s consciousness through his acts of

extended sympathy. In this light , he looks very different from other

male writers like R.K. Narayan and Munshi Premchand. Where novels
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of Narayan like “The Dark Room” and “Swami And Friends” focus

mainly upon the nationalist struggle and fear of modernization;

Premchand’s “Godan” gives a brief account of existence of casteism in

Hindu society. Both the novels attribute an altogether different space to

women. They are either given importance in kitty parties or in the

domestic spheres of home. And if a modern woman like Malti is given

some sort of belief, she is left quite vulnerable at the end in the hands of

various men. Thus, these women are either given feminine delicacy and

endurance to strictures of patriarchy or are completely rejected as

irrational beings. On the contrary, Tagore depicts them not only as

aesthetic but also as radicals. He, no doubt, supported women as social

powers even in their most simplistic states. Whereas, at other places in

this discourse, the focus was laid upon defining the woman either as

delicate and nurturing or as transgressing and fierce full, Tagore instead

caricatured a blend of both and along with this, gave them some sort of

agency in his literature.

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Therefore, when we look at the adaptations of Tagore’s works in

films, media and web-series, we encounter different air of simplicity in

them. A major adaptations of his stories was taken by Anurag Basu in

the twenty six episode series called “Stories By Rabindranath Tagore”

on Epic Channel. The female actors are given simple, traditional

clothing but rebellious and radical expressions. There have been

numerous film adaptations on Tagore’s fiction. Whenever, one imagines

the feminist discourse and portrayal of dynamic women across the times

and nation, one cannot help going back to Tagore as a radical writer and

painter.

The women in his paintings are dynamic; struggling against

patriarchy, whereas, the women in his paintings were still, melancholic

and dark. Their covered heads and bodies under the sari signifies the

claustrophobic environment of their existence. Their dark shadows

shows the inability of their expressions. He shows that women could, but

did not prefer to play the same role as man in the society.
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The lack of rebellion from the women was a cause as well as result

of lack of resources to them. Thus, to hold the world in hand and

representing a sex as equal to other, the first step must be taken by the

oppressed themselves. Only when women in romantic, fictional world of

literature raise a voice do their voices are silenced and echoes are spread.

Only through such echoes, have the women brought themselves in the

21st century, standing on a platform; fighting for their cause. Echoes lead

to expressions. Literature and media have been playing the part of such

echoes which are adopted in the real world to being social changes.

.
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References

1. “Woman In Tagore’s Novels” by Dr. Soniya F. Sapowadia.

2. “Sambud Kaumudi”; a weekly newspaper started by Raja Ram

Mohan Roy in 1819.

3. “Bamabodhini Patrika” started by Umeshchandra Datta.

4. “Amar Jiban” by Rassundari Debi.

5. “The Two Sisters” or “Dui Bon” (1933) by Rabindranath

Tagore.

6. “The wife’s Letter” by Rabindranath Tagore.

7. “The Exercise Book” by Rabindranath Tagore.

8. “A Vindication Of The Rights Of Women” by Mary

Wollstonecraft.

9. “The Dark Room” by R.K. Narayan.

10. “Swami And Friends” by R.K. Narayan.

11. “Godan” by Munshi Premchand.

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Figures

Figure 1. https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/kolkata/abanindranaths-

bharat-mata-on-display/article6949692.ece/amp/

Image of Bharat Mata as painted by Abindranath Tagore.

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Figure 2: http://www.sify.com/movies/radhika-apte-stars-in-stories-by-

rabindranath-tagore-imagegallery-bollywood-pg0rjMjgjejgj.html

A show directed by Anurag Basu: “Stories By Rabindranath Tagore”.