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@article{189935,
        author = {Sanjay Kumar},
        title = {Tradition, Modernity, and the Crisis of Identity in Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {12},
        number = {8},
        pages = {4679-4683},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=189935},
        abstract = {Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World, 1916) stages a sustained interrogation of the encounter between tradition and modernity in colonial Bengal. Using a tripartite narrative—Bimala, Nikhil and Sandip—Tagore maps competing ethical systems and political imaginations during the Swadeshi movement and shows how the collision of home (private, moral, domestic life) and world (public, political, modern) precipitates a crisis of identity at personal and national levels. This article argues that Tagore neither valorises a simple return to tradition nor endorses an uncritical modern nationalism; instead, through ambivalent characterization, ironic narrative placement, and symbolic motifs (the house, vermilion, letters, the verandah), he exposes how both an aggressive, instrumental modernity (Sandip’s nationalism) and an inward-looking domesticity (a static conception of tradition) can damage individual agency—most visibly in Bimala—and fracture moral responsibility. Close reading of key episodes shows Tagore’s commitment to an ethical cosmopolitanism that refuses absolutist identities while insisting on the moral duties that link home to world.},
        keywords = {ambivalent characterization, ironic narrative placement, and symbolic motifs, inward-looking domesticity, conception of tradition, moral duties},
        month = {January},
        }