Woman and her Condition in the Short Stories of Rabindranath Tagore, and Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain
Woman and her Condition in the Short Stories of Rabindranath Tagore, and Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain

Summary/Abstract: In many of his letters and interviews, Rabindranath Tagore confesses that he started writing short stories under the influence of the village folktales popular in rural Bengal. Like many authors of the period, though, he represents the condition of the woman in many of these stories. Short stories of Tagore, such as The Hungry Stone and Jibit or Mrit, particularly look at the women of the period. Similarly, Begum Rokeya portrays through her writing the condition of the nineteenth-century Indian woman. Countering the western notions of reform, she locates the idea of womanhood within the local boundaries. Disrupting the ‘norms’, she goes on to represent the nineteenth-century Bengali woman as ‘free’ and ‘enlightened’. I will look at the short stories of these two authors and will examine the representation of the female anxiety in their texts.

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