Rabindranāth's encounter with a larger world, beyond his own country, began at a very early age and continued all through his life. Hence the interrelation between his political thought and his view of the world is an exciting but challenging issue, for at least two reasons. First, Tagore was not a political activist, nor did he attach primary importance to politics in his thought. Hence apart from his lectures collected as Nationalism, delivered as the First World War was approaching its end, there is hardly any other text where he reflects exclusively on politics. The importance of this text notwithstanding, it is perhaps time to consider his political standpoint from other angles, by looking at many other sources that are not primarily political. Among these are his essays, mostly in Bengali, and his lectures and addresses delivered abroad in the period between the two World Wars. During this time he travelled extensively to both the East and the West, following the award of the Nobel Prize in 1913 and his desperate search for funds for his dream project of Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan.

Second, there is a methodological dimension to this exercise, which in turn is twofold. At one level, Tagore was a product of Indian and specifically Upanishadic tradition together with Western modernity, a mix that characterized the Tagore family. At another level, he was writing as a colonized subject in British India, experiencing colonial rule at first hand and the responses it evoked at various levels in his own country. He therefore had two rather easy options open before him. The first was to accept British rule in a spirit of servility like any ‘brown sahib’ of his day; the second, to completely reject the West, turning instead to nationalism or uncritical nativism. Tagore took neither of these two paths. His position on colonialism, more specifically on colonial modernity, was mediated through a total worldview evolving since his youth.

Tagore's contemporaries viewed India on an existential level through their lived experience of colonialism, and hence often resorted to nationalism by rejecting the West; but for Tagore the global citizen, the East–West binary was methodologically irrelevant.