Nationalism
- Publisher : Penguin Random House
- Publishing year : June 2017
- Binding : Paperback
- ISBN : 9780143064671
- Imprint : Penguin Books India
- Age Group : Adult
- Language : English
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize. Nationalism is based on lectures delivered by ...
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize. Nationalism is based on lectures delivered by him during the First World War. While the nations of Europe were doing battle, Tagore urged his audiences in Japan and the United States to eschew political aggressiveness and cultural arrogance. His mission, one might say, was to synthesize East and West, tradition and modernity. The lectures were not always well received at the time, but were chillingly prophetic. As Ramachandra Guha shows in his brilliant and erudite Introduction, it was by reading and speaking to Tagore that those founders of modern India, Gandhi and Nehru, developed a theory of nationalism that was inclusive rather than exclusive. Tagore's Nationalism should be mandatory reading in today's climate of xenophobia, sectarianism, violence and intolerance.
Born in Kolkata, Shri Rabindranath Tagore started writing poetry from a tender age of eight. Later, as an eminent poet, short story writer, essayist, painter, novelist and playwright of worldwide fame, he changed the face of Bengali literature and music. Some of his other works are Malini, The Crescent Moon and Stray Birds.
Well known as a 'polymath,' he was also known as a renaissance poet. He had a progressive mindset and believed that the human mind has unlimited capabilities.
