Gora (Modern Classics)
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
Gora
Translated by
Radha Chakravarty
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Contents
About the Author
Introduction
Gora
Epilogue
Notes and Glossary
References
Copyright Page
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GORA
Born in 1861, Rabindranath Tagore was one of the key figures of the Bengal Renaissance. He started writing at an early age, and by the turn of the century had become a household name in Bengal as a poet, a songwriter, a playwright, an essayist, a short story writer and a novelist. In 1913 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his verse collection Gitanjali. At about the same time he founded Visva Bharati, a university located in Shantiniketan near Kolkata. Called the ‘Great Sentinel’ of modern India by Mahatma Gandhi, Tagore steered clear of active politics, but is famous for returning the knighthood conferred on him as a gesture of protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919.
Tagore was a pioneering literary figure, renowned for his ceaseless innovations in poetry, prose, drama, music and painting, which he took up late in life. His works include some sixty collections of verse, novels like Gora, Chokher Bali (A Grain of Sand) and Ghare Baire (Home and the World), plays like Rakta Karabi (Red Oleanders) and Post Office, over a hundred short stories, essays on religious, social and literary topics, and over 2,000 songs, including the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
Rabindranath Tagore died in 1941. His eminence as India’s greatest modern poet remains unchallenged to this day.
Radha Chakravarty teaches English in Gargi College, University of Delhi. She has translated several of Tagore’s works, including Boyhood Days, Chokher Bali and Farewell Song: Shesher Kabita. Other works in translation include Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Kapalkundala, In the Name of the Mother by Mahasweta Devi, and Crossings: Stories from Bangladesh and India. She has edited Bodymaps: Stories by South Asian Women and co-edited Writing Feminism: South Asian Voices and Writing Freedom: South Asian Voices. Her latest book is Feminism and Contemporary Women Writers. She is currently translating a collection of Tagore’s writings for children and co-editing The New Tagore Reader for Visva-Bharati.
Introduction
Gora was serialized in Prabashi from Bhadra 1314 to Phalgun 1316 in the Bengali calendar (August 1907 to February 1910), and appeared as a book in the Bengali year 1316 (February 1910). Several portions of the serialized original were omitted from this book version. Some of the deleted passages were restored in the Visva-Bharati edition of 1928. The Rabindra Rachanabali of 1941 restored some more of the excised passages, and is now regarded as the standard edition, upon which the present translation is based.
This monumental, dynamic novel, so vibrant with ideas, passions and conflicts, has lost none of its immediacy and relevance today. The idea for the book probably occurred to Tagore in 1904, when he narrated the story at the request of a visitor to Shilaidaha, the Irishwoman Margaret Noble who took the name of Sister Nivedita when she became the disciple of Swami Vivekananda (Dutta and Robinson 154). In a letter to W.W. Pearson (July 1922) Tagore says: ‘You ask me what connection had the writing of Gora with Sister Nivedita. She was our guest in Shilida and in … improvising a story according to her request I gave her something which came very near to the plot of Gora’ (Pal 1990, 215). The basic plot concerns the extraordinarily fair-skinned young man Gora, an orthodox Hindu nationalist who spurns the Brahmo Samaj but falls in love with a Brahmo girl Sucharita. Gora ultimately discovers that he is not a Hindu, but the orphaned child of an Irishman killed during the 1857 uprising. In the published novel, Gora and Sucharita are united in the end, but in the story that Tagore narrated in 1904, the Brahmo girl rejects Gora upon discovering his European origins. Tagore says he wanted to demonstrate to Nivedita the strength of orthodox prejudice against Europeans, but his story made her angry, and she accused him of being unfair to Hindu women. ‘No, it can’t be so. It will be a great tragedy not to unite the two. Why won’t you let things happen in literature that do not happen in real life?… Unite them. United they must be.’1 This might explain why Tagore changed the ending in the published version, but it is equally likely that the change of storyline was triggered by his disillusionment with the Swadeshi movement in 1905 and his awareness that women were now coming out of purdah to claim greater autonomy in their lives.
Since Gora was born in 1857, the narrative is probably set in the 1880s, when he would have finished his studies at the University. The action of the novel thus takes place about three decades before the date of its composition. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the initial euphoria about the benefits of exposure to western culture had begun to give way to a certain disenchantment, for it had become clear that access to western education and culture did not grant Indian intellectuals equality with their British rulers. Bengali society at that time was divided into two wings, the liberals and the conservatives, who were engaged in a lively debate about every aspect of Bengali life.
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