Introduction-

Rabindranath Tagore was an Indian poet, writer, playwright,

composer, philosopher, social reformer, and painter during
the age of Bengal Renaissance. He reshaped Bengali
literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual
Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is
well acclaimed not only within India, but also in the world.
Apart from his remarkable contribution in the field of
literature, he has made a notable contribution to the
discourse of nationalism and cosmopolitanism
He was a towering figure in Indian literature and a key
cultural icon who made significant contributions to the fields
of poetry, music, drama, literature, and art. Born into the
Tagore family, which was at the forefront of the Bengal
Renaissance, he was instrumental in reshaping Bengali
literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual
Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Although known mostly for his poetry, Tagore was an
extremely versatile writer. Tagore wrote more than a
thousand poems; eight volumes of short stories; almost two
dozen plays and playlets; eight novels; and many books and
essays on philosophy, religion, education, and social topics.
He was also a composer, creating over two thousand songs,
including the national anthems of India ("Jana Gana Mana")
and Bangladesh ("Amar Shonar Bangla").
Gitanjali (Bengali: গীতাঞ্জলি) is Tagore's best-known
collection of poetry, for which he was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1913. Tagore is also the first non-
European to win a Nobel Prize in Literature. The
original Bengali collection of 156/157 poems were published
on 4 August 1910. The poems were based on medieval Indian
lyrics of devotion with a common theme of love across most
poems. Some poems also narrated a conflict between the
desire for materialistic possessions and spiritual longing.
It is part of the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works.
Its central theme is devotion, and its motto is "I am here to
sing thee songs".
"Where the mind is without fear" is a poem that represents
Tagore's vision of a new and awakened India. The original
poem was published in 1910 and was included in the 1910
collection Gitanjali and, in Tagore's own translation, in its
1912 English edition. "Where the mind is without fear" is the
35th poem of Gitanjali, and one of Tagore's most
anthologised poems.

Tagore always believed in the transformative role of

education. For him, education is vital for the advancement of
a society. He was of the view that lack of education is the
main source of India’s social and moral problems. He was not
just an enthusiastic proponent of education; he also
established education institutions, including Visva-Bharati
(meaning ‘India in the World’). It was an effort to show how
India could be self-reliant and self-respectful in education.
According to Tagore, “Viswa-Bharati represents India where
she has her wealth of mind which is for all. Viswa-Bharati
acknowledges India’s obligation to offer to others the
hospitality of her best culture and India’s right to accept from
others their best.”

Tagore was knighted by the ruling British Government in

1915. It was considered as prestigious because knighthood is
a title given to a person for his greatest achievements.
However, within a few years, Tagore resigned the honour as a
symbol of protest against British policies in India. In 1919,
following the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in which British
soldiers fired on an unarmed crowd in Amritsar, Tagore
renounced his knighthood.
Tagore’s Critique of Nationalism:
In a poem entitled, "The Sunset of the Century," written on
the last day of the nineteenth century, India's messianic poet
and Asia's first Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-
1941) launched a fierce diatribe on nationalism. In a mood of
outrage and disenchantment, tempered with intermittent
hope, he wrote:
“The last sun of the century sets amidst the blood
red clouds of the West and the whirlwind of hatred.
The naked passion of the self-love of Nations, in its
drunken delirium of greed, is dancing to the clash of
steel and howling verses of vengeance.
The hungry self of the Nation shall burst in a
violence of fury from its shameless feeding.
For it has made the world its food.
And licking it, crunching it and swallowing it in big
morsels,
It swells and swells
Till in the midst of its unholy feast descends the
sudden shaft of heaven piercing its heart of grossness.”

This anti-nationalitarian sentiment - that nationalism is a

source of war and carnage, death, destruction and
divisiveness, rather than international solidarity, that induces
a larger and more expansive vision of the world - remains at
the heart of Tagore's imagination in most of his writings.

As seen above and in many of Tagore’s writings, we can see

Tagore offered a profound and nuanced critique of
Nationalism. Tagore's critique is deeply rooted in his
philosophical outlook, which emphasized universal humanism
and the interconnectedness of all peoples. Tagore had
attempted to define his understanding of a nation and
nationalism in his book Nationalism (1917).

But first, we must understand what is Nationalism?

Nationalism has been conceptualized in different ways and
forms. Many scholars have tried to define the term. For
example, Benedict Anderson, in his well-known writing,
Imagined Communities (1983) defined nationalism as “a bond
between people that comes to exist when the members of a
nation recognize themselves and their compatriots to be part
of a nation.” Another important scholar Ernest Gellner in his
Nations and Nationalism (1983) argued that a nation is
formed “if and when the members of the category firmly
recognize certain mutual rights and duties to each other in
virtue of their shared membership. It is their recognition of
each other as fellows of this kind which turns them into a
nation.”
However, these are the ideas on nationalism mostly
dominated by Eurocentrism. The conditions of non-European
world were different.

Tagore directly states that India’s real problem is social and

not political. Tagore directly states that India’s real problem is
social and not political. He explains how European society has
racial unity unlike India where being a large sub-continent, it
has people of several races living together for centuries. India
has to fight the problem of caste. It has used the caste system
as a solution for centuries to live together but still maintain
the boundaries amongst each other. This system helped them
in avoiding friction for a very long time but this solution is not
permanent. The caste system which was introduced to create
an accommodating environment has now become so rigid
that it is a system of repression now.
To solve this, Tagore focuses on the importance of education
in eradicating the long-sustaining caste-based suppression by
the elites over the untouchables and poor. India cannot gain
its freedom until it eradicates this social repression

