RUSTOM BHARUCHA’S ANOTHER Asia explores the convergence of different

notions of Asia embodied by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)

and the Japanese curator Okakura Tenshin (1862-1913). Today, writers and arts

practitioners meet in a variety of fora, not only within Asia but throughout the

world, charting paths that criss-cross the globe. The trajectories marked by Tagore

and Okakura in the early twentieth century stand out in comparison. Such encounters

were rare then, what more within Asia. One can easily envision the dramatic potential,

as Bharucha does, of the relationship that developed between the pair.

Bharucha revisits this celebrated relationship in order to reclaim the liberatory

potential of ‘Asia’. To this end, he is informed by ‘revisionist readings of postcolonial and

subaltern theory’, as well as by an inter- Asian perspective that underscores ‘East-

East trajectories of exchange’. Significantly, he locates his inquiry at the moment when

European imperial rule was increasingly discredited but anti-colonial nationalism

had yet to emerge as a force. At this ‘early modernist’ moment,

‘Asia’ had an undeniable liberatory resonance that it does not have

today, likened to the first glimmers of Independence in India through failed

insurrections such as the swadeshi movement, and the more self-confident

leadership of Asia provided by the ideologues of the late Meiji period in Japan.

The arrival of the Japanese curator in Calcutta, Bharucha notes, ‘could be said

to have catalysed the very idea of Asia for Tagore and many Indians at the turn of the

last century’. This book explores how the friendship between Tagore and Okakura

engendered notable inter-Asian reflections, debate, and exchange that were peculiar to

their time.

In a critical and nuanced appreciation of Tagore as a poet who defied categories,

Bharucha argues that the former’s meditations on everyday life gave rise

to a spiritual sensibility or historicality. I crudely interpret historicality here as

‘subjective renderings of the past’; the notion constitutes a theoretical turning

point of some complexity in the book. Tagore’s sensibility not only found beauty

in the ordinary, but informed his rendering of history. It shaped his sense of India

as motherland, albeit framed within a universalist worldview. Herein lies the

philosophical basis of his well-known views on nationalism, to which I shall turn later.

Okakura’s life and work took a markedly different turn. He was a writer and

curator who called for the renewal of a Japanese aesthetic that was fading in the

late nineteenth-century gleam of Japan’s fascination with European modernity.

However, as Bharucha suggests, Okakura did not make his mark in the world until he left

Japan for the US, leaving behind a failing art institute (the Nihon Bijutsuin) and personal

troubles. In his new life, he established himself initially as an advisor and then

a curator at the Chinese and Japanese department of the Museum of Fine Arts,

Boston, where he worked for nearly a decade before his death in 1913.

Like Tagore, the Japanese curator possessed a profound appreciation of beauty

and art. His 1903 book The Ideals of the East develops the idea of the oneness of Asia on

the basis of his observations of Japanese art. Indeed, the work outlines a bold pan-

Asian perspective on the cultural, historical, and spiritual underpinnings of the vast

continent, within which Japan is given a special place. In this and other writings,

Bharucha observes, ‘Okakura’s attempts to seek Asian affinities were constantly

ruptured by his assertions of Japan’s cultural superiority’. In fact, Okakura so

differs from Tagore on the question of Asia that Bharucha poses the question: ‘How

could the poet tolerate Okakura’s advocacy of one Asia, when its representation was so

conflictual, hierarchical, if not occasionally racist and culturally superior?’. The answer,

the author suggests, is that Tagore erased Okakura’s nationalism at the moment he

was erasing his own. Bharucha also adds the possibility that the modalities of friendship

between Tagore and Okakura reigned over any ideological difference.

On the whole, I find the worldview of Tagore better developed and more

compelling in this book than that of Okakura. This may be because Bharucha did

not intend an exploration of both figures in equal measure, noting that ‘instead

of attempting to summarize the totality of some fictitious “Asian perspective”

represented by Tagore and Okakura, I have focused only on the intersection of those

ideas that are relevant to my discussion’. Bharucha embarked on the book to augment

the sparse documentation and analysis, much of it idealised, of the relationship

between the two. He was also in no small measure provoked by his discomfort with

the New Asianism. Centred in Singapore, this worldview posits an Asia that is a

competitor if not the better of Europe, framed in the discourses of nationalism and

civilisation derived, ironically enough, from the latter.

Another Asia is deceptively simple to read. It is made up of four chapters: on

Asia, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and friendship. While the prose flows smoothly,

each chapter locates the subject matter within new and formidable theoretical

questions. Bharucha negotiates all this with a rare combination of scholarly depth

and pithiness. Meanwhile, he engages the thinking and lives of the iconic figures

under study by refusing either to exalt or to disparage them as others have. The

narrative thus constituted is a complex, multifaceted, and unanticipated perspective

on the relationship between the two men.

