‘Beyond the limits of nation and geography’: Rabindranath Tagore and the cosmopolitan moment, 1916–1920

This article examines the emergence of a distinctive brand of political cosmopolitanism across Britain’s Asian Empire during World War I. Rather than presenting this phenomenon merely as a response to Western developments (in particular, Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points), it argues for the Asian origins and political logic of such discourse. The activities of the poet Rabindranath Tagore in these crucial years, his voyage from Bengal to Japan and his scheme for an international university, are used as a lens through which to view the wider currency of cosmopolitan thinking and practice in the region. For, it is argued, while Tagore never committed himself to an explicitly ‘political’ cosmopolitan project, the success and failure of his international endeavours are best understood within this broader intellectual milieu.