Rabindranath’s rebellion
"The liberation that comes through sorrow is greater than the sorrow," says Nikhilesh, in Home and the World. I quote from Penguin's Modern Classics edition, in Sreejata Guha's translation. Tagore's liberal-minded, university-educated zamindar is a disciple of restraint and weariness, yet this line does not sound out of sync from Nikhilesh, whose heartbreak can also speak for the troubled swadeshi protesters he is so against. Re-reading the novel during such a perilous time, I was moved greatly by Rabindranath's trio of protagonists: through Nikhilesh's hesitancies that reflect well the attitudes of his class and their newfound "modernity", through his wife Bimala—egged on to come out to the "world" with him and leave the contours of homes all too familiar to women—and through Sandip, the brash revolutionary and agitator, hanging around Nikhilash's estate (one can almost say squatting) and flattering Bimala enough to win her over with talks of revolution and freedom.
Rabindranath is for every occasion. Nowhere does it feel truer to me than in Home and the World, whose backdrop of political turmoil only strengthens the personal dynamic between a zamindar with a sobering "conscience" and his insurrectionary friend, Sandip. Perhaps, it is testament to Rabindranath's power—an effervescent prose which overwhelms all senses—that a reader is often undecided whether the poet's attacks and denigrations are his own or the expected predispositions of the 'bhodro shomaj' who read him with delight.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. Home and the World, much like its author, provides multitudes of reflections, analyses, and reactions. The wrecking of Nikhilesh and Bimala's marriage when Sandip makes his mark in the estate seems to often to be washed away under the waves of nationalist fervour that much of the later half of the novel concerns itself with. I went into the novel to dwell on the former, but Rabindranath's treatment of Sandip did in the end force a few words out of me.
Home and the World begins with Nikhilesh encouraging his wife Bimala to step outside into the world, to engage with their enlightened contemporaries and become more of an equal partner to him in the process intellectually. It is a liberal urge that hides the fact that Nikhilesh's idea of equality is strictly on his terms and excludes any real independence for Bimala. This friction occurs when Sandip's charms propels Bimala to adopt ideals Nikhilesh is at unease with. Nikhilesh, meek as he is, outright refuses when Bimala requests they stop stocking foreign cloth in his estate's market. He believes that "the words that Bimala spoke in the name of the country, were coming from Sandip's mouth and not form a greater idea." An insecurity develops. Stumbling upon his wife in the garden later on in the novel, Nikhilesh blurts out, "Bimala, my cage here is walled from all sides—how can I keep you here? You cannot live like this."
Home and the World, then, already succeeds in conjuring up a great many conversations on the extent of ownership of one another in a marriage.
Too deftly, Rabindranath shifts gears just as the reader gets comfortable with the turmoil at home. The world bangs on the door incessantly and its calls to be invited in brings about a chaotic development. The turning point, if one has to choose one, is when Sandip asks Bimala for money, funds to carry out the noble work of this fight for freedom, for the country, swadesh. It is the very moment when the home and the world are entwined together significantly. It is also when Sandip stops being a person and becomes, instead, little more than a caricature. A greedy, materialist demeanour is sketched over him. "He had the divine scabbard," Bimala thinks, "but the weapon in it was the devil's." All talk of supposed revolution is set aside as Sandip dreams: "I want to have fifty thousand rupees in my hands and blow it in two days, on my own comforts and a few deeds for the country. I want to shed this poor man's disguise and look at the real me, the rich me, in the mirror just once."
Why does Rabindranath make him so crass later on? Is it so that Bimala's passion has a rude awakening and she returns to the comforts of her household? And if so, why must she have this reality-check in the first place? Rabindranath's own experiences during the movement to boycott British goods had apparently left him horrified. He felt, as Anita Desai wrote in a preface for a 1985 edition, "that the boycott of cheap British goods in favour of expensive and poorly made Indian goods was harming the interests of the poor, to whom Swadeshi was an abstract, distant and meaningless term." This explains his sympathies with a Nikhilesh he feels so attuned with. Rabindranath's rebellion here has been to completely identify with the zamindar against what he saw as misguided, though earnest, attempts at snatching up self-government by force. Sandip's charisma must, at this point, become witchcraft. Though the theft at the heart of the novel starts as a matter of the home, we find Sandip—the pied piper of "the world"—come out of the ordeal as reckless, predatory, almost evil. He is a boogeyman of the bhodrolok, who must hold him up to discredit an entire revolutionary spirit. Most other revolutionaries of this movement must be discounted as such, too, for Sandip serves satisfactorily as a representative figure. They must defame and deny Sandip the compassion and sentimentality that Nikhilesh is offered easily. Ultimately, Home and the World's Sandip is a brute with no serious vision for nation-building. All too often, and perhaps too close for comfort, we have seen a similar denial of humanity, the rebuffing of dignity, and a refusal to truly see contemporary revolutionaries with good intentions. They are shown to be people you cannot trust. Similar to Sandip, the powers that be paint them as the liberal's favourite kind of vulgarity—a radical.
Shahriar Shaams has written for Dhaka Tribune, The Business Standard, and The Daily Star. Find him on instagram: @shahriar.shaams.
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