Digital Object Identifierhttps://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.14
https://orcid.org/0009-0006-1203-6707Rabindranath Tagore’s female characters have been widely discussed in relation to marriage, widowhood, desire, rebellion, nationalism, and social reform. Building on this work, this essay distinguishes a character’s capacity to act from the narrative space granted to her as a thinking, self-interpreting person, and examines her narrative personhood.
Here, narrative personhood is viewed as separate from narrative voice and agency and refers to the depth of representation afforded to a character’s thoughts, ideas, and social and personal struggles. It concerns not simply a character’s capacity to desire, choose, or act, but the extent to which the text represents those actions as situated within a reflective understanding of the self and the surrounding world. A flawed or contradictory worldview may itself constitute evidence of substantial personhood, depending on the narrative framing provided.
This essay argues that Tagore often gives women forceful desires and consequential choices, but less consistently grants them narrative autonomy beyond the gendered conditions through which they are introduced.
Mandal Chakraborty, Rupsa. “Personhood, Voice, and Agency in Rabindranath Tagore.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 5, Oct. 2026, pp. 207-44, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.14.
© 2026 The Author(s). Published by the Research Centre for English Language and Literature (RCELL) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
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