Question

Were rabindranath tagore and his sister-in-law kadambari devi in love?

Answer 1

She was married at the age of ten, to a husband who was almost a decade older than her. Neglected, alone most of the time, with only the young Rabindranath for company, would it come as a surprise that she turned to him for emotional solace. It was a relationship that would never be spoken of or acknowledged, but intense and overwhelming all the same. What would have led her to take that overdose of opium barely a few months after her father-in-law got Rabindranath married? We will never know what ran through her mind in those last minutes, how she steeled her nerve and slid into oblivion. All we know is that she lives on, immortalised through the poet’s words, through his writing, and through his works of art.

On 21 April 1884, Kadambari Devi, Rabindranath Tagore’s sister-in-law, committed suicide with an overdose of opium — four months after the poet-laureate married Mrinalini Devi. Kadambari Devi played an extraordinary part in young Tagore’s life, inspiring him to write many poems, but their relationship has been shrouded in secrecy. What is known, however, is that Tagore was distraught after her death. ‘She, my Queen, has died and my world has shut against the door of its inner apartment of beauty which gives on the real taste of freedom,’ he wrote in a letter.