Okakura Tenshin

Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore & Okakura Tenshin By Rustom Bharucha, Oxford, Rs 495

This is a fine book, which is both scholarly and readable. It offers more than one dimension in its purview. In the author’s words,“At the heart of this book is a friendship between two luminaries of Asia, the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and the Japanese curator Okakura Tenshin (1862-1913), whose relationship is idealised in almost direct proportion to its relative absence of documentation. We have no photographs of Tagore and Okakura together, notwithstanding many striking portraits of their individual personalities. Nor can we draw on records of their conversations and dialogues: nothing, for instance, on the lines of Tagore’s philosophical exchange with Einstein. In the evidence that remains of their relationship, we are compelled to accept that Okakura and Tagore spoke about each other but not to each other....My task in this book is not to disrupt this idealised friendship, even if it were possible or desirable, but rather to test it within, and against a larger spectrum of contradictions, difficulties, and tensions that Tagore and Okakura, at least to the best of my knowledge, never once invoked in relation to each other...”

I would say he has done this admirably. I cannot tell how specialists in Asian Area Studies will assess the work, as I have no knowledge of the field. But for those of us who have an abiding interest in Tagore’s cosmopolitan circle of friends, or who are engaged in studying the history of his Santiniketan school, this work on Okakura Tenshin and Tagore and their “Asian universe” is most welcome.

The book also gave me the strong sense of belonging to a mind that ‘felt’ its enquiry even though it was also guided by the theoretical parameters of the day in laying down a conceptual framework for its construction of “Another Asia”. I enjoyed the author’s expressions of thought and feeling for the core enquiry that the work embodies. That is how I did not get waylaid by the theoretical bits. And, most importantly, the book has captured the beauty of an unusual friendship between two aesthetes who first met when Okakura came to Calcutta in 1902 and then, for a final time, when Tagore went to Boston in 1913 where Okakura was curator of the Chinese and Japanese department of the Museum of Fine Arts. When they first met in 1902, Tagore had just founded his alternative school at Santiniketan and was struggling to make it work. Okakura had come to Calcutta to invite Swami Vivekananda to Japan for another Chicago-like Parliament of Religions which Okakura planned to organize with a “more specific inter-Asian focus”. During the nine months that he stayed in Calcutta, he went not just to Belur but also to Jorasanko. Both he and Tagore found many common interests, not least in the art of modern Bengal which thrived in the Jorasanko house. Tagore must have taken occasion to speak about his Santiniketan school to Okakura, if not also taken him there for a visit. In fact, Okakura’s name remains intricately associated with the history of the institution for bringing to Santiniketan a Sanskrit scholar from Japan as early as in 1902. This was Shitoku Hori, whose help Tagore and his scientist friend Jagadish Chandra Bose sought to obtain copies of the Buddhist Sanskrit texts from the libraries of China and Japan for libraries in India. Shitoku Hori belonged to Okakura’s ‘political’ circle for pan-Asian unity. But from his own admission, Hori came to India really to discover his “Satdharma” and, while in India, immersed himself entirely in the study of Sanskrit and Pali to that end.

Tagore wanted Santiniketan to become the ‘thread’ linking India with the world, and this idea was there even before he added Visva-Bharati as an international university to the Santiniketan school. Okakura must have empathized with this idea well enough to want Shitoku to come. Okakura and Tagore must have been touched by each other’s vision of a united Asia, and also by their commitment to a radical Asian art movement. Otherwise, no two men could have been more unlike than Okakura and Tagore, going by the pen sketches of Okakura’s personality by the author of this book. Not only that. When it came to the nationalism of Japan, there could not have been a more striking difference. Rustom Bharucha rightly speculates that Okakura might have been very uncomfortable had he been present for Tagore’s lecture on ‘Nationalism in Japan’ in 1916. Tagore was antimilitaristic without qualification. He objected to Japan’s use of violence and to violence in all types of nationalism. That cannot be said of Okakura, especially when the argument rested on his country’s defence.

What then were the ‘pulls’ in this historic and intriguing encounter that have occasioned this perceptive book? We learn how Okakura had felt a “sudden loneliness” on Tagore’s departure from Boston after the briefest of all possible meetings. We also have on record Tagore’s nostalgic tribute to Okakura after the latter’s early death in 1913 even though their friendship was altogether ephemeral. Tagore held that it was Okakura, his “intimate friend”, who had paved the way for a “continental mind of Asia, greatly needed and long waiting to be revealed”. One might even say that Tagore set the tone for Bharucha’s critical enquiry into the subject. Having done all that, he becomes almost apologetic about his premise at the “heart of the book”. That, he concludes, is his “liberal perspective” on friendship, “which somehow survives almost all historical considerations and obstacles”. I could not agree more. Long live this “liberal perspective”. Tagore must have been content to feel Okakura’s cosmopolitanism deeply and willing to give Okakura’s militaristic nationalism a miss. As Bharucha points out, Tagore did not once mention Okakura in his lecture on ‘Nationalism in Japan’. Tagore’s and Okakura’s vision of a “new” cosmopolitan national culture was reconciled to a harmony of opposites.

There are a few eccentricities in the book. A minor one is in the author taking from the title of a particular publication to argue a point about the study of cross-cultural friendships, but omitting to refer to it either in the notes or in the bibliography. The omission would not have jarred had this not been such a careful and scholarly piece of work. The other is his reference to E.P. Thompson as a “Marxist critic” and not as the historian that he was when discussing “Alien Homage”, E.P. Thompson’s classic essay on the association of his father, Edward John Thompson, and Tagore. Such an essay could only have been written by a master historian, for it shows how the essayist could distance himself even while writing sympathetically, even emotionally, about a subject that was so glorious and painful in his father’s life and indeed in the life of the Thompson family.

These small problems cannot take away from the overall excellence of the book.