— The Home and the World (1916), Chapter 2
About this quote
हिन्दी में
सँकरी दुनिया से बड़ी दुनिया तक जाने का रास्ता तूफ़ानी होता है।
What it means
The sentence puts the storm in a precise place. Not in the narrow world, which is nowhere called wretched, and not in the larger one, which is not called better — only larger. The weather belongs to the crossing itself, which makes it temporary and also unavoidable, and which tells you nothing about whether the crossing was a good idea.
That is what separates the line from the comfort-zone slogan it gets used as. A slogan promises that the far shore will justify the rough water. This one promises only the rough water. Spoken by a man who has chosen to open the door for somebody else, it reads as a forecast he is making himself accept: he can decide to widen another person’s world, and he cannot choose what blows in behind it.
What it teaches you
If you are the one widening someone’s world — a daughter moving cities, a junior handed real authority, a spouse taking a job that rearranges the household — price the disturbance in at the start instead of reading each upheaval as evidence you decided wrong. The converse matters just as much: the storm is not proof you decided right either. Judge the decision by the reasons you had when you made it, and let the turbulence be a cost you already expected to pay.
अर्थ और सीख
यह पंक्ति कहती है कि तूफ़ान न छोटी दुनिया में है, न बड़ी में — वह बीच के रास्ते में है, यानी वह अस्थायी भी है और अनिवार्य भी। यहाँ बड़ी दुनिया को ‘बेहतर’ नहीं, केवल ‘बड़ी’ कहा गया है, इसलिए यह कोई आश्वासन नहीं देती। सीख यह है कि जब आप किसी की — या अपनी — दुनिया खोलते हैं, तो उथल-पुथल को शुरू से ही उसकी क़ीमत मानकर चलें, और हर झटके को यह प्रमाण न समझें कि निर्णय ग़लत था।
Where it comes from
Nikhil, Bimala’s husband, on what it means to let someone out of a sheltered life into the world. He has chosen it deliberately and is trying to hold his nerve.
The novel was written in 1916, at the height of the argument between Tagore’s universalism and the nationalism rising around him. The stormy passage he describes is personal, political, and in the book’s judgement unavoidable.
