Term Paper – I

M. Phil. Part- II, Session 2013-2015, Department of English, University of Calcutta.

Title: Between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ space: An Investigation into the Socio-cultural

Location of Women, against a Nineteenth Century Nationalistic Backdrop with Reference to

Bimala, the Central Woman Character in Rabindranath Tagroe’s The Home and the World.

Name of the Supervisor: Dr. Sinjini Bandyopadhyay

Submitted by: Argha Basu

Roll no. 92/ENG/144011

Registration no. 0025122 OF 2008-2009

Submitted on:

Signature of the Supervisor:

Between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ space: An Investigation into the Socio-cultural Location

of Women, against a Nineteenth Century Nationalistic Backdrop with Reference to Bimala,

the Central Woman Character in Rabindranath Tagroe’s The Home and the World.
 When Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghare Baire (1916) was getting serialized in the avant-

garde Bengali journal Sabujpatra in 1915; letters started flooding in, questioning the author’s

stance on the Nationalistic ideals and accusing him of betraying his country and Hindu

morality with particular emphasis on the institution of family and womanhood. Tagore’s

lifelong critique of the Swadeshi movement in texts like Gora, Char Adhyay, Chaturanga;

does not induce an exception in Ghare Baire (The Home and the World). Rather the

positional and moral dichotomy of characters like Nikhilesh, the zamindar of Sukhsayar and

his childhood friend Sandip, a swadeshi extremist, manifests the author’s understanding of

Nationalism. The long debates between these two friends; with occasional interjection and

insight from Mastermoshai, Nikhilesh’s teacher, slowly unfold Tagore’s perception of the

movement. Their initial argument readily reflects the author’s stand through Nikhilesh, as he

asserts,

‘It has its place, Sandip, I admit, but I do not believe in giving it the whole place. I

would know my country in its frank reality, and for this I am both afraid and ashamed

to make use of hypnotic texts of patriotism.’1 (p.25)

‘It is my feelings that are outraged, whenever you try to pass off injustice as duty, and

unrighteousness as moral ideal.’ (p.26)

Tagore identified the core struggle of Indian Nationalism to be social2 and believed that

freedom can easily be allowed a passage, if the spiritual solution, practiced in India can be

offered to the rest of the world, as it reads in the third chapter of his book, Nationalism,
 ‘In spite of our great difficulty, however, India has done something. She has tried to

make adjustment of races, to acknowledge the real difference between them where

these exist, … In finding solution to our problem we shall have helped to solve the

world problem as well. What India has been, the world is now. … If India can offer to

the world her solution, it will be a contribution to humanity. … There is only one

history – the history of man.’3

And he believed that this will eventually result in our true redemption.

The fundamental element in the ideological justification of the colonial rule in India

by the British, exploits the socio-cultural and economic position of women with a vehement

reference to the hostile treatments directed towards them in the name of ‘tradition’. This

particular stance on the colonizers’ part enabled them to question the cultural validity and

impose the importance of initiating a ‘civilizing mission’ to reconfigure the history of the

orient. The attacks converged more on the ground of rationalizing the barbaric practices (sati-

daha, abolition of widow remarriage and so on) in the name of religious doctrine (Rammohun

Roy in his Prabartak Nibartak Sangbad illustrates the idea of this scriptural conflict) and

identifies the Indian woman as a symbol of perennial oppression4. The initial reformatory

nature of the conflict slowly transformed into a political duel between an emerging colonialist

discourse and a practiced series of traditions of the conquered people. Romila Thapar has

argued that the status of women in pre-colonial India has varied widely from ‘a position of

considerable authority and freedom to one of equally considerable subservience.’5 Following

the hegemonic Brahminical gender code the teleological construction of the ‘woman

question’ has stereotyped the microcosmic existence of lack of freedom in the upper castes of

Indian society as the macrocosmic projection of the problems of Indian womanhood as

general. And Lata Mani in her study of the abolition of satidaha has rightly pointed out that

the tradition itself was a product of colonialist discourse.6 In his essay The Nation and Its
Women, Partha Chatterjee leaves us with a significant sketch of the emergence of

nationalistic discourse against this backdrop with a reference to the two-fold structure of the

social space, the inside and the outside in his pursuit of addressing the ‘woman question’.

Quoting Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay’s argument in Lajjashastra, where he talks about the natural

and social principals that provide the basis for feminine virtues; Chatterjee presents us with

the relevant material/spiritual dichotomy that corresponds to animal/godlike qualities which

in turn correspond to masculine/feminine virtues.7 Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay in the same essay

argued,

‘In the Arya system there is a preponderance of spiritualism, in the European system a

preponderance of material pleasure. In the Arya system, the wife is a goddess. In the

European system, she is a partner and companion.’8

In the face of modernity men were subjected to the task of making amends to the external

world of material activity and the women were endowed with the apparently elevated

responsibility of protecting and nurturing the inner spirituality of the indigenous social life.

