ABSTRACT
Rabindranath Tagore’s significance for ‘the urgent political predicaments we face today’ lies in his recognition of the ambivalence of nationalism. Unlike most intellectuals of his time, Tagore did not uncritically embrace anti-imperialist nationalism as the only response to European imperialist nationalism but articulated a ‘critical’ conception of nationalism which was cognizant of the inherent violence associated with modern conceptions of the nation-state. Since the colonial state was alien to the people it governed, it needed to be ‘opposed politically and contested ethically’. This, Tagore realized, could only be done through a nationalist popular movement. However, rather than accept the Eurocentric terms upon which the discourse of nationalism is constructed, it is suggested that Tagore posits the ‘nation’ neither as an object to be liberated by a nationalist movement nor one to be constructed by nationalist elites, but as ‘a moral imaginary: an ideal of human belonging which no state can historically realize in full, and which, therefore, can be used strategically as a ground from which actual states and their realization of the people-nation can be criticized’. Thus, instead of becoming a principle of exclusion, or an idea that serves to legitimize the actions of the state, this idea of the ‘ideal nation’ becomes a principle of criticism. Tagore’s reflections on nationalism suggest a larger question which is central to this volume: whether the idea of the nation-state is indeed ‘the final destiny of mankind’ or whether other forms of ‘imagined community’ can fulfill human needs for collective belonging.
