Introduction to “The Skeleton” by Rabindranath Tagore (1892)
Editorial Team: Ella Jorgensen, Natalie Lopresti, Caroline McKeown, Lucy Saunders
Additional editing by Dr. Heidi L. Pennington
Note: This introduction contains spoilers for some story events in Tagore's "The Skeleton."
“The Skeleton” by Rabindranath Tagore contains a story from one of the many women who were kept in purdah in this period; purdah is specifically the practice of secluding women into one section of their house and concealing them from all men besides some family members. This leaves the women with very little choice while their male family members influence them; the practice intends to protect their honor and not bring shame to the family (Pastner). Tagore’s short story features a framing narrative that takes place late at night in the home of a privileged family somewhere in the Indian subcontinent. It begins with a retrospective narration from the homodiegetic narrator, a grown man returned to his family home for a relative’s funeral. He reflects on his early education, during which he and his siblings were taught “osteology” using a skeleton. There is an implied lapse in time from the narrator's adolescence to his adulthood, when the narrator ends up staying the night in the old school room. He finds himself seeking sleep, reflecting on death and his own past, when he seems almost to will the spirit of the skeleton to emerge. While looking for her skeletal form, the spirit begins to recount her life, an existence filled with gendered traumas, including marrying young, and being continuously objectified for her appearance. In her narration of her life, there is a gap that could imply she killed her first husband, leaving her free to return to her family home, but also isolated in the zenana for the rest of her life. She tells her listener—the young man in his family home—that she had no connection to the outside world beside her brother and was forced to live in the zenana, a part of some homes in India where the women of the family would live, to retain their purity (Jhala). This gendered isolation incites the ghost to romanticize her own appearance. She starts a seemingly one sided, emotional affair with her family doctor. When discovering that he is to be married to someone else, however, she takes a poison she had earlier asked him about and slyly puts some into his glass. She dresses in her marital gown and kills herself.
In “The Skeleton”, the negative ramifications of purdah on women (or living in gendered isolation in the zenana) manifests through this spirit who isn’t even granted her own physical form through which to express her emotions. After being married off young to a much older man, and then being in mourning the rest of her life after he died, her existence during her lifetime was reduced to being just a body kept in the confines of the zenana. In the narrative, this spirit lacks a name, and in her lifetime she lacks social value and voice; this continues to be even more true after her death, when her bodily remains are reduced to children’s learning tools, and eventually go missing. These conditions that the narrative highlights allow the reader to gain perspective on the different ways women in this period lacked control of their own life. The consequences of being a woman with the barriers constructed through various institutions, such as gender expectations, religious conventions, and strict norms of the caste system, prevented the spirit from truly finding her voice—though she speaks after death.
From the very beginning of the story, the spirit can only manifest and live her life through men. Only when the narrator’s “train of thought recalled [his] mind to the skeleton” (para. 4) was she able to appear. The stress of her life and death are evident from the “rapid breathing” and “pacing” (para. 4) of her spirit. She reveals that in life she would sometimes “‘sit by men and talk to them’” (para. 8) seemingly as her only form of interaction with the social world. In death, she has “‘only moaned in the wind in the burning-places of the dead’” (para. 8). This seems to allude to the ritual practice known as Antyeshti, a Hindu death ritual, where the body of the dead would be cremated and their ashes are submerged in a sacred river. This was so the spirit could let go of life and move on or they become stuck between lives (Srivastava and Barmola). Her skeleton ending up as a prop for teaching clearly proves that her family did not abide by that ritual and let her soul move on. In her death, she was still trapped by the religious conventions that her brother forced upon her and then didn’t abide by the norms of the death ritual himself.
She proceeds to have her first conversation in “‘thirty-five years’” (para. 8) about her life story, which is “‘the funniest thing [she] can think of’” (para. 10). She is alluding to the constrained life she led and how she can only look at it with morbid humor. She starts by mentioning her husband, who she “‘feared…like death itself’” (para. 12). Using death as a metaphor to describe her dread of her husband is significant because she names her feeling for him through a fundamental fear that every human can experience because of death’s inevitability and mystery. Conforming to the norm of being married off young gave her a fear that she felt was inescapable and daunting. She was forced to be barely seen or heard, but used for horrific acts that a child should never have to go through. She describes her marriage as being like “‘a fish caught with a hook’” (para. 12). Her consequence of being a woman is to be trapped and used for the gain of someone else until her (or his) inevitable death. After hinting that she killed her husband, her father-in-law said, “‘Do you not see, she has the evil eye?’”(para. 12). He didn’t address her and instead levied an accusation at her. In many cultures an evil eye implies that the wrong glance can have horrible, even supernatural, consequences (Dillion).
