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ABSTRACT
This article examines female protagonists in Rabindranath Tagore's stories and novellas - specifically Charu (A Broken Nest, 1901), Mrinal (The Wife's Letter, 1914), Kamala (Musalmani, 1941), Anila (House Number 1, 1917), Chandara (Punishment, 1893) and Boshtomi (Devotee, 1916) - from a social anthropological viewpoint, focusing on gender and time-based kinship relations. Here, kinship is defined as an extension of familial relationships to the community (common ethnic-social life, locality and religion) in such a way as to achieve progressively higher levels of social integration and extensive social networks through marriage alliances and lines of descent. Studying how the characters placed the universality of family and kinship structures into question, I argue that parameters of kinship organisation need to be redefined, with plurality and difference as the basis of inquiry rather than universality.
KEYWORDS
biological descent, family, gender, kinship, marriage alliance
Tagore's Life
Edward Thompson said of Rabindranath Tagore that '[n]ot a man only but an age has made its way at last into history. . . . He has summed up in himself a whole age, in which India had moved into the modern world' (Thompson, 1926; cited in Fraser 2013: 1; see also Srinivasa Iyengar 1985: 103).
Tagore always pointed out that a tree stood out as a distinctive entity in its universe. He also indicated that the tree cannot subsist on unfriendly atmosphere and mutual exclusion, since it thrived by maintaining a union with the macrocosm, retaining its individualism in its separateness, which, in turn, thrived in perfect harmony with its world of the sun and the soil and the seasons (Fraser 2013). This was the harmony that Tagore experienced at Jorasako, his family home in Calcutta, where he was born in 1861 and where he breathed his last in 1941. Tagore himself explained: 'I was born in what was then the metropolis of British india. My ancestors came floating to Calcutta upon the earliest tide of the fluctuating fortune of the East india Company. The conventional code of life for our family thereupon became a confluence of three cultures, the Hindu, the Mohammedan and the British' (cited in Fraser 2013: 4). Very early in life, Tagore learnt the boundaries that could be imposed by unimaginative individuals as an impediment to freedom,...