A Bengali landowner encourages his wife out of the women's quarters and into the world, and the world arrives in the person of his friend — a nationalist agitator who wants her jewelry for the cause and rather more besides. Tagore won the Nobel in 1913, the first non-European to do so, and returned his knighthood after Amritsar; this 1916 novel says out loud what the nationalist movement did not want said, and cost him friends for decades. Fifty-four plates spanning 1847 to 1925, from Abanindranath Tagore's Bharat Mata to Munch's portraits, echo the novel's argument over nation, worship, and the place of women.