She continues to narrate what happened in her life after her husband’s death, mainly focusing on her “‘rare and radiant beauty’” (para. 14). This is all she has to focus on in her life. The way she was viewed because of both her gender and social status in this time and place didn’t allow her to foster her mind or skills. The voice she could have had and the story she could have told instead were taken from her because she had to conceal herself through purdah. In her death, that beauty got taken from her as well, yet her body was still used “‘as materials for teaching osteology’” (para. 16). She is so convinced that her beauty was her only worth that she says to the narrator, “‘That is why of all men I hate you the most’” (para. 18). He only saw her as a skeleton and he is the one person she has talked to who doesn’t just view her for her beauty. He simply furthers her belief in the primary value of her appearance by reassuring her that he can only think of “‘perfect loveliness, glowing against the black background of night’” (para. 19). She continues to talk about her loneliness and craving for affection. The norms of being secluded in the zenana because of her gender and status, without any close female relatives, gave her very few people to talk to and even fewer to care for her. She was stuck dreaming “‘that the whole world was in love with [her]’” (para. 20). She was never taught to recognize what these feelings were and was left again to be a body to be used for other’s gain. She claims that, “‘my heart, I know not why, used to grow sad’” (para. 20). She was so bound by her gender, status, and religious constraints her entire life, that during her lifetime she struggled to name how lonely she was.
She, therefore, fixated on the one man who came into her life. He is the only character who is given a name in this narrative, further signaling the patriarchal norms of the caste system ingrained in the spirit’s mind (Bidner). The caste system only furthered the discrimination of not only the lower castes, but women of the upper castes as well. Being that the caste system is based on hierarchy among groups and familial inheritance of caste status, the suppression that the women of upper caste face is again forced upon them. Her brother’s only friend, “‘Shekhar’”(para. 21), became their “‘family doctor’” (para. 21). Her brother had secluded himself from the world on purpose by deciding “‘not to marry’” (para. 20) and got “‘lost in an obscure corner’” (para. 21). Unlike the spirit, her brother had the ability to choose how he interacted with the world, and he also forced his preferences onto his sister. She would lay in her garden and picture that every blade of grass was Shekhar, proving her desperation for even the smallest human interactions. Her first interaction with him is a simple check-up. She recounts how she romanticized the interaction, because Shekhar is “‘the only young man [she] could ever get to see’” (para. 21). Through purdah, she was secluded away from both men and women her own age and never allowed to interact with them because she became a widow so young. When she thinks about their interactions, she uses words such as “‘imagination’”, “‘glorious’’”, and “‘‘bashfully’’” (para. 23). Her innocence and naivety in this situation show how secluded not only her life has been, but her knowledge of the world as well. The doctor actually comes off as “‘awkward’” and “‘[h]is fingers trembled as they felt [her] wrist’” (para. 25). He seems to come off as someone afraid to interact with her and cross a line that would go against the conventional separation of genders.
She continues to become more infatuated with the doctor, yet a large part of their interactions are “‘imaginary’” (para. 27). She talks about sitting in her garden and constantly thinking of him because she is forever trapped in a role of being a mourning widow without additional female companions in her family’s home. She says, “‘In these evenings I used to dress myself secretly in a canary-coloured sari’” (para. 28). In widowhood, according to conventions for high-caste Hindu women during parts of the nineteenth century, she was only allowed to wear white and no jewelry for the rest of her life. She had little choice in the matter, and at least according to British colonial sources—as an overt part of their attempt to “justify British colonial rule”—her only other option would have been self-immolation on her husband’s funeral pyre (Brick, https://academic.oup.com/book/45654/chapter/398017768#448991148). The religious and social conventions of nineteenth-century Hinduism in India seemingly gave her the choice of mourning in seclusion or death because of her gender and her implied caste status. (See Brick’s book Widows Under Hindu Law, 2023, for a fuller and more nuanced account of the shifting historical conditions and actual practices of widowhood in the Indian subcontinent in different periods.) In Tagore’s narrative, the spirit, in her isolated life, is forced to cling to her imagination of the doctor so “‘from that time [she] was never alone’” (para. 30). She would imagine his glances, kisses, and presence until she was convinced of their mutual love. He soon moved into the house and she talked to him to fill her time. She would ask “‘jokingly about medicines and poisons, and how much of this drug or that would kill a man’” (para. 33). Her inquiries seem suspicious, but it seems as if these men truly believed that a woman would never go against the set gender expectations and do anything with this information. The doctor would go on and on about the subject, which completely consumed her life. She claimed, “‘These talks familiarised me with the idea of death; and so love and death were the only things that filled my little world’” (para. 33). She was given such little interaction that she could only think about her love for the doctor and impending death. In a way, this allowed her to start taking a little control about where her life was going, even if her only way out was death. She was able to control her own death rather than being forced to select from such constrained options as were allowed in her time, place, and culture.