These inevitable changes in the external world should not affect their essentially spiritual

virtues (femininity). Hence, the westernization of women had to be manipulated. And the

manipulation would give birth to the ‘New Woman’, dwelling within a perfected and

balanced space between material and spiritual virtues.

The central woman character in Tagore’s The Home and the World, Bimala opens the

text with an address to her absent mother in the form of an apostrophe, and in her finds the

true ideal of womanliness, that she wants to embody in her conjugal life. She believed that

values like absolute devotion (bhakti) to one’s husband, unquestioning self surrender to the

rituals of the andarmahal, depicted through her mother, will result into a perfect
emancipation of innocence and beauty. The ideal of Hindu womanhood set out in Manusmriti

with its historical and cultural specificity finds a passage through Bimala into the text.

‘I distinctly remember after my marriage, when, early in the morning, I would

cautiously and silently get up and take the dust of my husband’s feet without waking

him, how at such moments I could feel the vermilion mark upon my forehead shining

out like the morning star.’ (p.2)

The affirmative nod from the family astrologer was strong enough to decide Bimala’s

fortune, and eventually these auspicious signs, read in her hands allowed her a position within

Nikhilesh’s household. Within the domestic domain, Bimala with her vermilion mark is

symbolically pitted right against her two widow sister-in-laws and the grandmother who

decided to bring her in for radiating the qualities of a faithful sati, which finally lands up in a

nimbus of doubt and confusion at the end of the text with an ironic undertone. She was

valued more for her signs than her beauty. It was believed by the grandmother that unlike her

sister-in-laws she had somehow managed to restrain Nikhilesh from pursuing those

despicable practices that had long been a part of the family tradition.

‘Was the credit due to me that my husband did not touch liquor, nor squander his

manhood in the markets of woman’s flesh? What charm did I know to soothe the wild

and wandering mind of men? It was my good luck nothing else.’ (p.6)

From the very beginning of the text Bimala encapsulates a series of transformations.

Nikhilesh’s sublime attempts at manipulating her feelings leave Bimala both disappointed

and baffled. She emphatically denied the desire to earn merits or impress Nikhilesh but

within the early romantic idealization of her conjugal life she could hardly escape the attempt

of identifying herself against her husband and thus begins the process of her self-making.

Nikhilesh’s love led Bimala out of the inner circle of the household into the world where she
was allowed a chance to know herself and embrace humanness whole heartedly. But this

philosophically idealized noble attempt falls prey to the undermined notion of the ‘ghar’ and

the ‘bahir’.

Though Bimala’s education and the process of self-making resulted out of an attempt

to please her husband, still she could help noticing a shift in her rhetoric in the event of an

exposure to modernity.

‘Since then, I have been educated, and introduced to the modern age in its own

language, and therefore these words that I write seem to blush with shame in their

prose setting.’ (p.4)

This was the moment of emotional and intellectual vulnerability when Sandip came in, and

with him came the stream of philosophical flood into the enclosure of Nikhilesh’s household

and the flames inevitably reached Bimala’s andarmahal. With the rest of the womenfolk

Bimala witnessed Sandip’s first swadeshi speech from behind a wicker screen, but could hold

her patience no longer. Her attempt to look at Sandip experiences reciprocation. This moment

marks Bimala’s introduction to the ‘outer space’ through the gaze of another male. In The

Home and the World the outer space is not merely a politically constructed one, but works

along the line of a psychological configuration. Bimala never leaves the house literally. But

Nikhilesh’s constant attempt at exposing his wife to the outer world brings Bimala out of the

gamut of her pre-conceived notion. The physical existence of the outer world is not properly

identified but it was Bimala who for the first time was enabled to locate herself beyond

Nikhilesh’s reference frame. Her instinctive act and response to the situation set the tone in

for a whole new world, unlike the description of Rasasundari Debi, as she retreated to her

room to avoid the gaze from her husband’s horse.9 As a public proof of determination to

liberate his wife from the woman’s quarter of the household, the enlightened husband
Nikhilesh allows Sandip to enter the inner circle and live indefinitely, visiting the drawing

room and meeting his wife. Thus the outer symbolically penetrates the inner. Rabindranath’s

sister-in-law Jnanadanandini Debi narrates an incident in her early married life with

Satyendranath, when prior to her emergence into the outer world Satyendranath’s friend

Manmohan Ghosh was allowed a passage into their bedroom (in their mosquito net) to meet

Jnanadanandini.10 This remarkable incident indicates one specific focus of emancipation that

obliquely refers to the act of Nikhilesh in The Home and the World. In an event of translation

the word ‘world’ cannot encapsulate the entire spirit of ‘bahir’, as the physical, social and

psychological boundaries of the inner and the outer are constantly shifting and inexact. This

imprecise location of the ‘bahir’ can either be a space of freedom and moral responsibility, or

one of license and immorality. For Bimala the elements of self-glorifying nationality coupled

with a predominant yet subtle sexual desire, the outer space becomes one of absolute

confusion and chaos, which results into a looming spectre of unawareness, exploited by

Sandip.

