Rabindranath Tagore was not a feminist in the way modern critics understand the term. He was more a benevolent patriarch. In his novels women are mostly daughters, wives, sweethearts and sisters.

There are very few young mothers to be found in the Tagore fictional oeuvre. Unlike Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, we hardly find Tagore eulogising young motherhood. Almost all his young married heroines — Charulata, Bimala, Mrinal and Binodini, are childless — and others, like, Lalita, Suchorita, Labanya and Hemnalini are unmarried and in the care of educated, enlightened and doting fathers.

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Also, in no way does Tagore dismantle the creed of patriarchy. Mrinal of Streer Patra (Wife’s Letter) asks barbed questions but only after positing herself squarely out of the reach of her mean-spirited in-laws.

In Jogajog (Connections), at the risk of being trapped in a loveless marriage for the rest of her life, when Kumudini realises that she is pregnant, she sees no option except returning to her coarse and offensive husband.

In Gora, when the eponymous hero realises that he isn’t a caste Brahmin but a white Irish orphan, as per the original ending of the novel, his relationship with Suchorita comes to a melancholic end. As Tagore had envisioned it, at the end Suchorita comes to Gora and asks him what her gesture regarding their marriage should be. He asks her to decide for herself. Suchorita touches Gora’s feet and leaves quietly.

For all intents and purposes this is a Brahmo girl’s rejection of an outcast of Hindu society. It was only on the behest of Sister Nivedita that Tagore changed the ending to a happy one in which Gora and Suchorita unite in marriage after the revelation of the secret of Gora’s birth. Nivedita’s request to Tagore was to accomplish in fiction what was impossible to execute in real life. Tagore bowed to her wish.

In Shesher Kobita after the Amit-Labanya love-relationship peters out, the duo get married to their admirers Katy and Shobhonlal. Amit goes so far as to describe Labanya as a lake (dighi) to be adored from a distance and Katy as a tumbler full of water (ghotir jol) to be used for mundane purposes. Just as he renames Labanya Bonya, Katy to him becomes Keya.

Amit’s epigrams prune women to size to suit the purposes of patriarchy. But stripped of his charm, who exactly is Amit Ray? Surely not the salt of the earth like Shobhonlal, but rather a slick conversationist, a heart-breaker and a womaniser who falters for the first time before the natural appeal and maturity of Labanya.

That Labanya recognises the peril of joining her future to his says a lot about her perspicacity and raises her above the woman-nature-emotion and man-culture-intellect binaries that did the rounds in Tagore’s society.

When we come to his plays we find Tagore presenting his women in figurative terms. Nandini, the heroine of Raktakarabi decked in palash flowers, is spring personified. Queen Sudarshana of Raja is the jejune, feminine soul yearning for surface beauty, too green to value the strength and resolve of inner splendour and soul strength. The Raja or King in both plays is the well of mystery, resurgence, potency and anagnorisis. Both plays draw their vigour from the shrouded male rather than the nimble, energetic female.

A charge laid at the door of Tagore is his blameworthy conduct of marrying off his minor daughters in Debendranath’s lifetime so that he could draw upon Maharshi’s funds for their marriage expenses. It is commonly felt that such injustice is not expected from an enlightened soul.

Having charted Tagore’s limitations in his fictional portrayal of the fair sex and his conduct towards his daughters, let us appraise his contribution towards the uplift of the women of his times.

At a very young age, Tagore was sent to England where he heard English and Scottish music and probably danced to their tunes. Doubtless he discovered the pleasure of dancing. An art-form that gave him pleasure and intense aesthetic satisfaction in his adolescence was regarded as the whore’s art in the Bengal of his time. Urban Bengal at that time had no dance-form except perhaps the khaemta, a spurious hip-swinging movement practiced by the ladies of the night to titillate their babus. For classical dance performances, baijis were commissioned by zamindars from Lucknow.

Everyone talks about Tagore’s role as an educationist but what is unsung is his inexorable enterprise to give female singing and dancing respectability in Bengal. Returning from the Occident, Tagore composed operas — wonderful song, dance and drama conglomerates. One purpose was to provide opportunities to the Thakurbadi women to give vent to their dancing skills.

His best compositions have haunting female characters — Chitrangada, Prakriti and her mother in Chandalika, Rani of Shapmochan, Ishkaboni and the Queen of Tasher Desh and the multi-layered character of Shyama — beloved, reprobate, princess and drifter.

Unlike Shakespearean drama, Tagore had no intention of projecting men in the guise of women on stage. The first girl-student to perform in public in one of his operas was Gauri Bhanja. Tagore personally sought consent from her parents before her stage-performance. Gauri’s mother famously replied, “We give her to you, Gurudeb. If she earns praise it is yours. If she earns censure, that is yours too”.

