Rabindranath Tagore was an extremely influential public figure in the early 1900s. He was a poet, musician, and artist all at the same time. He has made thousands of works which have been respected for decades, and was seen as an influential advocate for many issues such as womens rights. One of his early works focuses on that very issue. Punishment is a story that was written to attempt to gain some acknowledgment for rising issues in rural Bengal. The story revolves around the lives of 2 couples, Dukhiram Rui and Chidam Rui (brothers), who live in a rural village in India and Radha and Chandara. The men do the hard work and earn money for the house while the women are assigned to do domestic duties.
One day, Dukhiram discoveres that his wife had not cooked anything for him and she is sarcastic to him, so he decides to kill her. However, his brother blames Chandara as he would rather lose his wife than his brother. She proceeds to confess and take blame for a murder that she did not commit. Tagore touches on a lot of sensitive issues such as women’s rights, empowerment, and oppression.
I find these issues still to be relevant now, and many productions and tv shows have attempted educate the audience about them. One example is Riverdale, a new tv drama that shows on Netflix. One of the characters, Veronica Lodge and her mother fall trap into doing her fathers work for him, as well as taking the blame for certain crimes. Their loyalty to him is extremely strong, but he treats them as if they were expendable. The mother justifies her fathers murders, schemes, crimes, etc, while the daughter, eager to join the family company fails to fully grasp how to justify their actions as a family. As one of the main leading characters of the film, Veronica often rebels against her fathers wishes and refuses to take part in criminal activity. The mother has yet to reform. This is much like Punishment, where the man of the house does all the work while the mother stays at home and does jobs with “less responsibility”. The father uses his wife in many situations to trade, threaten, and blackmail in order to get what he wants, but in his words, for the family. Similarly, in these situations the women are given minimal descriptions and are minimized to a very stereotypical, basic character. Although she doesn’t die, she does struggle with the very same issues as Chandara had to face. Be loyal, or to be honest. The balance of power does not exist in these two realms, and only due to the gender of the person they are treated differently. The men’s need for control will not tolerate any defiance from the women, which put the women in a situation where they feel like they owe it to their husband to keep them content. However, in a case of crimes, blind loyalty can cause issues as we have seen with both Riverdale and Punishment.
Overall, even after 200 years of humans developing, we still face the same problems that rural Bengal had to face. What does that say about humans? Although we have evolved and women do indeed have more rights than before, they are still being treated differently in the workplace equality has not been reached yet. This is saddening, but over time humans will come to their senses and realize that we are all equal, and no race or gender should impact how we treat each other.