‘My poor little queen bee is living in a dream. She knows not which way she is

treading. It would not be safe to awaken her before the time. It is best for me to

pretend to be equally unconscious.’ (p.49)

Sekhar Bandyopadhyay in an essay, ‘Caste and Gender: Social Mobility and the

Status of Women’ argues,

‘The educated middle class males, it has been argued, dreamt of the Victorian ideal of

companionate marriage; an educated bhadramahila (gentlewoman) appeared to be the

ideal companion of the enlightened Hindu bhadralok. This new model of Indian

womanhood, being a fine blend of the self-sacrificing Hindu wife and the Victorian

helpmate, further domesticated women as good wives and better mothers. And if
 uneducated or ignorant women were regarded as impediments to progress or

modernization or bad for the family, children, community and nation, ‘wrongly

educated or over-educated’ women, negligent of household chores, or more precisely

Westernized independent women were considered to be threats to the cherished moral

order of a modernized Hindu patriarchy.’11

Though Nikhilesh is not an ideal manifestation of the quoted ‘bhadralok’, still his

progressive ideology converts Bimala into a subject of transformation, a transformation

which he dreamt to attain through the means of love. The love Nikhilesh feels for his wife, in

its essence is different from any other emotion within the text. It is modern in nature with the

autonomy of the individual, universalizing the realm of the personal. We can find an access

to Nikhilesh’s complicated philosophy of love through his statement,

‘The greedy man who is fond of his fish stew has no compunction in cutting up the

fish according to his need. But the man who loves the fish wants to enjoy it in the

water; and if that is impossible he waits on the ban; and even if he comes back home

without a sight of it he has the consolation of knowing that the fish is all right. Perfect

gain is the best of all; but if that is impossible, then the next best gain is perfect

losing.’ (pp.9-10)

Investing all the resources of his heart Nikhilesh invited his wife into the free space of the

outer world because he believed that the outer world may need Bimala although she may not

need it. But Bimala never reached the ‘bahir’, Nikhilesh envisaged. She was taken midway

by Sandip and thus the true nature of the emancipation faces a hindrance. When Sandip

identifies her with an image of the resurgent Bengali womanhood, inspiring its revolutionary

youth, her vision gets deluded.

‘I could not think of any suitable reply and so I sat down, blushing and

uncomfortable, at one end of the sofa. The vision that I had of myself, as the Shakti of
 Womanhood, incarnate, crowning Sandip Babu simply with my presence, majestic

and unashamed, failed me altogether.’ (p.25)

Bimala engaged her very being to a political system that was too obscure for her to analyze.

Her ideological and moral shift was palpable. From a woman who was too concerned to get

rid of Miss. Gilby in order to escape the clamour around her; later initiates a measure of theft

for accumulating money to serve the country against Sandip’s instigation. Bimala’s

relationship with Sandip hovered round a cloud of confusion, the confusion between the

inside and the outside. Eventually she realized the inevitability of her transformation and the

consequent induction; and learned to question Sandip’s motif that resulted in the discovery of

her redemption through Amulya, as she positioned herself to be mother.

In his essay ‘Producing and Re-Producing the New Women: A note on the Prefix

“Re”’, Shibaji Bandyopadhyay asserts,

‘In a bid to remove the stigma of a non-martial race, branded as they were by the

British adminidtrators, the Bengali bhadralok sought the blessings of the Mother- a

figure that would combine ‘passivity’ and ‘power’ in one, represent power in

passivity. The image of the mother is produced by a curious amalgam of Sita-Sati-

savitri and Kali-Durga. It was this figure that functioned as the buffer between

‘family’ and ‘nation’- in the double task of familialising the nation and nationalizing

the family, the mother was assigned the pivotal role.’12

Sandip, being a nationalist extremist twisted and exploited this notion, but ironically the self-

identification against this set reference frame denounces his objective. If Sandip is to be

considered guilty for misguiding Bimala, then so is Nikhilesh, for imposing his inflexible

ideological liberalism. Bimala was neither ready judge nor to count herself in.

Besides lending a space for objectivity the tripartite first person narrative strategy of

the text enables the reader to engage in a perspective oriented evaluation of the characters.
The self absorbed subjectivity of the characters adds an edge to the plurality of the fictional

truth and as we can witness Bimala the way she sees herself and the way she never can; the

character keeps oscillating between the desired and the fulfilled.

