Rabindranath Tagore's The Home and the World

Designed as a companion to Rabindranath Tagore's "Ghare-Baire" (The Home and the World), the ten essays of this volume cover the novel in terms of the complexity of colonial modernity. Taking into account Tagore's critique of religious nationalism and the historical processes in which the novel is embedded, the authors examine questions of gender, nationalism, and the novel form. Issues of gender are elaborated in terms of the creations of modern selfhood, the problems of representing the woman as nation and the crises of masculinity. Similarly, Tagore's critique of Hindu nationalism is evaluated by its many-sided implications: contextual resonances, anti-colonial vision of social relationships, and collective subjectivity, as well as by its insoluble contradictions.