Rabindranath Tagore, the unlikely conservative on Hindu marriages | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

Rabindranath Tagore, the unlikely conservative on Hindu marriages | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

Written by Amiya P. Sen |New Delhi |Updated: May 9, 2019 9:23:02 am

Rabindranath Tagore, the unlikely conservative on Hindu marriages

As with many progressive Hindus of the time, Rabindranath Tagore had some conflicting ideas about the role of women in a marriage and marital life. On his 158th birth anniversary, Sahapedia looks at how Tagore underwent brief but visible phases of social and cultural conservatism.

Rightly or wrongly, Rabindranath Tagore associated the practice of early marriage or betrothals with the institution of extended families; he found early marriages were useful only when kinship ties had the strength to resist fragmentation and the birth of nuclear families.

In a hilarious poem composed in 1888—‘Nabadampatir Premalap’ (Romantic Exchanges Between Newlyweds)—Rabindranath Tagore describes an educated husband enthusiastically but vainly reciting romantic verses before his newly wedded child-bride who kept playing with her dolls! Such incongruities in a young Hindu couple and the problems arising therefrom were issues that agitated the Hindu intelligentsia in colonial Bengal. We are only too aware of the public debates that occurred around the issues of sati, widow marriages, female education, polygamy and zenana seclusion. But this conceals the fact that woman-related reform was often deeply interpersonal, limited to only members of the family.