Author: Rabindranath Tagore
Translator(s): Sujit Mukherjee
Publisher: Sahitya Akademi
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 497
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8126018011
Description
Now available in paperback edition, Gora is the fifth in order of writing and the largest of Rabindranath's twelve novels. This new translation represents the fuller text as it appears now in Rabindra Rachnabali.
Gora is more than a mere novel; it is an epic of India in transition at a crucial period of modern history when the social conscience and intellectual awareness of the new intelligentsia were in the throes of a great churning.
No other book gives so masterly an analysis of the complex Indian social life with its teeming contradictions or of the character of Indian nationalism which draws its roots from renascent Hinduism and stretches out its arms towards universal humanism. Despite the abundance of the polemics in the book, inevitable in the nature of the theme, the author does not lose the thread of the main narrative whose interest is sustained to the end.
An early translation of Gora into English, often ascribed to Rabindranath's nephew Surendarnath, was published in 1924. That text probably rendered the original as it appeared with some deletions in the book form in 1909.
This new translation represents the fuller text as it appears now in Rabindra Rachnabali. It has been done by Sujit Mukherjee who wrote his doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania on the critical reception of Rabindrnath in the United States, and this was subsequently published as Passage to America.