The Threshold of Modernity: Allegory, Gender, and the Fractured Nation in Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World
Saddam Mollah
Published originally in Bengali as Ghare Baire (1916) against the turbulent backdrop of the anti-colonial Swadeshi movement, Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World serves as a profound critique of aggressive, exclusionary nationalism. This paper examines how Tagore utilizes the domestic sphere as an allegorical battleground to explore the ideological fractures of early twentieth-century Bengal. Through a close textual reading of the novel's polyphonic structure-comprising the diary entries of Nikhil, Sandip, and Bimala-this study analyzes how the transition of the female protagonist across the domestic threshold (purdah) mimics the nation’s chaotic entry into political modernity. By interrogating the intersections of gender agency, subaltern realities, psychoanalytic desires, and geopolitical identity, this paper argues that Tagore offers an ethical framework of "rooted cosmopolitanism" as an alternative to the destructive, hyper-masculine deification of the nation-state. this paper argues that Tagore offers an ethical framework of "rooted cosmopolitanism" as an alternative to the destructive, hyper-masculine deification of the nation-state.