A vivid, powerful and compelling story of love, power and political awakening.
Tanika Gupta updates Rabindranath Tagore’s classic novel to a contemporary British Muslim context.
Nusrat arrives in the UK from Pakistan to marry Nabeel, a wealthy, progressive and educated businessman. Fearful of the wider society, Nusrat locks herself away in the house reading newspaper articles that only serve to heighten her concerns. Nabeel encourages Nusrat to broaden her horizons and to enter the outer world as he believes that only then will they know if their love is true. When, at Nabeel’s insistence, Nusrat attends a public meeting led by Nabeel’s university friend Sultan, a charismatic leader of a charity that Nabeel funds, Nusrat’s eyes are opened to the potential for action and change.
Both a romantic-triangle story and a philosophical take on violence in times of revolution The Home and the World was originally set in British Colonial India in 1908 at the height of the Swadeshi movement, a boycott of British goods. Tanika Gupta reimagines the story transposing it to an unnamed Northern British town in 2016, where anger and resentment against Islamophobia is thriving. Young Muslim men and women search for a sense of belonging, a cause and a way to make their voices heard. The central philosophical questions of Tagore’s novel resonate strongly with current events.