Feministic Undertones in Rabindranath Tagore's/86 Punishment, Vision and Garibala

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