CORE QUESTIONS:
How might we identify with a young woman's emergence from the shelter of a traditional marriage into a life of greater public awareness and responsibility? How does her experience remind us of our own? How similar to our own are the boundaries--geographic, political, social--the characters in this novel live within, stretch, and explore?

TIME REQUIRED: Three weeks.

SUGGESTED GRADE LEVELS: Grade 12.

INTERDISCIPLINARY CONNECTION: Social studies

NEW JERSEY CORE CONTENT STANDARDS: 3.1G 2, 4, 6; H 4,5; 3.2 D 3, 6

OBJECTIVES:

1. Students will read Tagore's novel as a prompt for thinking about and discussing questions of personal development, its influence from culture and tradition, and conflicting allegiances of family, marriage, friendship, and the political scene.

2. Students will learn about the political movement known as swadeshi and its international interests as they read and interpret Tagore's novel.

3. Students will trace out patterns of romance and irony in this novel.

STRATEGIES:
Introduction:

The Home and the World (1915), Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengali novel, tells the story of a young wife, Bimala, caught between conflicting loyalties. She honors her husband in the way of a traditional Hindu wife, but responds with interest to the flirtatious advances made to her by her husband’s old college friend, Sandip. She admires the women who have devoted themselves to her husband’s family and accepted its confining traditions in the past, but she gets involved in a more public role when Sandip entangles her in political activism. Past and present, public and private, domestic and political, personal and social concerns tug at her from different directions as she responds to a simple but unconventional proposal made by her husband: that she should meet him as his equal in the world and test their love there. Tagore allows his three protagonists to narrate the story from their distinct perspectives, each one revealing certain secrets to us that have not been disclosed to the others and each one giving a different slant on the actions they share in common. Their love triangle bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Lancelot, Guenivere, and Arthur from Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and other markers within the novel ally it with the literary form called romance. The political events depicted in the novel closely resemble events of the swadeshi movement in Bengal in the first decade of the 20^th century, in which the author was personally involved.

Interdisciplinary Inquiry Questions:

1.      How does the swadeshi movement depicted in this novel resemble the political activism that went by that name in Bengal in the first decade of the 20^th century? Which character’s actions most resemble the author’s personal involvement in that political movement? How did swadeshi anticipate the activism and struggle for independence led by Mohandas K. Gandhi a few decades later? How does Sandip’s political activism verge on terrorism as we would define it today? How does Sandip’s lifestyle resemble the life of terrorists we might read in the newspaper today?

2.      This novel’s romantic structure (its reprise of many elements of romance) bears an interesting resemblance to the late 16^th century English Morte d’Arthur, which had its immediate sources in medieval French romances and its more distant inspiration in legends of Celtic Britain. How closely does The Home and the World resemble the outlines of the Lancelot-Guenivere-Arthur love story told in those older books? What special meanings come into the story from its romantic structure? How important is romance in modern Indian literature—and in modern Indian films? Indian films show a marked preference for romance, and students might make an interesting study of Indian films in this regard, comparing to The Home and the World.

3.      The swadeshi movement depicted in The Home and the World would have the Bengali people burn their English clothes, spurn foreign goods, and depend more thoroughly on things made in their own country by their own people. Bimala, in accepting this movement, feels that she should no longer wear the English dresses her husband has bought for her. Study the history of English influence on dress in colonial and modern India. To what extent is Indian fashion today distinct and independent of foreign influence? To what extent has the English influence on Indian dress continued and prevailed in the present? Is there any blending today of Indian and western fashion styles, in the United States or in India?

4.      The Home and the World gives many references to its characters’ educations, which are all derived to some extent from Indian culture but also from English colonial influence. Thus, reading this novel offers an opening to some research on education and colonialism in India—a topic that could be extended with other readings in literatures of post-colonial cultures from Africa and elsewhere. What makes Bimala so conscious of her husband’s education? What makes Nikhil so conscious of the degrees and programs of study of the politically radicalized students he speaks with in the novel? What values evinced in Nikhil’s conduct might have come from his European education? What values and interests in his and Sandip’s education and reading might evince a European influence? What educational structures, goals, programs, subjects of study, biases, prejudices, and moral and civic values were bequeathed to Indian education from the English?

