Gora

Widely regarded as the grandfather of Indian letters, Rabindranath Tagore is best known as the Nobel Prize–winning poet and author of Gitanjali, but he was an equally virtuosic writer of fiction who, like Eliot, Tolstoy, and Dickens, employed the form of the novel to probe the pressing social and political issues of his day. Gora is Tagore’s great masterpiece, a coming-of-age novel set in late 1870s and early 1880s Calcutta—the high noon of the British Raj—which tells the story of two young men, the eponymous Gora, given to endless argument and theorizing, and his childhood best friend Binoy.

A former progressive, Gora has turned away from his ambition to reform Hindu society, and has embraced Hindu orthodoxy fully in the interest of fashioning what he thinks is a genuine Indian way of opposing imperialism. But his ideals are challenged when he and Binoy fall in love with sisters Sucharita and Lolita, modern, educated women raised in a family that has embraced Western ways. A novel that ponders nationalism, colonial resistance, and the tensions between indigenous values and modernity, Gora brings a vibrant late-nineteenth-century India to life.