1910 and the evolution of Rabindranath Tagore’s vernacular nationalism

Abstract

Tagore has been accused of capitulating to Western liberal-humanist ideologies, and/or to excessively romanticized Germanic concepts of the ‘volk’: from the political perspective, other critics have faulted his understanding of nationalism by arguing that Tagore misconceived the cultural dimensions of the nation-state. These reproaches are very different from Edward Said’s acknowledgement of what might be termed ʼnationalisms’ when he distinguishes between ‘coercive’ nationalism and nationalist opposition to imperialism. Tagore can certainly be called an anti-statist but not an anti-nationalist if one appreciates his dialectical perception of ʼnation’ as the intersection of ‘swadesh’ and ‘samaj’. This chapter describes this alternative nationalism as Tagore’s ‘vernacular’ nationalism.