On 1 January 1877, the title of ‘Empress of India’ was conferred upon Queen Victoria. To mark the occasion, Sourindra Mohun Tagore (1840–1914) composed a song in her honour, hailing her as ‘rajrajeshwari’ (empress). A month later, the not-yet-sixteen Rabindranath sounded a defiantly different note in a poem, ‘Dillir Darbar’, that he read at the Hindu Mela:

And, in response to Eleanor Rathbone's insensitive statements made in an open letter (28 May 1941), on 4 June 1941, just a couple of months before his death, Rabindranath had this to say:

Between the teenager and the octogenarian, came various phases of Rabindranath's ideological engagement with the notion of the ‘nation’, which need to be historicized in relation to events, both at home and abroad, to which he was a witness and which left their own impressions upon him. There was his early emphasis on the indigenous society (Swadeshi Samaj) – which, according to some recent Western theorists of nation and nationalism, would point towards an ‘organicist’ view of nation as an ancestrally based sociocultural community, or, according to others, might correspond to the idea of the Gemeinschaft (emotional community). Against this could be posited the notion of the ‘nation state’, which, for some theorists, is a product of ‘modernization’, with the political community as its constituent, while, for others, would be equivalent to Gesellschaft (rational/ political community or state).