The Home and the World

By: Rabindranath Tagore

Narrated by: Michael Fitzpatrick

The Home and the World is a 1916 novel by Rabindranath Tagore and is both a love story and a narrative of political awakening. The book reveals Tagore’s inner struggle between his embrace of Western culture and his opposition to it. These opposing ideals are portrayed in two of the main characters, the rational Nikhil who opposes violence and the radical Sandip. The story is set in 1908 on the estate of a Bengali noble, where the main character, Bimala, is torn between her loyalty to her husband, Nikhil, and the demands made on her by the radical leader, Sandip. Her attempts to resolve the conflict between the home and the world mirror the conflict in India itself, and foreshadows the unrest that accompanied the partition of the subcontinent between India and Pakistan in 1947.

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