Gora in Bengali is considered to be the best novel by Rabindranath Tagore for its epic range. Though written between 1907 and 1909 (when the author was in his forties), the action of the text is clearly set at least thirty years earlier, in the early 1880s and takes into account events that happened even earlier. If one takes into consideration the moment of Gora’s birth, then the action of the narrative should be said to begin from the year 1857. The novel is considered central to the nation question because it captures the Indian nationalist upsurge of the late nineteenth-early twentieth century in all its tragic complexity. Gora is produced in an awareness of Lord Curzon’s proposed partition of Bengal and the consequent crystallization of the Bengal-Indian identity. The narrative evokes the image of a beauteous golden Bengal and this evocation also sustains the longing for its distinct identity and the urge for an emancipated desh (nation). At the same time the novel is equally embedded in questions of religion, modernity, and more particularly, orthodox Hinduism’s negotiation with colonial modernity’s ‘secular’ representations. It maps the ideological upheavals within the Bengali Hindu psyche, enunciating the first phase of Young Bengal’s arrogant agnosticism, the second phase of the emergence of reformist sects such as the Brahmo Samaj, and the final phase of resurgent neo-Hinduism that asserts itself in an unabashed, aggressive manner. It is also this neo-Hindu revival/resurgence in Bengal that also shapes its nationalist intent. Yet, Tagore’s narrative is resolved by demolishing the very basis of any firm identity position. In its broadest and most humane of senses, Gora is rendered ‘foundational’ to India today.
The book under review revisits Tagore’s text from perspectives as varied and interdisciplinary as textual and genre studies; translation and reception studies; narration, gender, race and caste studies. The eleven contributors, including the editor have assessed the novel from as many different perspectives as possible and thus give us a comprehensive understanding of this complex yet seminal text.
Gora was published serially in Prabasi from August 1908 to February 1910 in 76 chapters and a conclusion. In April 1909, while twenty instalments of Gora had been published and eight more were to come, Kuntaline Press published an incomplete edition of the novel. It contained the first 44 chapters till Lalita’s attempt to start a girls’ school at Sucharita’s house and its failure. This is probably the only instance in the entire Tagore literary corpus, where a novel was published in book form, while the narrative was still halfway. This makes an interesting phenomenon in itself. Positing the vital difference between a ‘work’ and a ‘text,’ in the first essay Spandana Bhowmik decodes the causes/contents for change and elisions in Rabindranath’s narratives and gives the readers a taste of Textual History studies as an emergent discipline. She also explores why Tagore was in such a hurry to see his novel in a book form.
Ananya Dutta Gupta revisits the generic categories of the ‘novel’ and ‘epic’ and their intertwined paths in the context of Gora. According to her the novel’s capacity to simulate the epic strain also implicitly points towards a certain flexibility and adaptability in the epic itself. Thus Gora may be described as an epic in its projected literary function and, at the same time, a novel in its representational philosophy and technique so that at the end it remains an open-ended Bakhtinian novel, culminating in the rejection of closure.
Discussing a distinctive Indian patriotic imaginary that Rabindranath Tagore elaborated in Gora, Tanika Sarkar contends that the novel offers a radically new way of being an Indian patriot. Elaborating the theme of patriotism alone, what moves Sarkar most in the novel is its eventful failure to secure a reliable and convincing foundation for patriotism and in its own way it is a heroic failure. This is because patriotism slides into something more than a politics of place, a certain definition of the culture of the land becomes its defining essence. She further argues that it seems undeniable that Rabindranath of the Swadeshi era provided the model for the patriotic language of the early Gora in the novel. The novel is therefore autobiographical in a split mode as the early and later Gora reflect the two different political moments in Rabindranath’s life.