Rabindranath Tagore at 164: Translator Sharmistha Mohanty on the writer’s profound empathy for women

If there is one thing that flows like blood through the veins of these stories, it is helplessness. Their power is in the endurance and strength that lies after it. Tagore’s direct narrative prose is clear water. At times the light changes over it, a shadow passes, and when night falls the water too takes on night’s opacity. The reasons for power and pain cannot always be traced to their precise sources.

Charu can do nothing as the man she loves goes away, to a place she can never reach, like Ratan, the little girl whose employer goes back to the city, leaving her behind, and Uma, powerless as her only notebook is taken away from her. This is a woman's helplessness, a woman in a certain place and time, but like any phenomenon seen keenly, it becomes more than itself, becomes a complex aspect of the human.

I use the word helpless, and no other can be substituted for it. That is what these women are, because there is no hope that anything will be redeemed in their lives. “Amal is in good health, yet he does not write. How did this complete and terrible break come about?” Charu wants to ask Amal...

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