The Brahmo Samaj also approved of women's education, and clearly these young girls are educated far beyond what Hindu society would have permitted. But he is clearly speaking approvingly of the Brahmo Samaj opposition to many of the social restrictions placed upon women-including widow remarriage, suttee, increasing the legal age for marriage, and so on. As such, Rabindra seems to make them, their thoughts and sentiments rather more mature than we could reasonably hope girls of that age to be. The two girls, though not as young as typical Hindu girls of the period would have been when marriageable, are nevertheless in their early to mid-teens, i.e., past 14 but not much past. His own daughter Lolita (ললিতা) and the adopted daughter Sucharita (সুচরিতা) are the young girls whose romantic sentiments are at the center of Rabindranath's concerns about women's issues. Paresh and Boroda have two daughters and a son, as well as two adopted children. On the one hand he describes genuine wisdom in the group-the individual (Paresh Babu, পরেশ বাবু) who is accepted as the 'guru' in the end is a longtime Brahmo Samaji liberal-its decadence is represented by the same man's wife, Boroda (বরদা) and of theis more or less blacklisted by the more dominant conservative factions represented by one of the book's less pleasant characters (Haran, হরণ), a militant preacher of the organization. Rabindranath's account seems to reflect the tensions present in the Brahmo Samaj during that time. Since the name of Keshab Babu ( Keshab Chandra Sen) is mentioned, it would appear that it is set in the time before that movement split in the 1860's. It is also quite clear from the historical references that the events described are taking place in a Bengal of a few decades earlier, when the Brahmo Samaj was a greater force in Bengali society than it was by the turn of the 20th century.

Indeed there is enough earnestness in this work to make me wonder if it was not written by a much younger man than the 50-year-old Tagore was in 1910. Perhaps more Dickensian social overtones would have been welcome, and where Rabindranath uses irony, it seems insufficient. The overall flavor seems to have been touched by the feminine social and romantic mood of Jane Austen or the Brontes, or even Louisa May Alcott. translation, done in 1924 by W.W.Pearson, is in the literary English of the period and keeps the spirit of the original quite well. I started reading it 20 years ago in Bengali but never finished it. Written in 1910, this novel is sometimes said to be Rabindranath's masterpiece.

Somehow or another I found myself reading Gora, which I found in the Gurukula library.

Gora bengali novel