Dastan-e-Ghare Baire

Dastan-e-Ghare Baire is Mahmood Farooqui’s evocative adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s classic novel Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World), created to commemorate Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary. Commissioned by a Kolkata-based group, the dastan transforms Tagore’s modernist Bengali narrative into the timeless oral tradition of dastangoi, fusing history, poetry, and performance into a single immersive experience.

The story unfolds during the Swadeshi movement that erupted in Bengal after British Viceroy Lord Curzon’s 1905 partition, a moment that ignited political fervour and fractured loyalties across the region. Within this turbulent landscape, the tale centres on three sharply etched characters:

• Nikhil, the liberal, introspective zamindar committed to reason over rhetoric;
• Sandip, his charismatic childhood friend, whose fiery nationalism veers toward manipulation and self-interest;
• Bimala, Nikhil’s wife, initially sheltered in the domestic realm but gradually drawn into the intoxicating world beyond her home — and into Sandip’s orbit.

As Bimala steps from the sanctity of the household into the flames of political agitation, the boundaries between personal desire, moral responsibility, and national identity blur. Through Farooqui’s storytelling, the narrative takes on a lyrical fluidity — dense with imagery, emotional nuance, and a poetic rhythm reminiscent of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Meer Taqi Meer. The result is a richly textured meditation on love, ideology, and the seductive pull of revolution.

Dastan-e-Ghare Baire invites audiences to revisit Tagore’s timeless questions about freedom, loyalty, power, and the fragile line between home and the world — questions that continue to echo across our own era.