Notes
Love and Marriage in Noukadoobi
1 Arunava Sinha tr. The Boat-wreck (New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2017), p. 186.
2 Ibid., p. 186.
3 Beman Behari Majumdar, Heroines of Tagore: A Study in the Transformation of Indian Society 1875-1941. Kolkata: Firma, 1968, p. 18.
4 B.C. Chakraborty, Rabindranath Tagore: His Mind and Art (New Delhi: Young India Publications, 1971), p. 193.
5 Srikumar Bandyopadhyay, ‘A New Kind of Realistic Novel: An Analysis of Noukadoobi, 1938’, The Boat-wreck (New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2017), p. 279.
6 Nihar Ranjan Ray, An Artist in Life (Trivandrum: University of Kerala, 1967), p. 186.
7 Sujit Mukherjee, Passage to America (Kolkata: Book Land Pvt. Ltd., 1964), p. 179.
8 G.V. Raj, Tagore the Novelist (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1983), p. 38.
9 Edward Thompson, Rabindranath Tagore: His Life and Work (Calcutta: YMCA Publishing House, 1961), p. 31.
10 Rabindranath Tagore’s introduction to Noukadoobi tr. Arunava Sinha. The Boat-wreck (New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2017), p. 279.
11 Arunava Sinha tr. Noukadoobi (New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2017), p. 270.
Milan, Ghunghat, Noukadoobi: The Novel and Its Film Adaptations
1 Bakshi, Kaustav: Noukadubi – With and Beyond Rabindranath (http://kaustavsarden.blogspot.in/2011/05/noukadubi-beyond-rabindranath.html)
2 Founded in 1828 by Raja Rammohan Roy in Calcutta, the Brahmo Samaj is a religious movement. At its centre is the belief that there is one God, who is omnipresent and omniscient. It differed from existing religious practice in its dismissal of idol-worship and the caste system. The Brahmo religion is now practised in many parts of the world. The Brahmo Samaj has played a significant role in the renaissance of India, and the roots of much of the modern thinking in India can be traced back to the Brahmo movement. Rabindranath Tagore was one of the luminaries of the Brahmo Samaj. As British rule consolidated in India during the eighteenth century, two factors contributed to the formation of the Brahmo Samaj in the following century. Firstly, the Hindu social system had begun to stagnate and placed too much emphasis on traditional rituals. Secondly, an English educated class of Indians began to emerge to fulfil the administrative and economic needs of British rule. Raja Rammohan Roy, a Bengali, was a product of the latter trend. (Source: Supriyo Chanda: http://www.chanda.freeserve.co.uk/brahmoframe.htm)
3 Mitra, Zinia: Tagore’s Noukadubi and Rituparno’s Inspiration – Interrogating Marriage and Home, Silhouette Magazine, December 29, 2011.
4 Bakshi, Kaustav: Noukadubi – With and Beyond Rabindranath (http://kaustavsarden.blogspot.in/2011/05/noukadubi-beyond-rabindranath.html)
5 Rabindra Rachanabali, Vol. 7, p. 686.
About the Book
After a boat-wreck overturns his life, Rameshchandra Chowdhury mistakes young Kamala for his newly wedded bride. They move away from Calcutta to start a domestic life together, even as Ramesh is unable to forget Hemnalini, whom he was always in love with but could not marry. Meanwhile, Hemnalini must steel her heart while her hypochondriac father and hot-headed brother seek a groom for her. When Nalinaksha, a serene and influential doctor, enters the scene, fate decides to rock the boats again.
Initially serialized in Bangadarshan magazine between 1903 and 1904, and then published as a novel in 1906, Noukadoobi was Tagore’s exercise in the sensitive probing of the minds and hearts of an ensemble cast of characters, to reveal not just their individual pains and passions, but also the collective consciousness of the society of the period.
Narrated in warm tones that reveal the tenderness of everyday life, and translated gracefully by Arunava Sinha, here is a story about love and sacrifice, faith and resilience, that is timeless.
About the Author
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) is India’s greatest littérateur. The only Indian to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he wrote prodigiously and brilliantly across forms, including novels, short stories, plays, poetry, song lyrics, essays, travelogues, and even question papers. His works span an astonishing range of subjects, including humanism, love, family and society, politics, sociology, philosophy, psychology, spirituality, and religion. Tagore wrote primarily in Bangla, and his works have been translated into almost every major world language.
Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and non-fiction into English. More than thirty-five of his translations have been published so far. Twice the winner of the Crossword translation award, for Sankar’s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen (2011), he has also been shortlisted for The Independent Foreign Fiction prize (2009) for his translation of Chowringhee. Besides India, his translations have been published in the UK and the US in English, and in several European and Asian countries. He was born and grew up in Kolkata, and lives and writes in New Delhi.
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First published in India in 2017 by Harper Perennial
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
A-75, Sector 57, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201301, India
www.harpercollins.co.in
Translation Copyright © Arunava Sinha 2017
P.S. Section copyright © Nivedita Sen, Shoma A. Chatterji, Arunava Sinha 2017
P-ISBN: 978-93-5277-318-3
Epub Edition © October 2017 ISBN: 978-93-5277-319-0
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Rabindranath Tagore asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
This is a work of fiction and all characters and incidents described in this book are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under The Copyright Act, 1957. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers India.
Cover image : Stills from the film Noukadoobi by Rituparno Ghosh, courtesy Shoma A. Chatterji
Series design : Pinaki De
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