Vol. 6, Issue 1, Part D (2024)

A subaltern is someone with a low ranking in a social, political or other hierarchy. It can also mean someone who has been marginalized or oppressed. Human civilization has differentiated women from men for centuries and considers women as inferior one. In early modern Bengal (as well as India under colonial rule) there was a wave of women”s rights movement leading to women”s empowerment, especially with the grant of voting rights to women. A social consciousness was generated by the intellectuals of the era led by the writers of the time who were predominantly males. Short stories became an important genre since the mid-nineteenth century. Short stories played a prominent role as the short story writers projected through their stories the culture in the colonial era. The short story writers through their micro-narratives played a crucial role by highlighting the women”s situation in the world. The first Asian Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore is regarded as one of the progressive short story writers. He very successfully depicts the psychology of women in his short stories through which one can guess the level of gender suppression. The focus of this paper will be on the female protagonist of the short story titled, “Streer Patra” (“The Wife”s Epistle”) by Tagore and how they were dominated by the patriarchal norms. This short story also exposes how the orphaned, homeless girl Bindu has to accept servitude and all types of humiliation in order to survive and finally finds her escape only through committing suicide.