In July 1921, Tagore returned home from Europe. He was alarmed to find that many members of the staff at Santiniketan had enthusiastically embraced the  non-co-operation movement, thus giving themselves up to ‘narrow nationalist ideas that were already out of date’. In the first week of September, Gandhi met Tagore at his family home in Calcutta. They had a long and argumentative conversation about non-co-operation. C. F. Andrews, who was present, wrote that they had ‘a difference of temperament so wide that it was extremely difficult to arrive at a common intellectual standing, though the moral ties of friendship remained entirely unbroken…’. Tagore later recalled that he had told Gandhi that ‘the whole world is suffering today from the cult of a selfish and  short-sighted nationalism. India has all down her history offered hospitality to the invader of whatever nation, creed or colour. I have come to believe that, as Indians, we not only have much to learn from the West but that we also have something to contribute. We dare not therefore shut the West out. But we still have to learn among ourselves how, through education, to collaborate and achieve a common understanding Gandhi’s answer is not recorded. But apparently Tagore was not satisfied, since he chose to make his criticisms public in the influential Calcutta journal Modern Review. In his recent travels in the West, said Tagore, he had met many people who sought ‘to achieve the unity of man, by destroying the bondage of nationalism’. He had ‘watched the faces of European students all aglow with the hope of a united mankind…’. Then he returned home, to be confronted with a political movement suffused with negativity. Are ‘we alone to be content with telling the beads of negation’, asked Tagore, ‘harping on other’s faults and proceeding with the erection of Swaraj on a foundation of quarrelsomeness?’  
Gandhi responded immediately, defending the non-co-operation movement as ‘a refusal to co-operate with the English administrators on their own terms. We say to them, “Come and co-operate with us on our terms, and it will be well for us, for you and the world”. … A drowning man cannot save others. In order to be fit to save others, we must try to save ourselves. Indian nationalism is not exclusive, nor aggressive, nor destructive. It is health-giving, religious and therefore humanitarian. India must learn to live before she can aspire to die for humanity. The mice which helplessly find themselves between the cat’s teeth acquire no merit from their enforced sacrifice.’