Nationalism

In three lectures, Rabindranath Tagore warns against the spirit of the modern nation-state, which he calls 'the organised self-interest of a whole people', a machine of commerce and politics that crushes the human spirit, breeds war and justifies empire. He speaks to the West; to Japan, which he fears is copying Western militarism; and to India, which he hopes will find its unity not in nationalism but in the meeting of cultures and in social reform.

Tagore delivered the lectures in Japan and the United States in 1916 and 1917, during the First World War, and published them in 1917; they made him unpopular in both countries but now seem prophetic. Read his Sadhana and Gitanjali.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was born in Calcutta, the youngest son of a great Bengali family of reformers and artists. He wrote poems, stories, novels, plays and some two thousand songs, and his songs became the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh.

He founded a school in the countryside at Santiniketan, which grew into a university, and in 1913 became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize, for Gitanjali. In 1919 he returned his British knighthood in protest at the massacre at Amritsar. The Home and the World and The Post Office show his range.