Home and the World

Rabindranath Tagore, born in Calcutta in 1861, was a poet, playwright, novelist, painter and composer, and in 1913 he became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. He wrote in Bengali, and his songs are still sung across Bengal and Bangladesh. The Home and the World, first published in Bengali in 1916, grew out of the years of turmoil that followed the partition of Bengal in 1905, when boycotts of British goods and the call for home-made products divided families and friends. Tagore shared the hope for self-rule, yet the novel looks critically at the way a noble cause can be bent by zeal and violence.

This recording follows the English translation of 1919, made by his nephew Surendranath Tagore. The book is built from the confessions of three narrators, which gives it an unusual, almost theatrical intimacy. It has been filmed and adapted several times, and it is often read today as an early and clear-eyed study of nationalism and of the place of women in a changing society.

You will find thirteen sections here, with a running time of about seven hours and twenty minutes, read by several LibriVox volunteers. Listening now, you may be struck by how current its questions still sound: what we owe to a cause, what we owe to the people closest to us, and how hard it is to tell conviction from vanity.

Because the novel is told through three voices in turn, it works particularly well in audio: each section feels like a confidence whispered directly to the listener. Take your time with it, and notice how the same events look different depending on who is speaking. By the end you may find your sympathies have shifted more than once.