A Voice of Liberty and Protest: Exploring Binodini’s Identity Crisis, Power and Self-discovery in Tagore’s Chokher Bali (A Grain of Sand)

Abstract

The cultural icon and trail blazer of Bengali Renaissance Rabindranath Tagore has experimented successfully upon some great female protagonists in his fiction who have managed to curve a niche for themselves in world literature. A master artist, he has also depicted with his dexterously professional brushstrokes a host of highly progressive and brave female identities with a strong voice of protest against all prejudices of the contemporary backward and prejudiced Hindu communities as well as against all conservative forces of fate and society. Tagore has portrayed extremely meticulously some female voices, attributing them to the strength of motherhood, the beauty of the beloved, and the strong power of womanhood, allowing them to develop their own individual status and identity in a stereotypical, male dominated, and patriarchal Bengali society. This paper undertakes to explore Binodini, a finely crafted character in the Novel ‘Chokher Bali’ by Tagore, who battles over her identity breaks a fresh ground for her own, and emerges as an uncompromisingly assertive woman with a voice and brand of her own. It explores that she is not terrified by the severity of the male gaze or trodden down by the repression of the male centric society in her journey through liberty and blossoms an individual very sure of herself by breaking the image of the traditional Indian womanhood.