The Home and the World

This novel is set in Bengal during the swadeshi movement, the early twentieth-century campaign to boycott British goods. It is told in turn by three voices: Nikhil, a gentle landowner, his wife Bimala, and Sandip, a charismatic nationalist friend. Bimala is drawn out of the secluded life of the household into politics and into a difficult emotional entanglement. The book weighs private feeling against public cause, and idealism against fervour. It is a thoughtful, still timely study of marriage, freedom and the costs of political passion.