In one of the response-letters to Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s essay Pracheena

Ebong Nabina (Women, Then and Now) in Bangadarshan Shree Lakshmimani Debi wrote,

‘Learn? Why? Does it even come close enough to the pleasure we derive from

looking at your faces? Does it even come close to the act of serving you? Look, you

taught us the measures of self-sacrifice. Will education leave us with a lesson like

that? And when will we learn? In dreaming your faces our days go by. When the hell

will we learn?’13

This intended spirit of sarcasm can be directed to justify Bimala’s dilemma and its

catastrophic consequences. She was better off on her own. Nikhilesh’s inability at proper

guidance working in tandem with Sandip’s foul desires emplaced her forever, both from

within and beyond. Unknowingly, resonating her true status, Bimala in one of her

autobiographical notes strummed the perfect chord,

‘And then, the other day in the garden, how easy my husband found it to tell me that

he set me free! But can freedom- empty freedom- be given and taken so easily as all

that? It is like setting a fish free in the sky- for how can I move or live outside the

atmosphere of loving care which has always sustained me?’ (p.149)

 Notes and References

1. All citations of The Home and the World are from the text of The Home and the World: At

Home and Outside, Eds. Dilip Kumar Basu and Debjani Sengupta (Delhi: Worldview

Publications, 2011). Rest of the page references are to the given edition.

2. Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2009), p.64. Tagore opens

the essay ‘Nationalism in India’ with the line, “Our real problem in India is not political. It is

social.”

3. Ibid., p.65.

4. “A woman, it is affirmed, is never fit for independence, or to be trusted with liberty…”,

J.W. Massie, Continental India, vol.2 (London: Thomas Wood, 1839), quoted in Partha

Chaterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993),

pp.118-119.

5. Romila Thapar, ‘Looking Back in History’, in D. Jain (ed.), Indian Women (New Delhi:

1975), p. 7, quoted in Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Culture and Hegemony: Social

Dominance in Colonial Bengal (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2004), p.142.

6. Cited in Partha Chaterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (New Jersey: Princeton

University Press, 1993), p.119.

7. Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay, ‘Lajjashastra’ in Bhudeb Rachanasambhar, ed. Pramathanath Bisi

(Calcutta: Mitra and Ghosh, 1969) p.445-448, quoted in Partha Chaterjee, The Nation and Its

Fragments (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), p.125-126.

8. Ibid. p.126.
9. Rasasundari Debi, Amar Jibon, p.33 in N. Jana et al., eds., Atmakatha, vol.I (Calcutta:

Ananya Prakashan, 1981), cited in Supriya Chaudhuri, ‘A sentimental Education: Love and

Marriage in The Home and the World’ in The Home and the World: At Home and Outside,

Eds. Dilip Kumar Basu and Debjani Sengupta (Delhi: Worldview Publications, 2011), p.296.

10. This incident is related by Jnanadanandini herself in Indira Debi Chaudhurani, ed.

Puratani (Calcutta: Indian Associated Publishing Company, 1957). Jnanadanandini’s

reminiscences, Smritikatha, were reprinted in Ekshan, vol. 19 (1990), pp.14-15. Cited in

Supriya Chaudhuri, ‘A sentimental Education: Love and Marriage in The Home and the

World’ in The Home and the World: At Home and Outside, Eds. Dilip Kumar Basu and

Debjani Sengupta (Delhi: Worldview Publications, 2011), p.296-297.

11. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, ‘Caste and Gender: Social Mobility and the Status of Women’ in

Caste, Culture and Hegemony: Social Dominance in Colonial Bengal (New Delhi: Sage

Publications, 2004), pp.150-151.

12. Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, ‘Producing and Re-Producing the New Women: A Note on the

Prefix “re”’, Social Scientist, vol. 22, No. ½ (Jan.-Feb., 1994), pp. 19-39., Jstor,

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3517850, web, 23 Apr 2013.

13. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Pracheena Ebong Nabina’ in Bankim Rachanaboli,

vol.2 (Calcutta: Kamini Prakashaloy, 1991), p.255.

 Works Cited

Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar. Caste, Culture and Hegemony: Social Dominance in Colonial

Bengal. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2004. Print.

Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments. New Jersey: Princeton University Press,

1993. Print.

Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra. Bankim Rachanaboli. Vol. 2. Calcutta: Kamini Prakashaloy,

1991. Print.

Social Scientist. Vol. 22. No. ½. Jan.-Feb., 1994. Print.

Tagore, Rabindranath. The Home and the World. Eds. Dilip Kumar Basu and Debjani

Sengupta. Trans. Surendranath Tagore. Delhi: Worldview Publications, 2011. Print.