The Home and the World

ঘরে বাইরে · Ghare Baire · The Home and the World · published 1916 · ISBN 9780140449860

Rabindranath Tagore — Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941) — India, writing in Bengali. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.

“Because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West.” — The Nobel Committee citation

About Rabindranath Tagore

Bengali poet, composer, painter and reformer — the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He wrote the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh, and spent his life building bridges between Eastern tradition and modern humanist thought.

How it came to be

Tagore wrote the novel in the aftershock of the Swadeshi movement that erupted after the British partition of Bengal in 1905 — a movement he first supported and then publicly left when it turned to bullying the very poor it claimed to speak for. It was serialised in the magazine Sabuj Patra in 1915 and published as a book in 1916; the English version appeared in 1919, translated by his nephew Surendranath Tagore. Satyajit Ray filmed it in 1984.

Summary of The Home and the World

Nikhil, an educated and temperate Bengali landowner, urges his wife Bimala to step out of the inner quarters where highborn women live secluded and see the world for herself. The first man she meets there is Sandip, leader of the Swadeshi agitation, eloquent, magnetic, and convinced that a noble end justifies any means. The three narrate in turn while, outside, the boycott of foreign goods slides from ideal into coercion and violence.

Analysis & legacy

Tagore chose three narrators so that no one would get the last word. Sandip is given the most stirring prose in the book, and that is exactly the danger: the novel lets the reader feel a demagogue’s pull before showing what it costs. Nikhil is morally right, but his rightness is cool and largely powerless. Bimala, pushed between two men and two ideas of the country, is the real centre — her passage out of seclusion shows that emancipation is not one door opened but a series of real choices with real consequences. The sharpest stroke is Tagore’s insistence on naming who pays for the boycott: small traders, most of them Muslim, without the capital to change suppliers. For that the book was attacked by nationalists of its own day, and it remains one of the earliest and most unflinching critiques of nationalism written from inside a colonised nation.

Themes: Nationalism · Women’s emancipation · Ideals & violence · Bengal 1905 · Three narrators

🎧 This page has an AI voice introducing the book (~2 min) — tap “Listen” in the app.

Frequently asked questions

What is The Home and the World about?

Nikhil, an educated and temperate Bengali landowner, urges his wife Bimala to step out of the inner quarters where highborn women live secluded and see the world for herself. The first man she meets there is Sandip, leader of the Swadeshi agitation, eloquent, magnetic, and convinced that a noble…

Is The Home and the World worth reading?

Tagore chose three narrators so that no one would get the last word. Sandip is given the most stirring prose in the book, and that is exactly the danger: the novel lets the reader feel a demagogue’s pull before showing what it costs. Nikhil is morally right, but his rightness is cool and largely…

When did Rabindranath Tagore win the Nobel Prize, and why?

Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913: “Because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West.”

Discover more Nobel Literature