The Originals : Gora

About The Book

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.

About Rabindranath Tagore

RABINDRANATH TAGORE, an exponent of the Bengal Renaissance, was a polymath who not only reformed Bengali literature and music, but also combined Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the 19th and 20th centuries. He also won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 for Gitanjali, a profound collection of songs he authored. Also called the "the Bard of Bengal", Tagore's poetry is both spiritual and effervescent. Along with a writer, Tagore was a humanist, and believed in universal internationalism. He was an ardent supporter of India's freedom from the colonial regime. Other seminal works by him include Gora and Ghare-Baire, while he also wrote plays like Visarjan, Chandalika, and The Post Office. Tagore is also responsible for the composition of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh, and is said to have inspired Sri Lanka's national anthem as well. He passed away in 1941.