The Home and the World

Nikhil, a wealthy and idealistic landowner in Bengal, wants his wife Bimala to be free, and encourages her to leave the women's quarters and join the world. Then his old friend Sandip arrives, a charismatic leader of the movement to boycott British goods, and Bimala is swept away by his passion for the nation and for her.

Told in turn by its three main characters, the novel was published in Bengali in 1916 and is a clear-eyed look at nationalism, idealism and violence during the movement against the partition of Bengal. Satyajit Ray filmed it in 1984. For Tagore's poetry, read Gitanjali.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was born in Calcutta, the youngest son of a great Bengali family of reformers and artists. He wrote poems, stories, novels, plays and some two thousand songs, and his songs became the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh.

He founded a school in the countryside at Santiniketan, which grew into a university, and in 1913 became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize, for Gitanjali. In 1919 he returned his British knighthood in protest at the massacre at Amritsar. The Home and the World and The Post Office show his range.