Book Review
The Home and The World (1916)
by Rabindranath Tagore
Replaces: Martin Eden by Jack London
I think you could make an argument that when Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, the idea of "world literature" was invented. Tagore is one of only a handful of literature Nobel winners who weren't born in Europe- you have to go until 1945, when Gabriela Mistral a South American poet, became the second non-European to win.
If you look at the way that South Asia has been introduced to the west in literature, Bengal- the seat of the British East India Company and later the British Government, occupies a central role it lacks within the history of India. Within India, Bengal was essentially a wealthy internal colony of a succession of Muslim conquerors who were based out of Delhi to the northwest. Eventually, this peripheral position vis a vis the Mughal Empire gave local elites a concrete motivation to ally with the British East India Company and later Britain herself.
The upshot is this is that the literate Bengali elite, who had a history of running an economic powerhouse that generated excess revenue for whichever master, were able to maintain themselves. Tagore, and his international success, represent an initial flowering of this elite Bengali culture on the world stage. International profile as it may be, The Home and The World is a deeply Indian novel, about the Swadeshi movement- an early manifestation of the Indian independence spirit.
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