Stories from Tagore

In colonial Bengal, a novelist trying to write a romance is constantly interrupted by his five-year-old daughter, who soon strikes up a friendship with a traveling Afghan fruit-seller. A city-raised postmaster takes a position in a remote village, relying on an orphan girl to tether him to his new routine. A mute girl named Subha observes the community she is excluded from, while a mischievous boy is sent away to Calcutta, where he shrinks under the weight of his displacement.

Across ten stories, Rabindranath Tagore records the friction of everyday life in India at the turn of the twentieth century. His subjects are the sidelined and the overlooked—servants, wandering merchants, and restless children—caught between rigid class traditions, rural isolation, and the creeping influence of modern cities.

First published in 1918, this collection was originally compiled to provide Indian students learning English with literature drawn directly from their own landscape and culture.