Towards Freedom : Critical Essays on Rabindranath Tagore's Ghare Baire : The Home and the World

Contents: Acknowledgements. Notes on contributors. 1. Introduction. 2. The role of Tagore's literature/Niharranjan Ray. Home/Ghare: 3. Andare Antare: Inner worlds/Sambuddha Chakrabarti. 4. Teaching the wife: Miss Gilby, the English women, and the Antahpur/Shampa Roy. 5. Goddesses, women and the clutch of metaphors in Ghare Baire/Saswati Sengupta. 6. Beyond the intricate web of words: an essay on Tagore's Ghare Baire/Shirshendu Chakrabarti. World/Baire: 7. Contesting modernities: the two men in Ghare/Baire/Sharmila Purkayastha. 8. The peasant in Ghare Baire/Sumanta Banerjee. 9. Understanding Panchu: Swadeshi, Ghare Baire, and the lower-caste peasants of Eastern Bengal/Sekhar Bandyopadhyay. 10. Mirjan from the margins/Saswati Sengupta, Shampa Roy and Sharmila Purkayastha. Select bibliography. Index.

"Towards Freedom is a collection of critical essays on the issues raised by Tagore's novel in a contemporary world where differences of religion, region, class, caste, gender etc., constantly demand to be addressed. It focuses upon the crafting of the novel out of complex historical contexts of caste, class and gender politics. By examining the play of ideologies in this novel, the anthology aims to help students recognise the importance of locating imaginative literature within its histories. Given that most of these structured hierarchies of oppression function powerfully in our lives even today. Towards Freedom stresses the continuing relevance of engaging with the issues raised by a novel which looks at the private and the political as intertwined."