SOURCE: “Tagore's Short Fiction,” in Rabindranath Tagore, Twayne, 1976, pp. 80–114.

In the following essay, Lago discusses Tagore's short fiction as the first “modern” short stories in Bengali literature and also some major themes in Tagore's stories.

Bengali literary historians generally agree that in their literature the modern short story began with Tagore's stories of the 1890's. No leading writer of Bengali short fiction (as distinct from the tale or short narrative) pre-dates him. Buddhadeva Bose says that Rabindranath “brought us the short story when it was hardly known in England.”¹ Sukumar Sen says: “Tagore is the first writer of the true short story in Bengali (1891) and he has remained the best.”² Bhudev Chaudhuri writes: “The Bengali short story had its first full flowering in the shelter of Rabindranath's work. Modern Bengali literature crept into an era of new experience with the start of Rabindranath's periods of short story writing...