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?India has never had a real sense of nationalism? penned by Asia's first Nobel laureate, Rabindranath tagore?s nationalism foregrounds his view of nationalism ?as a great menace.? suffused in four essays and a poem, the book tries to define ?nation? as a social construction levied to achieve a Mechanical purpose. The author, a mystic Orient, tries to unravel the dark reality of western nationalism and the repercussions of spiritually idealizing a nation. Delineating the complex maze of nationalism, its position in the world and its relation to India, Tagore emphasise that ?there is only one history- The history of man. All National histories are merely chapters??.
About the author
Rabindranath Tagore (7 May 1861 - 7 August 1941) was a Bengali polymath who was active as a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, educationist and painter during the age of Bengal Renaissance. He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful" poetry of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European and the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; where his elegant prose and magical poetry were widely popular in the Indian subcontinent. He was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. Referred to as "the Bard of Bengal", Tagore was known by sobriquets: Gurudeb, Kobiguru, and Biswokobi.[a]A Bengali Brahmin from Calcutta with ancestral gentry roots in Burdwan district and Jessore, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old. At the age of sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bh¿nusi¿ha ("Sun Lion"), which were seized upon by literary authorities as long-lost classics. By 1877 he graduated to his first short stories and dramas, published under his real name. As a humanist, universalist, internationalist, and ardent critic of nationalism,[15] he denounced the British Raj and advocated independence from Britain. As an exponent of the Bengal Renaissance, he advanced a vast canon that comprised paintings, sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, and some two thousand songs; his legacy also endures in his founding of Visva-Bharati University
