Caught between Tradition and Modernity: A Reading of Rabindranath’s “Nastaneer”

Abstract

In 1878, Tagore made his first trip to England at the age of seventeen. The freedom cherished by the British women motivated young Tagore to concentrate upon the confinements of Bengali women. After attending a party where British men and women mixed freely, Tagore wrote a letter condemning women’s imprisonment, strictly observed in Bengal:

It is only natural that men and women should seek amusement together. Women are a part of the human race and God has created them as part of society. To consider the enjoyment of free mixing between people to be a cardinal sin, to be unsociable and to turn it into a sensational matter is not only abnormal, it is unsocial, and therefore in a sense uncivilized. Men are engrossed in all manner of amusement in the outside world, while women are like their privately owned tamed animals, chained docilely to the walls of the innermost chambers of the houses. (Tagore, Letters 88)

Tagore toiled hard to posit the surge of women emancipation within the cultural context of India. Consequently, his effort encountered innumerable oppositions of the orthodox upholders of rigid patriarchal norms. Even his brother Dwijendranath could not embrace Tagore’s reformist ideals. The Tagore household advocated the ideas of the emancipation of Bengali women, the necessity of female education, yet, it could not altogether sever its ties with the custom of purdah, the sadar-andar compartmentalization or the tradition of palki. Thus, Tagore was posited somewhere between tradition and modernity, social dictates and individual assertions, that is to say, between social scripting and individual scripting. This paper will locate individual scripting and its tragic predicament in Tagore’s short story, “The Broken Nest” (“Nastaneer”,1901)

DOI - https://doi.org/10.65525/SVUP.9788199392083.2025.25-33.