Nationalism

Lectures that told a neutral America, in the middle of the First World War, that the nation-state itself was the enemy.

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1917(aged 56)
Original language: English

Overview

The First World War was in its third year, and the United States still neutral, when Rabindranath Tagore landed at Seattle in September 1916 for a lecture tour arranged by a New York agency. The tour put him in danger: in a San Francisco hotel Indian expatriates plotted to kill him, and the plot failed only because the would-be assassins fell to arguing. Macmillan published the lectures in New York in 1917, with his two Japanese addresses and a poem he had written in Bengali on the last day of the nineteenth century. The lectures start from the war, which Tagore read as the beginning of the Nation's death agony. By the Nation he meant something narrower than a people: a people organised for its own power and profit, a machine that produces policy as a power-loom produces cloth, and that looks the same in every country that adopts it. Britain governed India, he argued, through such a machine rather than as a people, and Japan, where he had just spent the summer, was learning to build one. India should not copy it either: her real problem was social, centuries of division between castes and races, and the Americans who questioned him about caste had their own treatment of Black and Native Americans to answer for.

Key concepts

What is the difference between a society and a Nation in this book?

A society is an end in itself: the natural way people arrange their relations so they can pursue ideals together. A Nation is what a whole population becomes when it is organised for a mechanical purpose, power and wealth. Every society has a political side for self-preservation, Tagore grants, but once science and organisation make that side profitable, it outgrows its place and starts to swallow the rest.

Is the book against the West?

No. Tagore separates the spirit of the West from the Nation of the West. The spirit marches under the banner of freedom and science, and even brought India's races the wish for a common bond; it scatters living seeds, he says, though it came like a storm. The Nation forges iron chains of organisation and doles out the West's benefits to India in a miserly measure. His quarrel is with the second, never the first.

What is the race problem the book says India was given?

The problem of many peoples, ethnically different, brought into close contact in one land, which Tagore calls India's task from the beginning of her history. Her answer, as he describes it, combined two things: social rules that regulated the differences between peoples, and a spiritual recognition of their unity. He admits the answer was flawed, its boundary walls set too rigidly, but insists the problem is the world's, not India's alone.

What does the book set against both cosmopolitanism and nation-worship?

A unity that keeps differences rather than erasing or idolising them. Tagore rejects the colourless vagueness of a cosmopolitanism that wipes peoples out, and the self-idolatry of nation-worship that sets one people above all. The goal, as he sees India pursuing it, is to regulate differences socially while recognising their spiritual unity, a work of centuries full of errors that has to keep being adjusted.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Nation as a Machine

A people becomes a Nation when it organises itself for power and profit. Whether anything human survives that organisation is what the lectures press on a neutral America.

By the Nation Tagore means something narrower than a people: a population organised for a mechanical purpose, power and profit, an applied science that looks the same wherever it is built. Its human parts carry out policy with no twinge of pity, and its products are men as puppets of war and money. He read the First World War as the start of the Nation's death agony, and on the last day of the nineteenth century he had already written of its sun setting in blood-red clouds.

nationalism
power
political power
mechanization
bureaucracy
imperialism
colonialism
militarism
greed
materialism
science
modernity
political ethics

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A Problem That Is Social

India's nationalists wanted political freedom first. Tagore told them, and his American hosts, that a mind kept unfree by its own society gains little from a change of rulers.

India's history, as Tagore tells it, is a race problem: peoples of every kind sharing one land. Caste was her serious attempt to let them live side by side, and it went wrong by fixing differences that life keeps changing. Her real problem is therefore social, and copying the Nation would only borrow someone else's history. Political freedom, he warns, no more frees a mind than an automobile creates freedom of movement. America, with its own caste toward Native and Black Americans, faces the same question.

caste
tradition
cultural identity
humanity
humanism
moral responsibility
human dignity
freedom
spirituality
civilization
cultural exchange
culture
ethics

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Within this work

passages held: 101
distinct concepts: 220
by passages held, corpus-wide: #500

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “imperialism” and “nationalism”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 20 pairings. 84 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
imperialism	nationalism	8
colonialism	nationalism	7
nationalism	spirituality	6
humanity	nationalism	5
nationalism	political power	5
humanity	power	3
nationalism	power	3
colonialism	political power	2
colonialism	spirituality	2
humanity	imperialism	2
humanity	spirituality	2
power	spirituality	2
colonialism	humanity	1
colonialism	imperialism	1
colonialism	power	1
imperialism	power	1
modernity	nationalism	1
modernity	power	1
modernity	spirituality	1
political power	spirituality	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1913 Sadhana: The Realisation of Life
Tagore's talks on the Upanishads, published in London in the year of his Nobel Prize; Creative Unity later carries the same ideas into art and society.
EN
1916 The Spirit of Japan
A single lecture, printed in Tokyo as a pamphlet; with "The Message of India to Japan", given a few weeks earlier, it makes up the Japanese chapter of Nationalism.
EN
1917 Nationalism you are here EN
1922 Creative Unity
Where Nationalism attacks the nation-state, this later collection sets against it what Tagore wanted built instead, from the village religion of Bengal to the university he founded.
EN

— or open another of their works