Released in India as Ghare Baire, Home and the World offers a rare collaboration between that country's top director Satyajit Ray and versatile Indian film-personality Victor Banerjee. The latter plays a well-educated Hindu living in colonial East Bengal in 1908. When British governor-general Lord Curzon deliberately foments unrest between the Hindus and the Muslims in order to solidify his own power, Banerjee's best friend Soumitra Chatterjee tries to organize his countrymen into a rebellion. Banerjee introduces his wife Swatilekha Chatterjee to his charismatic rebel friend, hoping in this way to test his wife's love. Her attraction to the rebel is but one of the many wedges, both personal and political, driven between the two friends as Hindu/Muslim tensions flare up. Based on a 1919 novel by poet Rabindranath Tagore, Home and the World had long been a pet project of Satyajit Ray's, but he'd been unable to bring the book to the screen until India's political climate allowed him to do so.~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide