Anita Desai reads The Postmaster by Rabindranath Tagore

This story embodies most of Tagore's themes throughout his plays, novels, poetry and polemical writings: the conditions of women who are treated as servants; the denial of education that effectively cuts them off from the mainstream of life; the insensitivity of even the educated male to matters of the heart; the ignorance of, and general contempt for, the peasantry and the ­labouring class; the peasant's intolerable situation – poor, neglected, expected to be content with mere subsistence; and the disturbance of the age-old balance of society caused by the introduction of foreign, western methods and mores. Over and over he wrote of heroines who were young, illiterate and voiceless in the rigid structure of Hindu society and yet who displayed qualities of intelligence, imagination and persistence; by comparison, the male characters cut sorry figures, deficient not only mentally but, more importantly, emotionally. As the New York Times reviewer of Satyajit Ray's faithful film adaptation of The Postmaster wrote: "It says almost all that can be managed about the loneliness of the human heart."