Introducing Rabindranath Tagore in English academia is easy, but at the same time, no frivolous job to conjure up. His multifaceted brilliance renders its magnanimity in all facets of art, thus advancing a vast oeuvre comprising of paintings, hundreds of short stories, novels, dramas, and some two thousand songs. As an artist, educationist and thinker, he has been variedly studied, constantly examined and has been continually engaged in a dialogic replete. The parturition of this dissertation aims at a specific juncture, where Tagore’s women characters are projected to be striving along the set ‘notions of womanhood’ and curving out the struggle against the ‘public/private’ dichotomies within the contemporary society. In my dissertation, I read selected…show more content… The subsequent passages elaborate concepts of Bengal Renaissance, the newly emerging ‘Woman Question’ —women’s education and reformation, and how the Anti-Colonial Resistance have supplemented these ideas. Taking up the queue of the arguments I propose to trace the trajectories Tagore’s life in the next part of the chapter, and re-investigate the shaping elements within the plethora of Tagore’s Literature. It is to be followed by the concept of spaces—public and private, which leads to the convoluted discussions so that Tagore’s egalitarian approaches consign suitable exploration and criticism. The next section records significant discussions made by several critics on the aforesaid subjects in divergent ways. The final section foregrounds the purpose and the structural pattern of argument that I employ to deal with the current topic.
1. I. Dawn of Bengali Literature: At the turn of the nineteenth century the literature in Bengal had been nearly eight hundred years old (Sarada 10). It had been a large bulk consisting mainly of rich verses. Critics agree to the general view that until the beginning of the nineteenth century, prose was rarely used