At present our only task is to infuse in the unbelievers our own unhesitating and unflinching confidence in all that belongs to our country.Through our constant habit of being ashamed of our country, the poison of servility has overpowered our minds. If each one of us will by example counteract that poison, then we shall soon find our field of service. Iconic Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore’s fifth novel, Gora, is set in 1880s Calcutta, in the time of the British Raj. This is Tagore’s longest novel.The narrative revolves around the parallel love stories of two pairs of lovers: Gora and Sucharita, Binoy and Lolita. Gora contains in-depth philosophical debates on politics and religion and it highlights social and political upheavals in 19th-century India. Other themes Tagore grapples with in Gora are freedom, feminism, caste, class, the collision between tradition and modernity, urbanites versus peasants, colonial rule, nationalism and the Brahmo Samaj. Over the years, the novel has been adapted for film and television successfully.\n\n
Somdatta Mandal is Professor and Head of English at the Department of English and Other Modern European Languages, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. Having a teaching career that spans 32 years, she has held several administrative posts in the university. Paper-setter, examiner and adjudicator for doctoral dissertations across several universities in India and the SAARC nations, she has lectured widely in national and international fora. A recipient of several prestigious international fellowships and awards from the Fulbright Foundation, Charles Wallace Trust, Rockefeller Foundation, Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute and Sahitya Akademi, her areas of interest are American literature, contemporary fiction, film and culture studies, diaspora studies and translation. She has published three books, five volumes of translation, edited and co-edited 22 books, published above 90 research articles in national and international journals and anthologies. Somdatta Mandal has published translations of several travel narratives, among which are Krishnabhabini Das?s A Bengali Lady in England (2015); Wanderlust: Travels of the Tagore Family (2014); Durgabati Ghose?s The Westward Traveller (2010) and Hariprabha Takeda?s The Journey of a Bengali Lady to Japan and Other Essays (2017).
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