Abstract: This essay explores a bricolage aesthetic that pervades Rabindranath Tagore's fictional works published in the journal Sabuj Patra in the mid-1910s, paying particular attention to his novels Chaturanga and Ghare Baire . Questioning the characterological readings of Ghare Baire as well as the multiple attempts to reconstruct Tagore's cosmopolitanism through his political writings, I attend instead to the formal peculiarities and experimental energies of Tagore's fictional works from this period. I argue that Tagore does not so much offer any unified vision or ideal in these novels as reshape, repurpose, and reimagine the historical contradictions of colonial modernity in an improvisatory manner.
Philip Tsang (Sun,) studied this question.