Some stories are built on a murder, a scandal or a great reversal. The Postmaster, by Rabindranath Tagore, is built on a young orphan girl learning her letters and a city man who is homesick. Nothing dramatic occurs, and yet it is among the most affecting short stories ever written in an Indian language. If you are looking for a way into Bengali literature, or into the short story as a quiet art, this is a fine place to begin.
Who wrote it, and where
Tagore (1861-1941) is best known abroad as a poet, and in 1913 he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, chiefly for Gitanjali. But in Bengal he is also remembered as a songwriter, playwright, painter, educator and the founder of the first great Bengali short story tradition. In the early 1890s, he was living in rural East Bengal, managing his family’s estates, travelling by houseboat along the rivers. He watched village life closely there. Many of his early stories, including The Postmaster, come from that period, and they carry the details of ferry landings, monsoon skies and small-town offices.
The plot of the postmaster
A young man from Calcutta is appointed postmaster in the village of Ulapur. He is a city person with a little education, and the post office is a tiny room in a thatched hut near an indigo factory. The place feels to him like a fish out of water. The villagers keep their distance, he has no one to talk to, and in the evenings he listens to the rustle of the leaves and thinks of home.
He engages an orphan girl called Ratan, about twelve or thirteen, to do small chores. She sweeps, lights the lamp, brings water, and cooks. She has no family worth mentioning, only an older brother whom she hardly sees. In the evenings, bored, the postmaster begins to teach her to read. She learns the alphabet quickly, and soon is reading simple words and combined letters. He talks to her about his mother and sister and the house he misses. Ratan listens, and in her head begins to build a picture of these people, whom she has never met. She starts calling the postmaster’s mother “Ma” and his sister “Didi” in her mind.
The illness and the leaving
In the rainy season the postmaster falls ill with fever. Away from home, he is helpless, and it is Ratan who nurses him. She sits by his bed through the night, fetches the village doctor, gives him medicine, and she becomes, for a time, a mother and a sister herself. When he recovers, he decides that the place is bad for his health, and applies for a transfer. The request is refused, so he resigns.
On the day of his departure he calls Ratan, to give her a little money for her service. She refuses it, falls at his feet and begs him not to give her anything, and not to trouble himself on her account. Then she runs away. He picks up his bag, and a boatman carries him down the river. As the boat moves, he feels a pang. A kind of pity and sadness at the girl left behind rises in him, and he almost turns back. Then he thinks of the world as a stream of departures and reunions, and tells himself it would be foolish to go back. The boat moves on.
What the ending is doing
The last paragraph is the heart of the story, and it belongs to Ratan, who has no power. She hangs around the post office long after he has gone, and hopes that he may return. The narrator tells us she is caught in a mistaken hope, and that is how people are: they cling to a thread of expectation when the heart should know better.
Here the story takes two views at once. The postmaster treats her affection with a gentle philosophy, which is a way of letting himself off. Tagore does not condemn him. He is not cruel, only young, and he belongs to a world where his life matters more than hers. But the narration sides with the girl. We see that what was a pleasant chapter to him was her entire family.
Things to notice
- Class and education. The postmaster teaches Ratan to read, which looks like generosity. Yet it is also a way to pass the time. The story leaves open whether the gift has real value for her, or whether it only deepens her longing.
- Nature. The river, the rain and the rustling bamboo are not decoration. They mirror the postmaster’s mood, and then, at the end, the sense of the world’s indifference.
- Understatement. There is no declaration of love or grief. The emotion is carried by actions: sweeping, lighting a lamp, waiting at the door.
Translation and film
Tagore wrote in Bengali, and he supervised or made several translations himself, though his own English renderings sometimes differ from the original. Public-domain English versions are easy to find online. If you read more than one, compare how they treat Ratan’s speech. The register of her voice, simple and rural, is one of the hardest things to carry across.
In 1961, the filmmaker Satyajit Ray adapted the story as part of the anthology film Teen Kanya (Three Daughters), to mark the centenary of Tagore’s birth. Ray’s version is faithful in spirit and has long been admired. Watching it after reading the text is a good exercise in how images can carry what words suggested.
Why it matters beyond Bengal
The story belongs to a world-wide family of tales about unequal affection. You can set it beside Chekhov’s Van’ka, about a child’s letter that will never arrive, or beside Maupassant’s stories of petty clerks and servants. In each, a small life is given the same dignity as a large one. That democratic attention is among the great gifts of the modern short story, and Tagore practiced it with remarkable grace at a time when the form was still new in Bengali.
Closing thoughts
The Postmaster is short enough to read in a quarter of an hour, and its question is hard to put down: who gets remembered, and who does the remembering? Read it on a quiet evening, and notice where your sympathy lands. Most readers find it settles, uncomfortably and stubbornly, on a girl standing at the door of a closed office, still looking down the road.
