SOURCE: “The Supernatural in Tagore's Short Stories,” in Rabindranath Tagore: Perspectives in Time, edited by Mary Lago and Ronald Warwick, MacMillan, 1989, pp. 67–82.

In the following essay, Bhattacharya discusses elements of the supernatural in ten of Tagore's short stories from the volume Story Collection (1959).

Tagore's short fiction presents abundant evidence of his genius as a story-teller, which his fame as a poet slightly overshadows. He was virtually the first writer in Bengali to take up the cultivation of this modern literary genre. Between 1884 and 1925 he wrote more than eighty short stories, all very different one from the other. Omitting the last three, published together fifteen years later, we shall consider those gathered in 1959 as the single volume, Galpa Guccha (Story Collection). Some ten of these may be labelled as ‘supernatural’ stories (récits fantastiques).¹

The supernatural in literature has been variously defined. For example, ‘The supernatural … is characterised … by...