Cosmopolitan Nationalism, Spirituality and Spaces in Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo

Abstract

In this essay, I engage with the idea of pragmatic spirituality as conceptualised, practiced, and interpreted by Sri Aurobindo and Rabindranath Tagore in the everydayness of experiential spaces. In Sri Aurobindo’s “integral vision”, spiritualism forms the core in understanding places of human habitat. The ashram was an aesthetic corner of Sri Aurobindo’s “active retirement” and his inclusive reclusiveness from an apparent involvement with the nationalist movement. With Tagore’s Visva-Bharati, I observe an academic space which reflects his spiritual belongingness to education as a philosophy for indigenous nation building. Within the precincts of such institutionalised spaces, spiritualism need not be interpreted as a space that is inviolable by the materialism of human life and its socio-political conditions. Instead, I argue that the core of their spiritualism was integrally connected with a kind of cosmopolitan nationalism, critically concerned with practicing self-reliance and self-critiquing as a means and medium of realising the engagement with freedom of mind, political sovereignty, and cultural independence.