Nationalism in india rabindranath tagore summary

Cover of the book ‘Nationalism’ If you look for a definition of the word 'nationalism' on Google, or in an encyclopedia, you will find quite a few. However, this word, like many such words, is 'notorious' in its own way, as no single definition seems to define it thoroughly. It assumes different meanings in different contexts. And such contexts are countless. Feudalism, with its many faces, is one. Colonial rule is another, which itself has numerous varieties—colonization in the Americas or Australia cannot be compared with that of India or China. And an independent country cannot dispense with nationalism either; it must build up its own brand or brands. Tagore was born and lived his whole life in a colonial country, then undivided India, which can be roughly identified with the modern South Asian subcontinent. It had long been under feudal control, to be replaced by British imperial occupation of India after a brief period of mercenary masquerade. A hundred years after the Plassey defeat of 1757, an attempt was made to replace the White occupation. This was a bid to revert to traditional feudalism, in the form of a mutiny. However, it failed. Rabindranath Tagore was born three years later, soon to become an imperial subject with the rest of his countrymen. He, as a boy, would share the patriotism of his family and wish that his country were free. He would write poems about its past glory and present indignity as a subject-race. Beyond his singing 'Bande Mataram' in Congr...

Rabindranath Tagore, who died in 1941 at the age of eighty, is a towering figure in the millennium-old literature of Bengal. Anyone who becomes familiar with this large and flourishing tradition will be impressed by the power of Tagore’s presence in Bangladesh and in India. His poetry as well as his novels, short stories, and essays are very widely read, and the songs he composed reverberate around the eastern part of India and throughout Bangladesh. In contrast, in the rest of the world, especially in Europe and America, the excitement that Tagore’s writings created in the early years of this century has largely vanished. The enthusiasm with which his work was once greeted was quite remarkable. Gitanjali, a selection of his poetry for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1913, was published in English translation in London in March of that year and had been reprinted ten times by November, when the award was announced. But he is not much read now in the West, and already by 1937, Graham Greene was able to say: “As for Rabindranath Tagore, I cannot believe that anyone but Mr. Yeats can still take his poems very seriously.” The contrast between Tagore’s commanding presence in Bengali literature and culture and his near-total eclipse in the rest of the world is perhaps less interesting than the distinction between the view of Tagore as a deeply relevant and many-sided contemporary thinker in Bangladesh and India, and his image in the West as a repetitive and...

Rabindranath Tagore's best known work, Nationalism (1917), is often mistaken for the sum and substance of his thoughts on nationalism. However, a look at the evolution of his idea over different stages suggests that his thoughts on nationalism cannot be accommodated within the stereotypes of "internationalism" or "anti-nationalism" in which commentators cast him. To focus only on that is a reductionist over-simplification of Tagore's evolving approach to the antinomies of nationalism as he perceived them. The Economic and Political Weekly, published from Mumbai, is an Indian institution which enjoys a global reputation for excellence in independent scholarship and critical inquiry. First published in 1949 as the Economic Weekly and since 1966 as the Economic and Political Weekly, EPW, as the journal is popularly known, occupies a special place in the intellectual history of independent India. For more than five decades EPW has remained a unique forum that week after week has brought together academics, researchers, policy makers, independent thinkers, members of non-governmental organisations and political activists for debates straddling economics, politics, sociology, culture, the environment and numerous other disciplines. First published in 1949 as the Economic Weekly and since 1966 as the Economic and Political Weekly, EPW, as the journal is popularly known, occupies a special place in the intellectual history of independent India. For more than five decades EPW has r...