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Queer, Homoerotic, LGBTQIA+ Themes

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Queer and homoerotic themes appear in different ways in Tagore's writing.

Sometimes, as in "The Housewife," there is a character who is treated as effeminate or emasculated (here, a teacher bullies his male student when he sees the student playing dolls with his sister); Tagore finds such policing of gender norms unpleasant and damaging.

Sometimes, there are intense friendships and a sense of attraction between men that will strike some readers as homosocial or homoerotic; examples of those might be "The Gap" and "Raja and Rani."

For more on this topic, we recommend Sucheta Choudhuri's essay in South Asian Review, "Transgressive Territories: Masculinity and Space in Rabindranath Tagore's Short Stories" (South Asian Review, 32.2, 2011). Choudhuri reads Tagore's engagement with masculinity in the context of late 19th century debates about gender roles and gender identity. While writers like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Swami Vivekananda were responding to the stereotype of the effeminate Bengali "Babu" with an aggressive form of nationalist masculinity, Tagore took a different path, one that embraced fluidity and a pre-colonial erotics associated with Vaishnava Hindu tradition. 

Contents of this tag:

  1. Rabindranath Tagore, "The Gap" [or "The Divide"] (1891 / Translated 2026) (Short Story)
  2. Rabindranath Tagore, "Master Mashai" (1907/ Translated 1918) (Short Story)
  3. Rabindranath Tagore, "The Editor" (1893/ Translated 1925) (Short Story)
  4. Rabindranath Tagore, "The Castaway" (1895 / translated 1918) (Short Story)
  5. "A Passage to India" By E.M. Forster (1924)
  6. Rabindranath Tagore, "The Housewife" (1891 / translated 2026) (Short Story)
  7. Rabindranath Tagore, "The Lost Jewels" (Translated 1925) (Short Story)
  8. Rabindranath Tagore, "Raja and Rani" (Translated 1918) (Short Story)