Along with her love of the doctor, she was also alluding to her thoughts of his death as well. Her plan was spurred into action when she discovered that his metaphorical death—as her brother calls his friend’s impending marriage—was being taken from her. After noticing her doctor seemed “‘absent-minded’” and “‘ashamed’” (para. 35), she asked her brother about it and he claimed the doctor was going “‘[t]o his death’” (para. 37), meaning that Shekhar was actually getting “‘married’” (para. 39). She was never taught how to handle these emotions. All she could do was laugh “‘long and loudly’” (para. 40), concluding that “‘[m]en are not to be trusted’” (para. 41). Every single one of the few men in her life had let her down. She had no choice but to accept it too. She claims that she has “‘known only one man in all [her] life’” (para. 41): every single man in her life behaved to her in the same ways. They could all be summed up by the same traits that let her down whenever possible. This, however, was the norm that she was forced to put up with because of her gender.
Even when she asked the doctor about it, he acted “‘irritated’” (para. 43). Him acting as if he didn’t have a choice in the matter truly showed his ignorance towards what women had to go through. He definitely has much more of a choice than his bride did, but he nonetheless sarcastically asks her, “‘Is marriage then such a joyful occasion’” (para. 45). This marriage only solidified her plan of controlling the death of her doctor and herself. When she would mention the wedding, she believed that she was “‘piercing the doctor’s bosom like deadly darts’” (para. 48). She would talk about it optimistically, leaving the doctor to fully believe that she was excited to gain a companion in the zenana. That is the only thing she could look forward to in her seclusion. She had her brother arrange the “‘trappings of a gay wedding’” (para. 47). She made it seem like she was thrilled for the wedding. It wasn’t the norm for her to get excited about her plan to take control back, so they never expected her to. That was exactly how she took the knowledge that the doctor thought her of poison and “‘got a little powder, which at a convenient opportunity [she] had dropped unobserved into the doctor’s glass’” (para. 51), which he drank in one “‘gulp’” (para. 52).
In the end, she “‘dressed [her]self in [her] bridal-robes of silk and gold’” (para. 53). These robes were what she wore when she was forced to her inevitable death with her husband and her finally controlling her death again. She put on all her jewelry that she never got to enjoy and put a “‘red mark of wifehood on the parting in [her] hair’” (para. 53). When she lays down in her garden to die, she uses words like “‘beautiful night’”, “‘gentle’”, and “‘rejoicing’” (para. 54). The happiest point in her life was when she was able to have power over her death that most women in her position wouldn’t have. She was able to beat the religious conventions, gender constraints, and strict societal norms of the caste system, even if she was punished in death for it. The last moment of her life, she “‘closed [her] eyes, and smiled’” (para. 55). She held onto that smile in death, even though the reader now knows that her body was later discarded and shamed by being denied the sacred death rituals and donated to a medical school. In the framing narrative, the voice of the spirits asks the man (the frame narrator) if he saw “‘any sign of that’” smile (para. 56). Even in her death, this question shoes that she is still trapped by gendered constraints; she could only hope that those who studied her skeleton saw her “‘joys and griefs’” and her physical beauty (para. 56). When trying desperately to hold onto her voice, she wanted the people who saw her skeleton to understand that she was able to take the power at one point. Despite her attempt to control her own destiny, she was still forced in death to tell her story through men, existing at the end of the narrative as only a voice in the wind.
