Nationalism

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Overview

Nationalism is a set of lectures Rabindranath Tagore delivered in Japan and the United States in 1916 and 1917 and published in 1917. In them he argues that the modern nation-state is a machine of organised power that serves commerce and war and treats people as means. He criticises the West, warns Japan against imitating it, and describes India's problem as social and moral, not simply political. The lectures matter because they come from a poet who loved his country yet distrusted the idea of the nation, a position still debated in South Asia and elsewhere.

Context

The lectures were given during the First World War, when European nations were destroying each other, and in a world of expanding empires. Tagore had taken part in the swadeshi movement of 1905 after the partition of Bengal and then withdrew from it. He had received the Nobel Prize in 1913 and was knighted in 1915; he gave the title up in 1919 in protest at the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.