Tagore’s Women Heralding The “New Indian Woman”: A Critique of the Women’s Question in the Nationalist Discourse

Abstract

Tagore’s women are distinguished for their radical worldview and actions, successfully heralding the ‘new Indian women’ of modern India. The women’s question that proves crucial not only for the colonial justification of a foreign rule over people who apparently ‘brutally’ treat their women but also for the nationalist discourse regarding the sacredness of space that women in India inhabit, gets a new dimension through portrayal of extraordinary women in Tagore’s fictions. His fictional writings foreground images of outstanding women as harbingers of the ‘new era’. Tagore’s strong belief in the potential of woman as the driving principle for meaningful change in the fossilized immobility of a rigid patriarchal society is evident in most of his remarkable female characters such as Chandara, Binodini, Mrinal, Kalyani, Damini, Bimala, Anila, Nandini, Kumudini, and Ela. These characters, projected as the catalyst for social transformation in terms of the woman question, are fervent advocates of women’s rights and caustic critique of social injustices that dehumanize and objectify women in society. This article attempts to explore how such women characters organically contribute, like the blocks of a jigsaw puzzle, to complete Tagore’s imagination of the ‘modern Indian woman’ and critique the nationalist discourse on the women’s question in the nineteenth century Bengal.