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In Sharmistha Mohanty’s reading of Rabindranath Tagore, women’s lives are marked by helplessness—but not defined by it. In the stories collected in Broken Nest and Other Stories, translated from Bengali by Mohanty, characters such as Charu, Ratan and Uma endure constraints that men can move beyond. Their dignity and strength persist within those limits, rather than appearing as easy escape or triumph.
That argument comes from Mohanty’s preface, reproduced as a book excerpt by Scroll.in on May 9, 2025. The “at 164” in the headline is the occasion’s anniversary framing; the excerpt itself is not an independent account of Tagore’s birth date.
What does Mohanty see in Tagore’s women characters?
Mohanty’s central claim is that helplessness runs through these stories, while women’s endurance and strength remain present inside it. The characters are not made powerful by escaping their circumstances. Instead, the stories attend to what it means to live with limits imposed by family, social position and the expectations of their time.
Three women make that tension concrete:
- Charu cannot follow the man she loves.
- Ratan is left behind when the man who employs her returns to the city.
- Uma has her notebook taken away.
These situations are different, but each involves a woman’s attachment or expression being constrained by someone else’s choices. Mohanty’s formulation is stark: “The only thing for them to do is endure, and this they are infinitely capable of.” Endurance here signals capacity and dignity, not that the circumstances are fair or freely chosen.
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Why does movement matter?
Mohanty draws a recurring contrast between men who travel over rivers and seas and women who remain in place. The women cannot leave, return to their parents’ home, or go with the person they love. Movement becomes more than a plot detail: it makes the unequal distribution of freedom visible.
As Mohanty puts it, “The profound connection, perhaps even an equivalence, between movement and human freedom is fundamental.” Against the men’s journeys, women’s imposed stasis becomes a form of suffering. The force of the contrast is especially apparent at the endings of stories, where, in her account, the divide between movement and stasis comes sharply into view.
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How does this perspective reach beyond individual characters?
Mohanty places Tagore’s women across class and caste, and in both urban and rural settings. She reads his attention to their circumstances as more than compassion: the stories unsettle the assumption that marriage and family necessarily fulfil a woman’s life.
This is Mohanty’s interpretation in her preface, not a claim established here through a survey of scholarship. Its emphasis is on the specificity of the women’s situations and on how those situations become part of a larger human experience without losing their gendered constraints.
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What is Broken Nest and Other Stories?
The collection brings together Tagore stories translated from Bengali by Sharmistha Mohanty and published by Ekada/Westland. In the preface excerpt, Mohanty describes “The Ghat’s Tale,” written in 1884, as Tagore’s first short story and the earliest in the language. She says the stories begin in a relatively direct mode, sometimes with authorial interventions and digressions, while his later fiction grows more complex by entering characters’ inner lives.
Mohanty calls Broken Nest the latest work in the collection and one of Tagore’s greatest works of fiction. These chronology and evaluative statements are hers in the excerpt. She also notes that Tagore’s prose can approach poetry, particularly when it brings a reader close to a story’s consciousness.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How does Mohanty translate Tagore’s Bengali prose?
Mohanty says Bengali and English differ substantially in both language and culture. Where she can, she retains long, winding sentences, Bengali syntax and the movement of the original, even when this makes the English less smooth. Her aim is not to make Tagore sound as though he first wrote in English, but to preserve an encounter with the work and let its voice cross into another language.
That approach treats translation as interpretation rather than word substitution. Mohanty describes Bengali compound words with several dimensions, culturally resonant terms such as “bisharjan,” the force of “abhagini” (a woman abandoned by fate), and shifts in tense as challenges. She also points to “abhimaan”: a hurt feeling left unacknowledged within an intimate relationship, for which she says English has no equivalent.
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In the excerpt, Mohanty quotes translator and essayist Eliot Weinberger: “The primary task of a translator is not to get the dictionary meanings right – which is the easiest part – but rather to invent a new music for the text in the translation language, one that is mandated by the original.” She also cites Raja Rao’s 1937 foreword to Kanthapura: “We are all instinctively bilingual, many of us writing in our own language and in English. We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us.” These are quotations as presented in Mohanty’s excerpt.
Why read the stories through both form and subject?
The stories’ account of women’s constrained lives is bound up with how they move—or do not move—through the narrative. Mohanty’s attention to sentence rhythm and Bengali syntax offers another kind of movement: the original language’s patterns carried into English. In her reading, the prose can bring the reader close to a character’s consciousness, while the women’s lack of physical or social freedom remains visible.
Holding those elements together avoids reducing the stories either to a general lesson about women’s suffering or to a discussion of translation technique alone. Mohanty’s reading connects the two: form shapes how a reader encounters characters whose endurance is real, but whose freedom is restricted.
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