That Tagore took female dance and song very seriously is betrayed from his untiring stage presence at the time of performance. In his seventies, plagued by age-related ailments, Gurudeb would be ensconced in his signature easy-chair on stage in full view of the audience while his students danced. The message beamed forth was that their performance had his seal of approval and was not to be taken as a lewd act.

Casting about for “respectable” dance movements, Tagore chose Manipuri and Kathakali forms for their prominent hand and torso movements in place of hip-swinging, which was regarded as vulgar and whorish in those times. If today, the Bengali woman is characterised by her reading habit and love for song and dance, she has Tagore to thank for opening a whole new avenue for her pleasure and enrichment.

Returning to our discussion of Tagore’s fiction, we find Tagore leaving many of his major works open-ended. Two world-class stories, Streer Patra (The Wife’s Letter) and Manbhanjan (Reconciliation of a Love Quarrel), fan out into a larger, more exigent reality at the very moment of their fictional conclusion.

Mrinal begins her letter with the familiar address of the subservient wife: Sricharanakamaleshu (One to whose lotus-feet I submit), and ends it with Amio bnachbo, ami bnachlum, tomader charantalayshraychhinno Mrinal (I too shall live, I am relieved to live at last, one who has severed herself from your family’s feet). The resolute severance and the primordial sea of Puri roaring in the background propel the narrative beyond the constricted matrix of upper-caste, Hindu, zamindari existence. Fed up with a barren marital life, a woman voluntarily and proudly strikes out on her own.

Manbhanjan is even more radical. The first emotion that strikes the slighted Giribala, wife of the zamindar Gopinath, is curiosity. Night after night, from the zenana-seat in the theatre, she observes the luscious actress who is her husband’s all-encompassing love interest. Returning home she rehearses the songs and dance-moves she has observed in the threatre, flitting across her spacious terrace.

When her husband returns to Kolkata after a love-soiree with his mistress, they hear that the actress has been toppled by a new-comer who at present is winning the hearts of the Kolkata elite with her theatrical skills. The husband rushes to the hall to discover to his horror that his abandoned wife, resplendent in silks and jewellery, in the new diva on stage.

He howls invectives and tries to pull her down. Guards throw him out of the hall. The story ends on a note of rapture — Everyone in Kolkata partook of the pleasure of watching Giribala dance that night except her husband.

A story that could have ended in lamentation over a woman’s crossing the chalk-circle of respectable housewifery to a life of disrepute and sexual recklessness, actually ends in a note of carnival and authorial endorsement of female initiative. Tagore’s fictional work is speckled with instances of such carnivalesque and nonconformist representation of female conduct.

His representation of companionate marriage is fascinating. In Ghare Baire (Home and Outside), Nikhilesh views his marriage as a tryst between equals.

So long as Bimala is enamoured of the flamboyant, fire-spewing Sandip, Nikhilesh suffers and waits for Bimala to make an informed choice. In spite of being a strong, idealistic man, Nikhilesh jeopardises the future of his zamindari by giving priority to his private marital troubles over the fate of his hapless subjects.

In Chokher Bali (Sand Lodged in the Eye), Tagore transforms a widow — a piteous entity in his time — into an alluring, seductive heroine. Though I do not have data to support my contention I am sure Tagore did a lot to enhance the romance quotient of widows by portraying them in his work as women of mystic and enigma.

In novels like Dui Bon, Shesher Kobita and Gora substantial space is reserved for unmarried women who nurture dreams of public life and public service.

Urmi of Dui Bon shares, with her father, the dream of sailing to England to study medicine so that the lives of young Indians like her departed brother Hemanta can be saved by her after her return.

She is diverted into a failed engagement with the opportunist Nirod and a fling with her brother-in-law Sashanka, but at the end (again this is an open-ended novel) Urmi is on her way to Bombay from where she will sail to the West to fulfill her purpose.

Once her father weds a second time, Labanya, heroine of Dui Bon, amicably leaves the parental home to take up service as governess. In Gora the docile Suchorita is the heroine, but the sprightly Lalita, who braves public disgrace and sails in a steamer throughout the night with the young, personable Binoy, is the more vivacious and mutinous one.

To those accuse him of double standards I say that hemmed in by familial, financial and societal constraints, the poet perhaps could not stand by his daughters in the best possible manner. However, what he failed to achieve in reality he fulfilled in his artistic work. He left a blue-print for women for the purpose of enhancing and intensifying their inner lives and public horizons.

Tagore’s feminism is to be found in his life-long engagement with the academic, emotional and aesthetic growth of the women of his country. In this, he is no less than a social reformer who evinces extraordinary prescience and generosity of spirit.