Gora

Begun as a serial in *Prabasi* in 1907 and published as a book in 1909, *Gora* is Rabindranath Tagore's most expansive and philosophically charged novel. Through the friendship of Gora and Binoy, and their entanglement with the Brahmo household of Paresh Babu and his daughters Sucharita and Lolita, Tagore stages the great debate of his age — between revivalist nationalism and reformist universalism, between caste-bound Hinduism and an India still being imagined. Gora himself, a thunderous orator for orthodoxy who turns out to be the orphan son of an Irishman, becomes one of the great ironic figures of Indian fiction. This is the W. W. Pearson translation of 1924, prepared with the close collaboration of Surendranath Tagore — the version that first brought the novel to English readers.