This chapter begins by discussing Gandhi and Tagore’s perspectives on politics and uses those and other ideas to substantiate Nehru’s international political thought. It then goes on to suggest that in order to successfully theorise non-alignment, it is necessary to historicise it. The main argument in this chapter is that non-alignment is best understood not only as an approach to India’s international relations, but also to International Relations in general. Therefore, the case studies chosen are all instances of the breakdown of political processes where India’s national and territorial interests were not threatened, but where India chose to mediate nevertheless.

Trees and plants have been venerated for centuries in India as cosmic providers of life and energy. In the modern periods, these sentiments have dominated literary and cultural works. In Toru Dutt’s poetry, we see a heartrending call to trees as fabricating nostalgia for family histories. From Jagadish Chandra Bose’s epoch-defining scientific discovery that plants have life to Rabindranath Tagore’s philosophical and ecological meditations on preserving forested life-systems, Indian writers in the twentieth century have paid respect to trees as meaningful antidote to expansive agricultural and industrial-based deforestation. In the late colonial and post-colonial contexts of aggressive material development and prophetic resistance in literature, plant-based prose work by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Ismat Chughtai, or Bama, poetry of Gieve Patel or Mamang Dai, or experimental works by Sumana Roy or Kalpna Singh-Chitnis have variously offered significant imaginative mediums through which to reflect upon the complex and sacred dynamic of human–non-human relationship in India.

Tagore’s most widely staged play, The Post Office, theorizes passivity as resistance in its story about a dying boy. The experimental play has little plot and no action: This becomes especially interesting in light of the play’s performance history in succeeding decades. W.B. Yeats, André Gide, and Janusz Korczak would choose to translate and stage the play at moments of intense political unrest and great peril in Dublin in 1913, in France on the eve of Nazi occupation in 1940, and at an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942 as transports to death camps were taking place. I consider why, despite the charged political atmosphere in which Tagore wrote the play in 1912 and in which it was later staged, The Post Office counsels and even celebrates submission to forces outside one’s control as a mode of passive resistance.

Chapter 5 returns to the primal Sikh moment, the divine revelation of Guru Nanak. Autobiographically recounted in Majh Ballad, his sensuous experience of the infinite One is corroborated in early Sikh sources like the Janamsākhīs. This chapter is a three-mirrored kaleidoscope: (1) how the songster/bard (ḍhāḍī) Nanak relays his revelatory event in sonic aesthetics; (2) how poet (shāir) Nanak shares his numinous encounter in poetic ingenuity; and (3) how jeweller/goldsmith (suniāru) Nanak artistically stages his revelations for his audiences to reexperience his transcendent aesthetics. Art as idealized by Martin Heidegger, Amrita Sher-Gil, Leo Tolstoy, and Rabindranath Tagore is fulfilled by Guru Nanak’s gesamtkunstwerk. His multiple art forms function as art to show how the transcendent One is aesthetically lived in this world. Raising spiritual and social consciousness, Nanakian art is not for art’s sake alone; it redresses issues of social and environmental injustice and suffering. With his voice recorded in the GGS as a rich resource, Guru Nanak’s own perception of his aesthetic vocation comes to light.

Rabindranath Tagore was a progressive educational philosopher whose ideas were far ahead of his time but are most relevant to the contemporary challenges of today. The first Asian Nobel Laureate, his cosmopolitan, democratic ideas, and experiments in education were pioneering. But he was primarily known as a literary genius, and his image as a mystical poet from the East obscured his educational vision and philosophy in the West. The purpose of education was to him the development of critical consciousness and of freedom not only from poverty and oppression, but of the mind from ignorance and prejudice. Strongly against British colonial rule he, nevertheless, loved English literature and music and admired Western science and technological developments. Although proud of India’s glorious past, he was strongly opposed to chauvinistic nationalism and imagined a world of unity of all peoples, a synthesis of the East and West. He built a university which would represent his international liberalism.

Public education is crucial to the health of democracy. Recent educational initiatives in many countries, however, focus narrowly on science and technology, neglecting the arts and humanities. They also focus on internalization of information, rather than on the formation of the student’s critical and imaginative capacities. This chapter argues that such a narrow focus is dangerous for democracy’s future. Drawing on the ideas of Rabindranath Tagore, the chapter proposes a three‐part model for the development of young people’s capabilities through education, focusing on critical thinking, world citizenship, and imaginative understanding.

The chapter recovers and investigates a substantial body of poems from undivided India composed during 1914–1918 and how such a corpus challenges conventional Anglo-centric understandings of the term 'First World War poetry'. Showcasing the remarkable range and richness of war poetry written in Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali, and English, the chapter examines some of their historical and formal complexities, including their oral and aural dimensions; in the absence of testimonies, such poetry fills in the gaps left by history. Starting with civilian verse and songs – elite and subaltern, written and spoken, pro-war and anti-war, direct, oblique or diffuse - I propose the idea of a war 'poetics' rather than ‘poetry’ from combatant men and village women who were often non-literate but highly literary. I conclude with readings of the 'war poems' of Rabindranath Tagore, Muhammed Iqbal and Kazi Nazrul Islam, the national poets of the future India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh respectively.

Taking the First World War as an originary moment of global conflict, the chapter examines how a postcolonial approach opens up war studies in terms of perspective and methodology while asking, at the same time, how a focus on warfare puts pressure on the abstractions of postcolonial theory. What do terms such as ‘war archive’ and the ‘literary’ mean in a context where the majority of the world’s combatants and non-combatants were, till recently, largely non-literate? How does the experience of colonialism trouble the very distinction between ‘war’ and ‘peace’ in global histories and what is the relationship between anti-colonial resistance and postcolonial critique? Is diversity the first step towards decolonisation? The chapter engages with these issues through a focus on the colonial dimensions of the First World War. Combining a reconceptualization of the ‘archive’ with readings of figures such as Rabindranath Tagore, Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, Rudyard Kipling, Mulk Raj Anand and David Diop, it argues that a postcolonial approach goes far beyond challenging the colour of memory or Eurocentric assumptions into deconstructing the ideology of war itself.

Rabindranath Tagore’s essay on world literature, Viśvasāhitya (1907), is important not just because of the political and historical circumstances of its production, but because it advocates a method of ‘doing’ world literature that potentially frees us from the conundrums besetting the methods used so far if scholars writing on the essay were to read it for what it actually says. In this paper, the Bengali text of this essay is closely interrogated to arrive at the surprising conclusion that the idea of world literature that he arrives at in this essay, in complete contrast to Goethe’s, is not an addition of the national literatures of the world – that, he says, is a very provincial way of looking at the question. Instead, he posits here a philosophical notion related to an understanding of the self and the other which is predicated upon his inheritance of, and interest in, both Upanishadic high theory as well as popular folk culture. His concept (or anti-concept) was premised upon his advice to find the world in the self, and was one that may, perhaps, be mined for its emphasis on particularity and attention to the individual as it exists in relation to the whole.