Abstract:
As a writer of short stories, Rabindranath Tagore ranks
among the great short story writers of the world like Guy De
Maupassant, Edgar Allan Poe, Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekov. He
raised the Bengali short stories to the status of an independent
literary form. Credited with introducing colloquial speech into
Bengali literature, his short stories are fine works of art immensely
valuable due to realistic depiction of rural and urban Bengal.
However, these stories are by no means confined to the limits of
time and space of Bengal at a particular period and have a
universal appeal.
The themes of Tagore's short stories mostly revolve
around the problems of joint family system, family clashes, social
criticism in a wider sense, love; passionate or placid, outside
marriage ties born out of conjugal bond and love in its
waywardness and eccentricities. Moreover his stories often focus
on the struggles of women in a traditional Indian society and many
of them are concerned with marital relationships and the various
forms and issues of conflict between husband and wife