Specific Questions Devolving from the Core Questions:

On Universalization:

1. How does Nikhil and Bimala’s household remind us of our own? Would we say that our homes are more traditional than theirs, or less so? Do our homes share any common traditions with theirs? Do any rules, practices, customs, living arrangements, family relationships, or gender roles in our own households resemble theirs in some ways, even if they are not identical with them?

2. Discuss Bimala’s identification with the other women in her husband’s family. What is the basis for her identification with them? Does she admire and respect them? Does she empathize with them? Why or why not? Does she wish to imitate patterns of feminine conduct in her husband’s family? What opportunities does her culture allow her for getting to know others and their ways of being in the world? How would you compare hers with your own opportunities for getting to know others and forming new identifications with people in the world?

3. Consider Nikhil’s cosmopolitanism. In what ways does he identify with values and patterns of living he has learned from the wider world beyond his household and country? Would you say his cosmopolitanism represents a good way of being in the world?

4. Can you identify with Bimala’s unsettledness? Does her position as a young adult challenged to enter the public world and leave the confines of domestic privacy remind you in any ways of your own position in the world?

On Geography:

5. What are the boundaries of Nikhil’s world? Describe his estates and the purview of the zamindar’s realm as depicted in this novel. How much does Nikhil seem to know about the world beyond his estates and beyond his country? How has he learned of these things? [Students might here do some research to learn more about zamindars in Indian society and history.]

6. Study the life of Panchu, the tenant farmer whose case Nikhil takes up, and compare his limitations with Sandip’s and Nikhil’s broader experience in the world. Can you tell stories of people you know whose lives are as constricted geographically as Panchu’s?

7. Sandip is described as a traveler. Where has he traveled? How has his travel influenced him? How much does he know of the world beyond Nikhil’s estates? How much travel have you done? Has travel educated you?

8. How much has Bimala seen of the world beyond her husband’s household and estates? Has her life been more restricted than yours?

Crossing Cultural Boundaries:

9. What do you think of Nikhil’s proposition that Bimala should meet him as an equal in the world beyond their home? Does it seem fair and practical in their social context? Do your family elders expect you to meet them as equals in the world once you have achieved adulthood? What might restrain Bimala or make it difficult for her to accept Nikhil’s proposition?

10. What are Nikhil’s criticisms of his social tradition? What are Sandip’s? How do they express their common educational background, in spite of their differences?

11. How would your feeling about life be different if you lived as Bimala does in the first chapter of The Home and the World?

12. Have you or your friends contemplated making changes in your lives as thoroughgoing as the ones Bimala makes in this story? What consequences would you incur if you changed your relationship with your traditional past in ways similar to the changes Bimala has made in her life?

13. Discuss Bimala’s sense of women’s roles in and contributions to her husband’s family. Consider also her remarks at the beginning about her mother. Does she want to continue in their ways? Does she wish to emulate their examples? To what extent is she willing to respect and emulate their examples and to what extent is she willing to be modern and find a new public role for herself as a woman?

Valuing Storytelling:

14. Why do these narrators want to tell their stories? How does each narrator actually sound in telling his or her story? Discuss the following motives for storytelling and tell which ones you notice in the narrator of this book: justification; self-aggrandizement; reflection; dramatization; creating heroes. Do you see any other motives in their ways of telling their stories?

15. Why has Tagore wanted to have three narrators? What effect has he achieved in setting up their stories as three versions of a common set of events? What seems particularly modern about this?

16. What special values does the three-narrator structure of this novel suggest to its readers? How do its narrators value listening, being heard, and the opportunity for civil argument? How might we translate these things into civic practices in our lives today?

Individual Experience Reflecting Cultural Experience:

17. Which character in this novel represents traditional Indian culture most piously?

18. How does each character in The Home and the World represent Indian culture in a unique way?

19. How do the various characters of this novel manage foreign, colonial influences in their lives? Is any character in the novel without such influence?

