Tagore′s Ideas of the New Woman

A notable contribution on Tagore’s vision of womanhood

This book theorizes the continuous reconfigurations—‘making’ and ‘unmaking’—of female subjectivity in Tagore’s life, his times, and his works. This transhistorical approach in the book makes gender formations and discourses of the past relevant and necessary to the understanding of postmodern gender issues and ideologies.

A unique feature of this compilation is the variety of genres that it covers, ranging from Tagore’s poems, dance dramas, dance forms and their innovative uses, the gender-specific nature of several Rabindrasangeet, his travel writings and paintings, to highlighting the postmodern reworks of Tagore’s novels on celluloid. On the whole, this edited collection with its extensive focus on the issues of gender, heterosexual love, marriage and patriarchy in relation to the works of Tagore strengthens the claim that the politics of culture and the gendering of social subjectivity were intrinsic to the representative ideologies of literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century.