Tagore on Modernity, Nationalism and ‘the Surplus in Man’

Rabindranath Tagore’s reflections on the concepts and practices of civilisation, nationalism, and community are directly concerned with the nature of modern political power and its underlying assumptions about human life. This article interprets these reflections by reading them along with and in the light of his philosophical anthropology as articulated in a variety of philosophical essays, focusing closely on The Religion of Man. It concludes by underscoring the contemporary import of these reflections as a philosophical resource for thinking about possibilities of human communities that go beyond the way the dominant tendency in political power tends to capture human life under its multiple regimes.