TAGORE’S CHANDALIKA: A PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE (Pages 101-105) by Dr. R. Sandhya in THE ENGLISH RESEARCH EXPRESS / ISSN:2321-1164 (Online); 2347-2642 (Print)

Rabindranath Tagore has made a very skillful use of this legend to write a play having a profound psychological and spiritual significance. The theme of the play Chandalika is the realization by a chandal girl that she is a human being like others, and that it is a mistake on her part to think herself beneath the notice of human being who belong to the upper castes. In other words, the theme of this play is the awakening of a sense of her identify in a Chandal girl, and her newly acquired awareness that her having been born as a chandal girl does not mean that she is a non-entity. The chandal girl in this play is Prakriti who discovers that she is as much as a human being as anybody else, and that she too has the right to give water to anybody, high or low, who asks for it to quench his thirst. This realization by her not only makes that she is somebody with an identity of her own but also leads her to fall in love with a Buddhist monk, who is responsible for having brought about this new awakening in her. Prakriti’s love for the Buddhist monk is not in itself the theme of the play, her love for that man derives from her new knowledge, imparted to her by him, that she is a human being. But her falling in love with him shows also her presumptuousness. A woman commits no fault if she falls in love with a man, whoever he may be: but Prakriti’s falling in love with a Buddhist monk is certainly a fault and a serious fault too, because Buddhist monks are pledged to celibacy. Keywords: Non-entity, upper castes, Buddhist monk, presumptuousness, celibacy etc.