The illegitimacy of nationalism

Nandy, Ashis. The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self. Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1994. Summary: In this book, one of India’s (some might say, of the world’s) most eminent intellectuals sets out to examine the anti-nationalist thinking of a "dissenter among dissenters," the Nobel Prize-winning Bengali poet, novelist, and moral figure, whom Gandhi called gurudev, "great teacher": Rabindranath Tagore (b. 1861—d. 1941). This double dissidence calls for elucidation. According to Nandy, in the golden age of the Indian freedom movement, many of the leading actors in that movement had become ambivalent about nationalism, associating it with the rapine and violence of colonialism. Most of these antinationalist freedom-activists believed that nationalism was a premodern artifact that would melt into air as soon as the principles of the Enlightenment were embraced. But a small band, Nandy contends, saw nationalism as being rather the inevitable by-product of modernity, and wanted nothing to do with the homogeneous universalism that was proffered as a solution to the problem. "Their alternative," he says, "was a distinctive civilizational concept of