Published Paper Details:

This article explores several layers of tension presented in the story ‘The Hungry Stones’ by Rabindranath Tagore. Using a unique narrative technique of storytelling through multiple narrators the writer here describes the uncanny experiences of an unnamed educated Bengali gentleman Babu while working as a cotton tax collector in the middle province of British colonial India. Spending lonely nights in a deserted marble palace far from the neighbouring locality, this man experiences the presence of women around him wearing clothes as described in the famous book The Arabian Nights. But these women are invisible to him. He mostly feels their presence while being asleep. So they appear supernatural to him. These experiences come to him in the forms of dream. This man is Indian inside but dressed and educated in Western style outwardly. By using Freudian theory of psychoanalysis this article is trying to explain the reason behind this nocturnal experiences completely rejecting the idea of supernatural.