This essay examines Rabindranāth's views on women, gender, patriarchy, and the family, situating them in the ideas and practices of social reform in nineteenth-century Bengal. Rabindranath aimed to create new values and practices among colonized peoples and thus usher in a new age. The condition of women in brahminical families in Bengal forms an important part of this decolonizing agenda and the social critique underlying it.

Social reform, a modernist project in nineteenth-century Bengal, was vigorously contested by revivalist and traditionalist Hindu orthodoxy. The reformers were concerned with both religious and everyday life, but they focused most intently on family mores centred on brahminical patriarchy and ordering of gender. This contestation, resulting from the encounter between British capitalist colonialism and pre-capitalist Bengali society, gave rise to new social formations, creating new professional and trading classes (the bhadralok) and new forms of consciousness.

The results were varied, embracing all aspects of life. Colonial capitalism engendered a new state apparatus. This created a third space, that of civil society, comprising both the urban middle classes and a new land-owning rural gentry created by the Permanent Settlement (1793). This social space lay outside the immediate purview of the state and the economy, but was created through the interaction of the two. The central institution of civil society was the family, structured by brahminical patriarchy with its distinctive casteist character and gender values. Both reform and revivalism operated within this civil society, giving rise to serious controversies; yet the two trends could not be kept entirely apart. Reformers like Rabindranath, advocating a foundational social change, had to negotiate these complexities. Thus his critique of gender, patriarchy, family norms, and the condition of women could not follow a linear path.