Today’s buzzwords are “national interest” and “national security”.

Anything in the name of nation is

legitimized even though it might be far away from truth or justice. How many wars have been waged
in the name of nationalism? How many innocent blood has it claimed? And yet people are so caught
up in the frenzy when the idea of nationalism is invoked in the same way that religion caused a
hollow hysteria in the medieval era and still does in the present time. Nation is the most desirable
political institution; it is a fictive concept without any grounds of scientific justification, it inviolable
and almost enshrined in this modern imagination.

Given the present global situation where nations across the globe are fighting and flying to cut each
other’s throats, sometimes unintentionally and without any anticipation, we tend to ignore the
world’s opinion and in return we perpetuate mutual malevolence and fear.

If we take a look back in the past and pause for a moment and review the anti- nationalitarian
ideologies of Bengali poet and Asia’s first Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore. He had an
alternative vision and promoted the idea of peace, self-reliance, brotherhood, spiritual unity of
human kind and harmony, and it is what we need right now more than ever. In this time of chaos and
agitation all we really need is Tagore’s healing message of love, simplicity and non-violence.

Tagore in his piece, Nationalism in India, he talks about a major issue that is the problem in our
country is not political, it is social. He believes that this condition not only prevails in India but in
other countries as well. It’s a problem according to the author because we Indians are trying to
imitate the western ideals, ideals that seem to work for them but may not work for us. Europe, where
racial unity is present from the very beginning and since natural resources were insufficient, they
were politically and socially more aggressive and exploited the inhabitants. Tagore has a problem
with the fact while we are trying to imitate other countries, we’re still stuck in a place where we
discriminate on the basis of colour. Yet, when countries like America are trying to be superior and
proclaim to be a country that doesn’t differentiate or discriminate and yet have taken lands away
from Red Indians and made slaves out of an entire race just based on their skin colour. Hence
according to Tagore, Americans have hardly any rights to question us and can take a look at
themselves.

Tagore was predictably hostile to communal sectarianism (such as a Hindu orthodoxy that was
antagonistic to Islamic, Christian, or Sikh perspectives). But even nationalism seemed to him to be
suspect. Tagore's attitude toward cultural diversity was that, he wanted Indians to learn what is going
on elsewhere, how others lived, what they valued, and so on, while remaining interested and
involved in their own culture and heritage. Indeed, in his educational writings the need for synthesis
is strongly stressed. Tagore also strongly rebelled against the strongly nationalist the independence
movement took and refrained from taking an active part in contemporary politics. He wanted to
emphasize and India’s right to be free but without denying them the lessons that they could learn
freely and profitably from abroad. He was afraid that a rejection from west against the indigenous
Indian tradition was not only limiting but it could make people turn hostile against all influences
from west especially religion. Since Christianity had already come in parts of the country by the
fourth century, Jewish after the Jews immigrated to our country after the fall of Jerusalem as did
Zoroastrianism through Parsi immigration and most importantly Islam, which had already been a
presence in India since the 10th century.

Tagore’s main issue with nationalism lies in its very nature and purpose as an institution. The fact
that it is a social construction, a mechanical organization built in a way keeping in mind certain
utilitarian objectives in mind, makes it unpalatable for Tagore, who was a man of creation over
construction, natural over the artificial, imagination over reason. According to him, as a formation
which is completely based on needs and wants instead of truth and love could never fulfill man in
any spiritual or moral way. That’s why, race was a more natural and acceptable social unit than a
nation. He envisioned a world where all races will live together in amity. Keeping all of their
distinctive characteristics attached to the stem of humanity by the bond of love and peace.

Tagore deemed nationalism a recurrent threat to humanity, because with its propensity for the
material and the rational, it trampled over the human spirit and human emotion; it upset man's moral
balance by subjugating his inherent goodness and divinity to a soul-less organisation. Tagore found
the fetish of nationalism to be a threat to humanity because of its constant emphasis on rational and
material, iot completely dismisses human emotion and spirit. Tagore considered this to be a soul less
organistaion promoting only war and hatred between nations. Where nation should promote good,
god, Soul, conscience over material and privilege instead cultivates absolutism, fanaticism,
provincialism and paranoia. Thuds every nation becomes paranoid and considers another a threat to
its existence. Even though war is considered to be legitimate and even “holy” but it only subjects the
nation to a downward spiral and a peril to itself.

Tagore never thought that real universalism is any different than nationalism and that they should
pull on opposite directions. Thus, the cosmopolitan universe envisioned by Tagore tries to
incorporate many opposites. Because he didnt see any difference between the best ages of the past
and the present, the East and the West, the modern and the traditional and didnt understand why a
balance could not be achieved.
It is a balance between universalism, nationalism and the traditional world that Tagore hoped to
achieve in his universal nationalism or better said as universal humanism. Many claim that they did
not consider Tagore a nationalist but infact a patriot and an anti-imperialis, because he loved his
country and did not want the British rule, he instead wanted a creation of cultures of all people
instead of seperate nation cultures, he could be called an universalist instead of a nationalist.

Tagore was opposed to the idea of a nation, even more opposed to the idea of India appropriating
it, he believed that it would compromise India’s history and culture and make it a poor version of
the West. His predictions did come true because even though India is politically free now it has
indeed join the bandwagon of nationalism and has let the western civilization cast a shadow over it.

“Tagore himself suffered from deep disillusionment with his former conviction in the
liberating power of European Enlightenment. However, he retained his faith in humanity.
This faith imparted to a colonized subject like him the courage to aspire to a metaphysical
cum universalist modernism/humanism: a position that he could trace to Indian
philosophical traditions. He thus bypassed the corrosive effects of colonization and could
envision ‘pedagogy of decolonization’ through the establishment of the Visva Bharati.
Tagore’s vision and discourse of an alternative modernity and “freedom” was a counterfoil
to a colonial power that emanated from mere imperial/racial/technocratic superiority.”

Tagore’s vision might seem idealistic but it is not unattainable. It calls for an humanitarian
intervention into present self-seeking and belligerent natioanlism through a moral and spiritual
dimension. Its time to step out and reinvent a new future for ourselves and that respects humanity
and treats everyone with dignity and sees the nation and every individual as equals, in its true
democratic spirit.

“Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity. I will not buy glass for the
price of diamonds, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live”

Although India is a free country, 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 has allowed neo- colonists to take over the country both explicitly and implicitly
spilling cultural doom for its own people. Also, the recent upsurge of extremist identity based
nationalism leaves us with no other choiuce but to trust on his model of nation, nationalism and
society.

Tagore never placed patriotism above soul, conscience and love for humanity, maybe its time that
we sought after the path that Tagore paved for us and finally wake up from this horrific moral
slumber and take note of the path of love,peace, justice, honesty, equality and unity of all mankind.
His viaion of a free world that distance itself from materialism and nationalism is passionately
expressed in one of his poems:

“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”

-Tagore Rabindranath, Song Offerings, 1912

WORKS CITED:

• Imagining One World: Rabindranath Tagore's Critique of Nationalism, Interdisciplinary

Literary Studies, Quayam A Mohammad,
• Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, Chatterjee Partha , Oxford University Press, New
Delhi, 1999
• Nationalism, Tagore Rabindranath, Macmillan, New York, 1917