Singing Bengal into a Nation: Tagore the Colonial Cosmopolitan?

This article argues that tracing Rabindranath Tagore's travels to Europe and America from 1913 to 1918, which coincide with his public disavowal of nationalism in Bengal, provides an insight into the limitations of nationalism. By offering a contextualization of Tagore's nationalist disillusionment through a reading of his personal relationships with scholars and artists often taken as the exemplars of literary modernism, the suggestion is made that Tagore should be read as a modernist author as well. Tagore's muscular critique of nationalism emerges as much out of local upheavals in Bengal post-1905 as out of a more global modernist landscape of war, revolution, and imperialism. Tagore models in his speeches and writing a locally rooted globalism, committed to a universal humanism and an avowed love of country, and it takes a form that is explicitly neither nationalist nor cosmopolitan.