Tagore was opposed to the idea of the nation; he was even

more fiercely opposed to India joining the bandwagon of
nationalism. This would compromise India's history and
identity as a culture and bring it under the shadow of the
West. He warned:
We, in India, must make up our minds that we cannot borrow
other people's history, and that if we stifle our own, we are
committing suicide. When you borrow things that do not
belong to your life, they only serve to crush your life. ... I
believe that it does India no good to compete with Western
civilization in its own field. . .. India is no beggar of the West.
(Soares 106)
India does not need begging; it needs constructive growth
from within. Tagore also criticized the extremists in the Indian
National Congress who are blindly following the revolution
and adopting violent measures for their nation but in reality,
ignoring the real sufferings of its own people.
Radical nationalism that acted as opiate of the people,
making them irrational and fanatical, blind to the senses of
truth and justice, and willing to both kill an die for it,
perpetuating a logic of "lunacy" and war, instead of a cycle of
freedom and peace, was an anathema to Tagore. He spurned
it as "a cruel epidemic of evil . . . sweeping over the human
world of the present age and eating into its moral fibre”, a
terrible absurdity that is seeking to engulf humanity in a
suicidal conflagration.

Concept of True Freedom:

Tagore was a benefactor of the concept of ‘true freedom’
which would break the shackles of bondage and go far
beyond the idea of Political freedom for a country. He defines
‘nation’ as a social construction levied to achieve a
mechanical purpose. Invoking the archaic spiritual history of
India, Tagore imbibed an audacious understanding of ‘true
freedom’ for his countrymen, which is a condition through
which an individual takes himself near to the ‘Supreme
Reason.’ Political independence does not elevate the
personality of individuals to this level of perfection. He
visualized four stages of ‘True Freedom’ which are:
1. Realization of freedom at the individual level
2. Realization of freedom at the community level
3. Realization of freedom from the community level to the
universe
4. Realization of freedom from universe to infinity and
beyond

Tagore and Gandhi:

Tagore and Gandhi were on friendly terms, and in many ways,
Tagore was a precursor of Gandhi; it was Tagore who gave the
title "Mahatma" (the great soul) to Gandhi, and in return
Gandhi dubbed Tagore "Gurudev" (the venerable teacher)
and greeted him as "poet of the world." Yet Tagore and
Gandhi never saw eye to eye on the way towards India's
future, as Tagore stubbornly refused to support Gandhi's
nationalist movement against the British rule. Unlike Gandhi,
Tagore believed that political freedom and attainment of a
nationalist identity by driving the British out was not the right
solution for India's problems;
Tagore took the view that what India needed was not a "blind
revolution" or the "miracle of [political] freedom [built] upon
the quicksand of social slavery”, “but steady purposeful
education”, or an evolution from within; "what India most
needed was constructive work coming from within herself,"
he argued in "Nationalism in India".

Tagore’s Cosmopolitanism:
For Tagore “when a man does not realize his kinship with the
world, he lives in a prison house whose walls are alien to
him”. Men must rise above the idea of nationalism and seek
universalism and humanity.
Tagore’s criticism of nationalism brings him close to the
concept of cosmopolitanism which means a belief that all
people are entitled to equal respect and consideration, no
matter what their citizenship status or other affiliations
happen to be.
Tagore’s cosmopolitanism is embedded with values of
cooperation, coexistence, humanity and spiritual
universalism. His cosmopolitanism transcends boundaries
and is meant for humanity at large. He believed that the
concept of citizenship should be based on a humanist ideal.
Tagore argued that Modern India’s claim to nationhood was
fundamentally flawed because India could not succeed in
retaining the unifying spirits which kept diverse people
together for centuries, and had allowed conflicts between
faiths and caste division to countervail that spirit.
Moreover, the on-going violence in the subcontinent
vindicates his position. India has since been broken up into
three countries: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
India still remains a poor country, with political corruption
rife, and plights of the downtrodden a daily reality. Tagore's
prediction that joining the bandwagon of nationalism would
make India a beggar of the West has also come true.
Although India is a free country now (ironically broken up into
three fragments), the appropriation of nationalist ideology
has erased the sense of India's difference as a society,
capable of standing on its own; forging of links with the West
on unequal terms (since India has merely copied the Western
thoughts and has nothing to offer of her own) has allowed
neo-colonialist controls to operate over the country both
explicitly and implicitly, spelling political and cultural doom
for its people.
Conclusion-
Rabindranath Tagore was not only a great poet who was
awarded with a prestigious Nobel Prize for his Gitanjali, but
also an original thinker who through his writings expressed
his views on various social, cultural, and political aspects.

Tagore could perhaps be faulted for impracticality; his vision

for India was too sublime and unrealisable in an imperfect
world. His wish that the West could help India in her mission
was also impracticable, especially since he knew that the
West came to the subcontinent, as he recounted in his essay
"East and West," "not with the imagination and sympathy to
create and unite, but with a shock of passion - passion for
power and wealth”. Yet his transcendent thought provides a
testament to his noble and beautiful mind, and it strikes a
chord in the moral person in each of us.

Tagore's vision might seem idealistic but it is not

unattainable. It calls for a humanitarian intervention into
present self-seeking and belligerent nationalism, through the
introduction of a moral and spiritual dimension in the
institution. It also requires us to step out of history to
reinvent a new future for ourselves that respects human
dignity and sees every individual and nation as equals, in a
true democratic spirit.
REFERENCES:

 School of Open Learning, Indian Political Thought-II

 IGNOU Reading
 Tagore, Rabindranath. (1917). Nationalism. London:
Macmillan
 A. Quayum, Mohammad. Imagining "One World":
Rabindranath Tagore's Critique of Nationalism.
International Islamic University Malaysia.
 Gandhi, Tagore, R., & Bhattacharya, S. (1997). The
Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and debates between
Gandhi and Tagore, 1915-1941. New Delhi: National
Book Trust, India.
 Wikipedia
 Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
 Britannica