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Rabindranath Tagore’s "Postmaster":


Rabindranath Tagore is the great figure in Indian literature. He was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. He has written many Plays, Poetries and short stories.


This short story is all about the attachment and detachment of human souls with worldly relations.The Postmaster" is a story about a postmaster and an orphan village girl named Ratan. The Postmaster gets transferred from Calcutta to Ulapur where he makes no friends and feel lonely. Somehow, he becomes very fond of the little orphan girl, Ratan and vice versa. They develop a bond of trust and friendship. They have meals together and Ratan runs small errands for the postmaster. She later become his pupil when he begins teaching her how to read. One day, postmaster falls ill due to the showers of the season and decides to apply for a transfer back to Calcutta. His application for transfer gets rejected, thus he resigns from the job. At the end, Ratan gets heart broken to know that her master left her for ever.


Postmaster represents many subjects: wisdom, reflection, compassion, and loneliness itself. Through the dialogue, Tagore reveals Postmaster as a man searching desperately for something to cling to in his life, for some meaning. 

Tagore, a lover of nature, uses it to describe the surroundings. The postmaster's office has a green, slimy pond, surrounded by dense vegetation. The way he describes this shows that postmaster is not in a position to appreciate his closeness to nature. There are three central themes to this story. 


The story revolves around 'longing and separation'; starting and ending with this. The postmaster is taken away from his family and brought to a remote village. He was in a village, where its busy people were no company, and he was left with not much work to do. He tries to pacify his longing emotions by writing poetry. However, the fact that he tries to write something external to him, like nature, makes it an impossible venture. An orphan girl of the village, Ratan, helps him with his daily chores. He speaks to her about his mother and sister in the evenings, and would keep enquiring about her family. He would speak with sadness of all those "memories which were always haunting him". 



'companionship', and thirdly 'dependency' can be seen through how the relationship between the postmaster and Ratan grows through the course of this story. Ratan did not have many memories of her family to be recalled. There were only fragments, like pictures, of her father coming home in the evening, and her little brother whom she played with, fishing on the edge of the pond. 


Tagore ends by saying that humans often fall into hope than seeing the reason, and long before we realize, disappointment becomes too hard to handle.






Thank you .............................


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