ABSTRACT
Like many political entities of the present day, the countries of South Asia comprise geographical units that have undergone phases of integration and fragmentation. The modern concept of nationhood came to South Asia in the colonial and postcolonial periods, during which both colonizers and colonized alike, willingly or not, forged national units from disparate ethnic, political, linguistic, and religious groups. Among the tools used to forge these new nations were hundreds of nationalistic songs. Two of these, both by the Bengali poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, eventually became the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
