Digital Object Identifierhttps://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.26
https://orcid.org/0009-0004-5599-8768“In a world that often tries to divide us, literature remains one of the last sacred spaces where we can live inside each other’s minds, if only for a few pages” 1. By these words what Banu Mushtaq, the International Booker Prize winner meant is of course, a process of separating one from the other. There is something definitive in the universe through which people from a community segregate other people in the same community or people in a different community, based upon their differences. Generally, this act of division and categorization is done on the basis of ‘caste’, ‘class’, ‘sex’, ‘religion’ etc. The foundation of the process of dissociation lies in the perspectives of the self towards the other, the way one perceives ‘an other’ (‘an other’ is not like the self, but different). What literature does is, it helps us to understand the concept of other, the way ‘an other’ is transformed into ‘the other’, the otherness of the other and the self’s engagement with the other. The paper has selected two works by Tagore – ‘Chaturanga’ and ‘Streer Patra’ which solely deal with one’s relation with an other. This paper tries to show how the process of othering is achieved and what are the criteria that are taken into account while objectification of an individual (Nanibala and Bindu) and a group of people (Lower caste Chamars and Muslims) is being accomplished. This is the view of the paper to understand how efforts have been made to subsume the otherness of the other under the umbrella of the same. The concept of ‘care’ helps us to comprehend the differences of the other and asserts that the others are not really others but the self’s imagination and product of excessive thought, which is powerful enough to dismantle the power structure of the given society.
Pal, Sanjukta. “Understanding the Other: A Study of Tagore’s Chaturanga and Streer Patra.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 5, Oct. 2026, pp. 464-83, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.26.
© 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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