What Would Tagore Say About Today’s India-Pakistan War Rhetoric?
May 14, 2025
As India and Pakistan exchanged fire recently, Indian media turned the conflict into a nationalist spectacle—fuelling misinformation, stirring up communal identity and drowning out voices of reason. In moments like these, warnings by poet-philosopher Rabindranath Tagore—who wrote India’s national anthem—about nationalism read less like history and more like a diagnosis.
Several Indian news channels aired unverified reports and misleading visuals—from false claims of suicide attacks to recycled videos showing fireballs falling from the sky, according to Newslaundry.
Anchors also thundered over the noise of background explosions, suggesting that Pakistan will face the full might of India’s wrath. Hashtags like #IndiaStrikesBack and #WipeOutPakistan trended for hours. Mainstream media, especially primetime television, presented war as spectacle, with little room for nuance or empathy. In some broadcasts, Indian Muslims and Kashmiris were questioned for their patriotism.
Fact-checkers, including like Alt News and Boom Live, scrambled to keep up, debunking claims about hundreds of casualties and the destruction of cross-border tunnels.
In this landscape of rage and performance, it’s worth pausing to ask: What would Rabindranath Tagore have thought of all this?
This question is relevant because Tagore wrote Jana Gana Mana, the national anthem. He was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, back in 1913. He founded Visva-Bharati University to bring together ideas from across the world, long before anyone used words like global or multicultural. He wasn’t just a poet—he was in conversation with Gandhi, Einstein and Nehru, and was read by thinkers from Ireland to Japan. So when he warned about the dangers of nationalism, he wasn’t doing it from a distance. He had seen where it leads, and he kept pushing India to think bigger than borders and flags.
More than a century ago, in 1917, Tagore stood before an audience in Japan and warned, “Nationalism is a cruel epidemic of evil that is sweeping over the human world.” Europe was neck-deep in World War I at the time. Japan, intoxicated with imperial ambition, was drifting into militarism. And Tagore, fresh off winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, was traveling the world trying to make a case for something different: a world where human beings recognised their shared destiny.
Tagore believed nationalism made people follow the state blindly, like parts in a machine. He didn’t mean patriotism or love for one’s country—he meant the kind of nationalism that needs enemies, thrives on hate and shuts down thought. What he saw in early 20th-century Japan and Germany, and what he feared for India, was the rise of a politics that could only define itself by what it opposed.
Had he been alive today, Tagore would likely have written another essay—perhaps titled Nationalism in the Time of Television. He would have found the media’s obsession with revenge hollow. He would have grieved the ease with which young people on social media adopted a militaristic posture, wearing nationalism like a jersey in a football match. And he would have been disturbed by how religion, again, became a test of loyalty.
No one can deny that Tagore loved India. He did, deeply. But his vision of India was generous, open and inclusive. He wanted India to be strong, not in arms, but in intellect and compassion. “India has never had a real sense of nationalism. Even though from childhood I had been taught that the idolatry of Nation is almost better than reverence for God and humanity, I believe I have outgrown that teaching, and it is my conviction that my countrymen will gain truly their India by fighting against that education which teaches them that a country is greater than the ideals of humanity.” he once wrote.
His university at Santiniketan was built on this idea. It brought together scholars from China, America, Europe and across Asia. He wanted students in rural Bengal to read Shakespeare and Confucius, to debate philosophy with visiting professors from Japan, and to understand that the world wasn’t something to fear—it was something to learn from.
Tagore’s internationalism wasn’t a rejection of India. It was a belief that India could be better than a country constantly preparing for battle.
That belief is still relevant.
Tagore wouldn’t have responded passively to the nationalist narratives that followed the India-Pakistan clashes. He warned against what violence does to the soul of a nation: it makes us celebrate fear, call it strength and forget to ask questions.
He would have said India would be safer if its citizens were taught critical thinking, empathy and history—not jingoism. Tagore didn’t claim to have all the answers, but he was certain of one thing: a country that builds walls of hate around itself cannot grow—morally, culturally or intellectually.
Today, as we sift through shouting headlines and angry social media posts, that thought is worth revisiting.
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