20. How would you evaluate the foreign influences the characters in this novel must respond to? Do some seem benign? Do some seem pernicious? What advice would you give these characters about dealing with such influences?

21. To what extent do you find your own life embodying cultural influences that are foreign to those of your personal origins? Would you make any comparisons between yourself and characters in this novel, in this regard?

22. What has Rabindranath Tagore done to make this novel, which owes much to the English tradition of the romance novel, particularly Indian? What has Tagore borrowed from the European novel and what has he put into this book that only an Indian writer could imagine?

23. Has reading this novel made you more aware of an individual’s responsibilities to diverse cultural influences and interests? Does it make you see some good in combining diverse cultural influences, or does it make you feel you should instead be culturally pure and completely distinct in your culture?

24. Have you, in reading The Home and the World, found yourself understanding actions in a character that you would probably not take in your own life, if you found yourself in a situation similar to that of this character? Have you been surprised, in reading the book, to find yourself understanding and agreeing with any action by a character that you would have condemned in the past as an unworthy action? Has the book broadened your range of empathy to any extent?

Reading Lessons:
Pre-reading Activities:

The teacher should prepare the class for reading a novel with multiple narrators. Perhaps students will have had some experience with such reading, or with viewing a film narrated in this way. A classic example from the English tradition is Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. A recent successful film with multiple narrative perspectives is the German work Run, Lola, Run, which has been released internationally. Of course, students’ experience with gossip provides a ready model for such multiple-perspective storytelling. The teacher might read a few brief passages from the novel to show, as an introduction to its technique, how its three narrators treat a single topic or event in their unique ways. Also by way of introducing the novel, the teacher might give some brief historical and biographical background on the early 20^th century swadeshi movement in Bengal and Rabindranath Tagore’s involvement in it. The novel’s first readers were Bengali; it was written in their language and depicted events they would have been recently acquainted with. Tagore had less reason to include more political information in the novel for them than a writer would have in approaching this same topic in a new work today. This should be pointed out to the students and should justify giving them some historical introduction. Early Reading Activities:

The teacher should be sure students understand something about romance as a literary genre. He or she might introduce this topic by telling over briefly and in an engaging way the outlines of the story of Lancelot, Guenivere, and Arthur, from the English and European literary tradition. This story might already be familiar to students from films they have seen or from allusions made to it in other readings they have done.

The teacher should also set out some markers for the genre of romance: an adventurous tale, close psychological realism about love and intimacy, devotion by the hero to high ideals, chivalrous conduct by men towards women, distinct gender roles, etc. Close reading of the novel’s opening passages will reveal Nikhil’s and Bimala’s devotion to ideals (and Bimala’s uncertainty about hers); similar close readings in the class of selected passages from elsewhere in the text should turn up evidence of these other markers, as well. The teacher can guide the students in finding them at first and later ask them to find others on their own.

To get used to the novel’s multiple-narration, students might read selected passages aloud, finding, perhaps with the teacher’s help, passages that retell a single event from each narrator’s perspective. These might be read aloud in the class and dramatized. Discussion should ensue. The teacher can ask students to interpret attitudes, values, or moods that distinguish the novel’s three narrators. The teacher should also make sure now that students appreciate the deliberative and reflective disposition all three narrators bring to their telling of the tale, as if the novel were not a process of telling action so much as one of introspection and self-discovery dramatized for its readers.Mid-point Reading Activity:

