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Short Stories by Rabindranath Tagore: A Collection

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(See our Tagore Author Profile for links to more Tagore materials on this site.)

All told, Tagore published more than 100 short stories and novellas in his lifetime. He was especially prolific as a short fiction writer during the 1890s, sometimes referred to as his "Sadhana" period after the family magazine he worked on and edited (a bit more about that magazine here). His biographers Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson indicate that he wrote about 59 stories during this brief time period, including much-beloved classics like "The Postmaster."

English translations of the stories began to appear regularly starting in the 1910s, starting with a collection called Glimpses of Bengal Life, published in Calcutta in 1913. Shortly thereafter, four additional collections of translated short stories by Rabindranath Tagore were published in the 1910s and 20s: Stories from Tagore (1918), The Hungry Stones and Other Stories (1916), Mashi and Other Stories (1918), and Broken Ties and Other Stories (1925). These collections were all published by Macmillan in the United States and England; the various collections contain significant overlap in terms of the stories they contain.

Here, we are collecting translations all of the short stories by Tagore we can find, and adding thematic tags and summaries to aid researchers in finding interesting groupings. I believe this is the most comprehensive collection of Tagore's stories in translation currently available online, though there are a number of stories we have been unable to include since the translations are still in copyright. (The translations included below should all be out of copyright.)

At the Country Estate. Tagore was born and raised in Calcutta, but at the time he wrote most of his "Sadhana" stories he had just begun living at his family's country estate at Shilaidaha (then usually called "Shelidah" in English), in what is today Bangladesh. There, he performed landlord duties on his family's behalf, receiving payments from tenants, addressing complaints, and managing the estate. He is described by his biographers Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson as finding the experience of country life and ordinary people as an eye-opening experience, and the decade he spent living and working at Shilaidaha as one of the most fruitful ones for him of his entire career. Not surprisingly, many of the stories he wrote during this period play on what might be described as "country vs. city" themes, exploring the gap between urban and rural life, and the clash between traditional Bengali peasant life and modern, colonial India. Also, even as he was outside of Calcutta while writing most of these stories, many of the stories do engage with city living in Calcutta in interesting ways. Others are written from the point of view of Landlords (Zemindars) like himself.

Judges and the Justice System. While performing landlord duties at Shilaidaha throughout the 1890s, Dutta and Robinson describe Tagore as working with villagers to adjudicate their grievances and disagreements. He acted, in effect, as a kind of judge in a parallel legal system. Not surprisingly, questions of justice and jurisprudence show up in several stories from this period, including "The Riddle Solved," "The Sentence," "The Judge," and "Detective." In "The Riddle Solved," the son of a wealthy Zamindar decides to modernize his father's property management, and cuts off special privileges being given to a particular Muslim tenant. The tenant then attacks the son, and in the trial certain secrets are revealed. "The Sentence" is a tragi-comic account of marital drama and dysfunction in an extended family living on the edge of poverty. It has a dark edge, of course, as one of the characters murders another and an innocent young wife is asked to take responsbility. In this story, Tagore seems to be suggesting, true justice is elusive. (Translating this story is also particularly complex; see our note about that attached to the text of the story itself at the link above.) Justice is also elusive in "The Judge," which foregrounds the hypocrisy of men in powerful positions and double-standards regarding "fallen women." And "Detective" has a striking formal reversal: who is investigating whom, and for what?

Queer and Homoerotic Themes. One especially interesting pattern we have been tracking is a series of stories that explore queer and homoerotic themes. These 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.

Education. Tagore was also deeply skeptical of colonial educational norms and methods, and starting around 1898 he pulled all of his children out of regular schools to have them schooled at home. (For three years, the family was based at Shelaidaha; later, they relocated to Shantiniketan.) See the "Education" and "Education of Girls and Woman" tags for some examples of stories on this theme.

Travel Abroad. Tagore also wrote short stories that describe characters traveling to the West. One such story is "Atonement," which features a husband stealing money from his wife's family for passage to England. While in England, he secretly marries a British woman; his Indian wife is left to suffer (she moves home to her parents' house). Then, when he returns he undergoes a ritual to restore his caste status, but is surprised when the British wife shows up in Calcutta! Another story describing a similar theft is "Master Mashai." (There the time in England is not directly described.

Allegories. Finally, there are admittedly not many stories with this tag, but Tagore's Allegories are provocative and sharp. "The Kingdom of Cards" is a brilliant take on caste. "The Parrot's Training" is a biting critique of both the decadence of Indian Maharajahs and current approaches to education.

Besides the five collections mentioned above, we will also be adding translations of stories that were not collected at the time, sourcing them from original site of publication where possible. In a few instances, we are attempting to do our own translations with the aid of generative AI (four such stories are "The Housewife," "The Notebook," "The Detective" and "The Gap" [The Divide]).

Some thematic tags to look for:

General Topics: Country vs. City, Calcutta (Kolkata), Simla, Education, Zemindars (Landlords), Maharajahs (Kings, Queens, Court), Nationalist Politics, Childhood, Mughal Empire,

Family and Gender issues: Education of Girls and Women, Widows and Widow Remarriage, Property & Inheritance, Polygamy, Adultery, Marital Dysfunction, Child Marriage, Arranged Marriage,

Social Issues: Caste, Disability, Hindus and Muslims, Hindu religious practice, Race/Racism, Religious Conversion, Illness

Other Interesting themes & forms: Unconventional Friendships, Performance, Homoerotic and Queer relationships, Ghostly Reincarnation, Ghost Stories, Hunting/Shikar, Allegory, Storytelling, Afghanistan/Pashtuns/Pathans,

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Rabindranath Tagore Photograph