Nationalism

Rabindranath Tagore delivered these three lectures during his 1916–17 tour of Japan and the United States, four years after winning the Nobel Prize. *Nationalism in the West* indicts the European nation-state as a soulless mechanism of organised greed; *Nationalism in Japan* begs the rising Asian power not to imitate Europe's mistake; *Nationalism in India* argues that India's deeper problem is social and spiritual, not political. The lectures were widely attacked at the time — in Japan as ingratitude, in India as defeatism — but they read today as one of the earliest sustained critiques of nationalism written by a non-Western voice.