Since The Home and the World’s three narrators share a deliberative approach to the actions their story draws them into, it would be well to analyze with students the rhetoric of each character’s deliberation. A close reading will reveal that each speaks with a habit of warranting, using cultural commonplaces to justify his or her position on whatever matter has prompted the latest expression of deliberation. The teacher can explain this process of warranting and something of its long tradition in law, in debate, in argument, and even in conversation and everyday speech, in European culture and civic life. Then, students can be asked to study selected statements by the novel’s three narrators for their warrants and especially for their uses of commonplaces as warrants. For instance, when Sandip says, “Every man has a natural right to possess and therefore greed is natural,” his egoism uses “nature” as its warrant. When he says, “Theft becomes necessary only because of miserliness, so its sin must be divided between the miser and the thief,” he warrants his assertions by claiming truth from commonplace belief about the badness of misers. Once students have learned something of this kind of speech, they can be asked to collect more examples from the book and present them in class for analysis and discussion. Taking this a step further, they might use the most general statements of this kind from the novel’s three protagonists as speaking points in debates to be held in class on such topics as ownership, selfishness, flirtation, independence, social responsibility, cultural pride, etc. Statements on these topics and the characters’ opposing arguments about them, which students can trace in their reading, could prompt interesting debates in class, with students coming up with contemporary examples to support or oppose them. These “speaking points” might also—or rather—be used as prompts for composition, asking students to write their own views in response to some of the more compelling or controversial statements made by Sandip, Bimala, and Nikhil. As these activities are pursued, the teacher should make sure students understand the role of debate in civic life in western democracies and in many other countries as well.

An important question of critical reading should be broached here: Does the author side more with one of these narrators than another? Reading and learning about Tagore’s personal character through his biography, available most comprehensively in Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-minded Man (1995) but also in many internet sites, encyclopedias, and other reference books, students might come to see his resemblance to Nikhil and thus suspect this character to be his alter-ego and the novel’s hero. We might come to this conclusion for another reason: Nikhil has the “last word” in the novel, so to speak, culminating its action with a selfless heroic action. The teacher should help students understand how the structure of the novel and the game of literary interpretation allow for and encourage such a determination.

Later Reading Activities:

Once students have advanced in their reading of the book, the teacher can open up a discussion about heroism in its story. Which of this novel’s three principal characters deserves to be called its hero? Some debate should ensue on this question. What claims might Nikhil and Sandip have on the title of “hero,” if we compare them to the legendary heroes Arthur and Lancelot, whom they resemble? Which of the two might seem more heroic in an actual political situation? Who in contemporary society—here and abroad—might prefer Nikhil, and who might prefer Sandip as a heroic model? Which of these men treats Bimala more heroically? How true today is the old chivalric claim of honor to women as a form of heroism? How is each of these men—Sandip and Nikhil—modern in his treatment of Bimala, and is he deserving of the title hero for his new way of treating and admiring this woman? What claim could Bimala make to being the novel’s heroine? What does she do that is exalted, generous, or of universal merit? Whom does she resemble among heroines from other stories? Could we see the shakti, or personification of a divinity’s power, in Hindu myth as heroic? Could we call Bimala heroic for following Sandip’s plan that she should be his shakti? Is she rather more heroic in her troubled allegiance to her husband? Is Nikhil really the hero, for his bold and selfless gesture in the novel’s final scene? Could we say, from our reading of Tagore’s biography, that Nikhil must be the author’s intended hero, because he most closely resembles the political and social ideals Tagore strove to embody in his life?

RESOURCES:
Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World. Trans. Surendranath Tagore. London and New York: Penguin Books, 1985. [Original Bengali edition entitled ghare baire published serially in 1915 and as a book in 1916.]

Dutta, Krishna and Andrew Robinson. Rabindranath Tagore: the Myriad-minded Man. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

ASSESSMENT:
Any of the “core questions” given above sequence might be used as prompts for essay writing or as open-ended questions for written response and discussion, to be graded with rubrics suited to the New Jersey Core Content Standards noted above. They might be presented strictly as prompts for analysis of ideas suggested in The Home and the World, incorporating research on swadeshi, Indian domestic culture, the biography of Rabindranath Tagore, etc. Or, they might be broadened to allow students an opportunity to reflect in writing on their own observations, experiences, questions, and expectations about cultural and civic issues implied in the questions. The “Interdisciplinary Inquiry Questions” given at the beginning ould also become research papers written by students using a variety of inquiry methods: library research, interview, internet research, etc.