Navigating the Ghat: Gender and nation in Tagore's short fiction

During the latter decades of the nineteenth-century, questions about the roles and rights of women were ostensibly overtaken by the rhetoric of nationalist and imperialist forces who wanted to use Indian women as a cultural cornerstone in the arguments over whether Britain had the right to rule India. Rabindranath Tagore, in a series of proto-feminist short stories written between 1892 and 1895, offered a dissenting perspective to the idea that the "women's question" disappeared during this time through his depictions of the physical and psychological turmoil experienced by Bengali men and women caught between the competing legal and societal regulations of British-controlled India. Tagore's heroines existed within the liminal spaces created by nationalistic and imperialistic ideologies and began to emerge as hybrid versions of simultaneously traditional and modernized Bengali subjects. His depictions of their resistance to externally imposed identifications present a powerful critique of the way nation, gender, and imperialism intersect under colonial rule.