Short Story Collection: Hungry Stones and Other Stories

Collection Overview
Published in 1916, Hungry Stones and Other Stories gathers Rabindranath Tagore’s short fiction in English translation at a moment when he was introducing global readers to the breadth of modern Bengali storytelling. The collection moves fluidly between the supernatural and the mundane, city and village, satire and lament. Its pieces observe colonial bureaucracy, the crumbling prestige of old aristocracies, the inner lives of women and children, and the stubborn pull of the past. Across these stories, Tagore balances lyrical atmosphere with sharply etched human motives, offering portraits that are intimate yet expansive in their social reach.

The Title Story
The Hungry Stones anchors the volume with a drifting, haunted mood. A government excise officer takes quarters in a dilapidated riverside palace once alive with Mughal splendor. At dusk the marble corridors seem to breathe; music and perfumes reawaken; a beautiful apparition beckons him into a world of vanished courtiers and seductions. A skeptical friend tries to keep him tethered to ordinary life, but the palace’s “hungry” stones seem to feed on memory and desire, blurring lines between dream and waking. The tale refuses a final, rational resolution, creating a lingering sense that places can be repositories of longing as potent as any living will.

Other Notable Tales
In The Home-Coming, a high-spirited village boy is sent to Calcutta to be disciplined under an uncle’s care. City routines and harsher expectations smother his energy; his longing for home goes unrecognized until illness forces a reckoning that comes too late. The story’s quiet tragedy springs from ordinary misreadings between adults and children, and from the distance between rural ease and urban constraint.

Once There Was a King is a playful but pointed fable about storytelling itself. A child narrator improvises a fairy tale for his mother, only to be gently challenged, corrected, and coaxed into making meaning. The piece becomes a meditation on how stories are born in the tension between fantasy and the listener’s demands for truth and coherence.

My Lord, The Baby sketches the comic vanity of power. A minor functionary, overawed by status and etiquette, is reduced to servility by the whims of a small child around whom all adult ambitions orbit. The satire exposes how hierarchies make people ridiculous, even when the object of reverence is innocently oblivious.

The Babus of Nayanjore turns to the decay of old gentry. A once-grand family maintains a brittle façade of wealth in a crumbling house, greeting visitors with hospitality that cannot conceal empty larders and unpaid debts. Beneath the irony lies a compassionate understanding of pride, nostalgia, and the social performance of respectability.

Themes and Tone
Throughout, Tagore’s stories juxtapose enchantment with critique. The supernatural becomes a lens for history’s remnants and private obsession; realism exposes the costs of pride, neglect, and social pretense. Children’s perspectives uncover adult blind spots, while women’s constrained choices surface in moments of quiet defiance or resignation. Colonial-era institutions appear not as grand abstractions but as petty offices, examination halls, and courtly salons where human frailty plays out. Humor and tenderness soften the sharp edges of satire, and even the bleakest outcomes glimmer with empathy.

Style and Legacy
Tagore writes with musical economy: scenes arrive in a few vivid strokes, dialogue is spare, and images recur like motifs in a raga. Endings tend to be open, preferring resonance to moral. Read together, the stories form a mosaic of early twentieth-century Bengali life that resists simple categories. Hungry Stones and Other Stories helped establish for English-language readers a model of the modern Indian short story, capable of ghostly shimmer, social acuity, and intimate psychological truth within a few pages.