Fatherly Love Theme Analysis

Love, specifically fatherly love, is one of the central threads of “Kabuliwallah.” The narrator of the story has one child: a precocious five-year-old daughter named Mini who “can’t stop talking for a minute” and frequently visits him in his study to talk and hide from her impatient mother. The narrator is touched by the liking that a local Kabuliwallah (fruit-seller) named Rahamat takes to Mini, and he enjoys watching them joke around and talk every day. When Rahamat is taken to jail shortly before returning to his home in Afghanistan, he’s quickly forgotten. However, on the day of Mini’s wedding, Rahamat returns to see her again only to find that she’s grown up and does not respond to him as she used to. Only then does he reveal that he has a daughter of his own, Parvati, back in Afghanistan, and the narrator finally understands why Rahamat became so interested in Mini. In “Kabuliwallah,” Tagore suggests that fathers harbor a particularly fierce and self-sacrificial love for their daughters, but that this love also entails the painful process of letting them go as they grow up.

From the very beginning of the story, the narrator establishes that he and Mini share a close relationship. Mini is talkative and her mother “often scolds her,” but the narrator “can’t do that” because he finds it “unnatural” when Mini is quiet. This illustrates his desire to let Mini be herself rather than trying to mold her into something more convenient or proper. The narrator is a writer and describes himself as something of a dreamer who wants to explore the world but is “condemned to [his] house” (though he admits to being a homebody by nature, too). This explains why he, unlike Mini’s mother, is okay with Mini exploring the immediate world around them and befriending Rahamat: he wants her to have more experiences than he did. Although the narrator is preoccupied with the outside world, it’s at least partially his love for Mini that keeps him “rooted.” As a father, he’s made himself content with staying home because it enables him to be there to provide for Mini and watch her grow.

By contrast, Rahamat is frequently away from his home and family—in a way, he’s living the narrator’s dream of travel—but love for his daughter motivates all his actions. Rahamat belongs to the lower classes, shown by the narrator’s description of his “dirty baggy clothes” and his unfortunate job as a travelling fruit peddler. It is not until after Rahamat is let out of jail eight years later that the narrator learns about his daughter back in Afghanistan. Rahamat says it was with his daughter “in mind” that he showed up with raisins for Mini, which also explains why he had spent so much time with her before he went to jail: she’d become a stand-in for his daughter, giving Rahamat the opportunity to do fatherly things until he returns home. Despite his love for Mini, the narrator feels “condemned” to Calcutta, but Rahamat could argue that he’s “condemned” to being away from his home. Just as the narrator has given up his desire to travel in part to be a good father to Mini, Rahamat has given up his desire to stay home with his daughter in order to be a good provider for her. Even though both men have different pictures of what it means to be a good father, both of them center their worlds around this goal.

Both the narrator and Rahamat love their daughters and have sacrificed their own self-interest in favor of promoting that of their children, but in the end, they are confronted with the pain of losing them. When Rahamat shows the narrator his daughter’s handprint that he keeps with him, the narrator realizes that Rahamat “was as I am,” meaning Rahamat knows what it is to let go of a child, something the narrator is still learning. The narrator calls Mini down and she appears in her wedding attire, forcing Rahamat to face the fact that his daughter will have also aged and changed in the time he’s been gone. In this, the two men’s roles are reversed: the narrator is learning to say goodbye to Mini as she grows up and gets married, and Rahamat has to learn how to “become re-acquainted” with his daughter after a long absence.

As fathers, Rahamat and the narrator share a good deal of common ground, but they are also traveling in different directions: Rahamat journeys from saying goodbye to his daughter to finding his way back to her, while the narrator, who has never been away from Mini, learns to say goodbye for the first time, allowing her to make the leap from childhood to womanhood. By coming to understand one another, however, Rahamat and the narrator also learn how to face the future and adapt to their ever-changing roles as fathers.