Rabindranath Tagore was critical of Western nationalism and nation states with their rigid borders. He was also unhappy with the extreme violence that accompanied the anti-British movement – reflected in his poems as well as in the 1916 novel Ghare Baire. For the major part of his life, Tagore stayed outside politics.  However, during 1905-1911, he was drawn into the political vortex.  In 1919, after the Jalianwallah Bagh massacre, he renounced his knighthood. He withdrew from politics and busied himself with his other interests, which, apart from writing and travelling, also involved raising money for his school at Santiniketan. In 1941, shortly before his death, Tagore envisioned the cataclysm that he feared would occur when the British left India, but continued to hope that man would retrace his violent steps and “win back his lost human heritage.” However, this was not to be.  The independence of India was accompanied by violence. Twenty-four years later, the nation state of Pakistan was split into two: Pakistan and Bangladesh. Bangladesh, like India earlier, chose one of Tagore’s songs for its national anthem.  This paper will attempt to contextualize these two songs within Tagore’s oeuvre, trace the circumstances of how these songs were written and the lyrics composed, how they came to be chosen as national anthems, and how each of them is representative or otherwise of its respective nation.