ABSTRACT
This chapter is a close and extended reading of Rabindranath Tagore’s final work of long prose fiction, Four Chapters (1934; author’s English translation, 1935–36). The novel is the least read (and studied) of Tagore’s canonised oeuvre of fiction – possibly because of its extremely pessimistic mood, which considers the historical advent of revolutionary violence in late-colonial Bengal, in agitations against the colonial power, as a sign of India’s civilisational decline; and possibly also because of the novel’s own, extreme violence, which condemns its female protagonist, a young woman revolutionary, to a brutal death, in which suicide becomes indistinguishable terrorism. The novel is contextualised as part of what is loosely understood to be Tagore’s “Swadeshi Trilogy” – three political fictions from his early and middle period of writing, which take as their background and subject matter, the swadeshi movement, or the agitation for self-government that would form the basis of India’s organised freedom struggle. The study approaches the novel – as well as it neglect – through its uses of the form of national allegory. While that national allegory was put to acclaimed and enduring use in the other works – especially through Tagore’s focus on gender as the site of both personal and national awakening – here, as the argument shows, it is used as a self-cancelling form.
