Gothic Perspective in Rabindranath Tagore’s The Hungry Stones

Abstract

The Hungry Stones provides a unique transformation of Gothic literary conventions within an Indian cultural and philosophical framework. This paper examines how Tagore employs key Gothic factors, haunted architecture, temporal dislocation, mental obsession, and the uncanny to create a surrounding of diffused dread instead of overt horror. The abandoned palace features as a Gothic space charged with ancient memory, in which silence and decay evoke unresolved desire and emotional absence. Not like Western Gothic narratives that rely on supernatural excess or violence, Tagore’s approach emphasizes interiority, restraint, and existential unease. The narrator’s gradual psychological involvement with the palace displays a descent into obsession, revealing how the past intrudes upon the present via memory and creativity. With the aid of reworking the Gothic mode into a contemplative exploration of longing, records, and human vulnerability, “The Hunger Stones challenges Eurocentric definitions of the style. The article argues that Tagore’s narrative represents a shape of postcolonial Gothic, wherein the supernatural operates as a metaphor for emotional and ancient starvation rather than as a source of terror. This reading situates Tagore as a significant contributor to the worldwide Gothic way of life.