Kabuliwala

KABULIWALA.

It is a story written by Rabindranath Tagore. He was a polymath who reshaped his region’s literature and music. He became the first non-European Nobel laureate by earning the 1913 prize in literature. He wrote poetry as an eight-year-old. He modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures.

This story is about a poor Afghani who leaves his family behind to earn a living as a dried fruit vendor in India. Profoundly homesick, he befriends a young girl who reminds him of his own daughter.

The writer throughout the story puts a play of emotions in front of us. He narrates the possessiveness of the mother and father towards the child as well as shows us the miniature tender love of the girl for the sweets and her eagerness to see the Kabuliwala and wait to get a sweet from him. The main idea here the writer wants to put forth is MIGRATION.

We all see migration in a stereotypical way where we blame the people for lack of jobs, power supply, slums, water etc that are faced by around.

But people fail to understand the emotional background of the migrator. Migrators go to a new place to work for money to earn a living and support their family. They go through alot of pain just to decent life. In this story, using the kabuliwali, the writer tells us about how he misses his family and has no money to go back and meet them and especially he mentions that his daughter who was very small when he left must not be even remembering his face as she is quite grown up now. Hence, migration has a bad part too and this is what the writer wants to put forward to us.

NATASHA D’CUNHA.

ROLL NO. 06