Women Liberation and Rabindranath

In my opinion Rabindra Nath was an admirer of beauty and considered women as object of beauty and desire. He used to instruct women to be always beautifully dressed. In one occasion when he was a guest at the house of historian Ramesh Chandra Majumdar in Dacca, he directly asked Majumder’s wife to be always beautifully dressed with sari and ornaments in his presence. Not that he always liked sari clad women, he admired scantly dressed ones too. When he visited US in his old ages, he spent hours of his time in the beaches of Los Angeles enjoining the beauty of the miserly dressed women. At that age he could only make comments like ‘It is fascinating even to watch them’.

In his contemporary time, a number of social evils prevailed in Bengal and prominent among them were the Child Marriage, Polygamy, Widow Oppression and Satidah. Reforms against these deplorable conditions of woman were headed by Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar against those topnotch orthodox Hindus. We do not see any contribution by Rabindra Nath to this renaissance; and instead we see him marrying 8 year old Mrinalini Devi while he was 24 years old.

More surprising is his glorification of Satidah. Dinesh Chandra Sen, the then Head of Bengali in Calcutta University who also was a supporter of Satidah, quoted a statement [1] of Rabindra Nath in which he admired the women who were burnt alive (translated from Bengali): ‘Just as at the end of the day you entered the bed with your husband, likewise at the end of your marital life you dressed yourself as a new bride and willingly entered the burning pyre of your husband. You made your death a beautiful and a pious experience; you have made a burning pyre as happy and glorious as the bed of your first night of marriage’. Rabindra Nath’s sataement indeed sounds so poetic, but it totally lacks the presence of sensitive mind and compassionate heart.

1. Reference: Dinesh Chandra Sen – Brihat Banga (in Bengali), volume 2, p.913, Dey’s Publishing, Calcutta, 1993.

Hope the vast ‘Rabir Kiran’ will not be tainted with this in any way.

Dr. Nikhil Mazumder

San Jose, Ca