Thakur's Representation of The Farmers: Reluctance, Rejection and Opposition

Abstract

When poet Rabindranath Thakur (1861­1941) was writing, his country Indo­Pak subcontinent had been undergoing long British colonial occupation. While under this colonial subjugation and local Brahmin (Hindu upper class) feudalistic torture, the severe victims were obviously the working class people who were mostly farmers. In such context it was expected of the greatest of the Bangla poets Thakur that he would uphold through his literature the larger section of his nation, the farmers, who were mostly Muslims living in East Bengal, the present Bangladesh. But in him we see complex contradictions to the nation’s expected poetic commitment while representing those working class people. This paper aims at exploring the nature of Thakur’s complex antagonistic treatment of the farmers in their own context which discloses his reluctance, rejection and opposition to that class.