Tagore's 1919 masterpiece dissects the moral wreckage left behind when revolution comes home. Bimala has lived quietly in her husband's estate, content in the world of tradition, until Sandip arrives: a magnetic Swadeshi activist whose fiery nationalism begins to pull her toward a life she's never known. She steps out of purdah, into meetings, into ideology. She falls under Sandip's spell. But what she gains in freedom, she may lose in something far more precious. Tagore wrote this novel in the midst of India's freedom movement and had the courage to ask the question no one wanted answered: what if the cause is righteous but the cost is our humanity? It was condemned as unpatriotic in its time. It remains one of the most uncomfortable, necessary novels about the seductions of ideology and the prices we pay for becoming someone new.