An alluring promise made in the opening page of the book is the prospect

of drama in the unfolding friendship. Only in the chapter on cosmopolitanism does

the drama take shape as we learn of the dress, use of language, and wealthy circles

within which the two men moved, and which made their global travel possible.

Both men were consummate performersin public. However, in a surprise move,

the compelling performance of the book takes place not between the pair, but

between Tagore and another friend, the poet Yonejiro Noguchi. Tagore had survived

the curator and therefore lived to take onthe escalation of ideological invocations

to war in the late Thirties when Japanese artists and intellectuals such as Noguchi

appropriated Okakura’s pan-Asianism. In a public exchange of letters in 1938, Tagore

and Noguchi made passionate defences of very different notions of Asia. Tagore stood

by his long-held views and rejected the imperialist ambitions of Japan over China.

Noguchi, on the other hand, supported Japan’s militaristic position and espoused

the belief that Asia would emerge as one through the violently disruptive test of war.

The carefully substantiated and reasoned scholarship demonstrated throughout the

book is seemingly turned on its head in the final chapter on friendship. We are faced,

in this closing reflection, with intimacies and logics that defy scholarly analysis.

Bharucha takes this turn because the ‘embeddedness of friendship in the informal

sectors of everyday life is what challenges pragmatic, statistical, social scientist

analysis, precisely because it does not have an agenda or any specifiable raison d’être

that can be spelt out in categorical terms’. There can be laws about a host of human

affairs but friendship, as Bharucha observes, ‘is one area of life that continues to have

deep human significance through the very commodification of social relations and the

globalization of cultures precisely because it has another value that cannot be reduced to

market relations and economic benefits’. He adds that ‘[t]he smallest memory, the most

trivial gift, the slightest misunderstanding, the most ridiculous joke, the most persistent

source of irritation are all elements that can contribute to the endurance of friendship,

even while they singularly fail to explain it’.

In contrast to the drama of this chapter, the epilogue ends on a quiet moment

imagined by the author when Tagore and Okakura are left alone to appreciate ‘the

beauty of ordinariness embodied in a clay pot’. Bharucha invokes the feeling that it is

the intimate appreciation of the ordinary that gave rise to the Asia they shared

together. With this moment shared between friends, Bharucha closes in both a beautiful

and challenging manner. I appreciate the moment and its openness to interpretation,

never mind the departure from scholarly convention. However, I am left wondering

how to make sense of the contrasting and intellectually demanding earlier chapters in

the absence of a concluding discussion of the key question of the book. I ask myself:

what indeed was liberatory about the Asia of Tagore and Okakura? As Bharucha wishes

for the concluding moment to speak for itself, I am left to my own devices should I

seek a conventional answer.

Another Asia contributes significantly to contemporary debates by deepening

our understanding of Tagore’s unusual views on nationalism and universalism.

The book illuminates the period before the wave of anti-colonial nationalisms in

Asia that frequently provoked the death of nuanced ideas of self and other. Tagore’s

universalism, as Bharucha puts it, ‘emerges and is constantly renewed not out of any

fixed ideological conviction, but out of his immersion in the particularities of a

creative process through which moments of being in everyday life are at once embodied,

illuminated, and transcended’. Informed by this universalism, the poet viewed the

‘national’ less in the way of political and territorial sanctity than as an impermanent

state of being.

In a phrase, Tagore stood for an ‘antinationalist nationalism’. Bharucha sees this

position as ‘a provocation that can trouble us to find new ways of re-imagining the

“national” in opposition to “nationalism”’, and even ‘renationalization’ as an act of

resistance against ‘the growing dominance of a virulently intolerant state’ – in this

instance, India. Tagore’s views are worth revisiting at a time when nationalism

has often amounted to a self-destructive politics of ethnocentrism, but the nation

nevertheless remains a salient experiment in political community.

To sketch a conventional concluding argument, as I have, is to detract from what

Bharucha’s book underscores, namely the value of the friendship between Tagore

and Okakura. The shared appreciation of ordinary beauty at the book’s close

thus deserves more than passingacknowledgement. By ending quietly but

conspicuously on an intimate moment between friends, I wonder if Bharucha is not

infusing a new measure of hope in inter-

Asian connections in the face of today’s farreaching globalisation of capital. His 2001

book The Politics of Cultural Practice1 plainly acknowledges the difficulties of breaking

out of the predetermined routes of global cultural exchange. In Another Asia, Bharucha

appears to suggest that the hope of engaging, if not defying, the hegemonic routes lies in

friendship. For friendship, to reiterate, ‘has another value that cannot be reduced to

market relations and economic benefits’

Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia Issue 10 (August 2008)