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Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin
On the works and friendship between Rabindranath Tagore, 1861-1941, Bengali and English author and Kakuzåo Okakura, 1862-1913, Japanese author with special reference to the depiction of Asia, nationalism, and civilization in their works.
236 pages, Hardcover
First published October 19, 2006
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August 7, 2025
Today is the 85th Death Anniversary of Tagore
It was sometime in mid-2023, during a quiet spell between grading essays and preparing for the next academic term, that I finally picked up Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin by Rustom Bharucha.
The book had been on my radar for a while—not because of any pressing pedagogical reason, but because I had long sensed a certain fatigue in the way Tagore was always being read. The predictable binaries. The exhausting West-vs-East framing.
The way Gora or The Home and the World were summoned again and again to illustrate Tagore’s troubled relationship with nationalism, as though the matter could be settled in one or two novels. Bharucha promised something different. And I was ready.
What struck me immediately about Another Asia was that it didn’t read like an academic treatise in the conventional sense. It carried a certain urgency, a sense that something had been missed—consistently, institutionally, even wilfully—by decades of scholarship, and Bharucha was here to ask why. Why have we so persistently ignored Tagore’s connections with other Asian thinkers? Why has Okakura Tenshin, a towering figure in Japanese cultural history, remained a footnote in Indian intellectual discourse? More provocatively, why has the very idea of “Asia” remained so undertheorized in Tagore studies?
Reading this book was like peering through a crack in the wall of a very old house—one I thought I knew well—and discovering a whole other wing that had been bricked off. Bharucha doesn’t just unlock that space; he walks through it with the reader, revisiting letters, essays, photographs, speeches, and marginalia that render visible the shared emotional, intellectual, and political terrain between Tagore and Okakura. This isn’t a comparative literature project in the traditional sense.
There is no neat matching of themes or styles, no forced symmetries. What we get instead is a messy, intimate, and at times almost melancholic exploration of the kind of cultural affinities that could have been—if only history had allowed them to flourish.
One of the most powerful ideas in the book is that of “unfamiliar affiliations.” It’s a phrase Bharucha uses to describe the kind of relationships that fall outside the conventional frameworks of intellectual history. Tagore’s connection with Okakura is precisely that—unfamiliar not because it is unimportant, but because it unsettles the stories we’ve told ourselves about the formation of modern Asian identities.
In the dominant narrative, Tagore’s internationalism is filtered through his friendships with European figures like Rothenstein, Yeats, and Romain Rolland. These names come up like clockwork in every secondary text. But Okakura? He is often absent. And when he appears, it’s fleeting, more as a cultural curiosity than a fellow thinker.
Bharucha's intervention is to shift the frame entirely. This isn’t about East meets West, or even East vs. West. It’s East converses with East. It’s Asia as a space of political imagination, of cultural negotiation, of shared anti-imperial longing. And this, perhaps, is the real provocation: to imagine Tagore not as an isolated genius or a reluctant nationalist, but as one node in a much wider and more complex web of Asian modernities. That notion alone made me reevaluate years of accumulated assumptions.
I kept thinking about how we read The Home and the World—so often reduced to a debate between Nikhil’s liberal humanism and Sandip’s fiery nationalism, with Bimala caught in the middle as metaphor.
But what if we’ve been reading it all wrong, or at least too narrowly? What if Tagore’s disavowal of nationalism wasn’t merely personal or philosophical, but part of a larger, transnational conversation with thinkers like Okakura, who were also grappling with the demands of cultural self-assertion under imperial scrutiny?
Bharucha doesn’t force this reading, but he nudges the reader toward it. And once the door opens, it’s impossible to shut.
There’s also a methodological shift in the way Bharucha approaches his subject. Where literary criticism often clings to close reading and aesthetic analysis, Another Asia leans into the archive—the speeches, the forgotten letters, the unpublished notes, the fleeting mentions in journals. This isn’t the Tagore of lyrical abstraction or philosophical universals.
This is the Tagore who travelled, who listened, who wept, who misjudged, who changed his mind. There’s something deeply human in this portrayal. He emerges not as a marble bust on a university lawn, but as a restless seeker—wary of nationalism, skeptical of empire, unsure of Europe, and increasingly drawn to a different kind of solidarity: one rooted in Asia.
Okakura, too, is rendered with nuance. Not simply as a Japanese nationalist or art historian, but as a cultural activist who saw in India not just a spiritual muse, but a geopolitical ally. His own work, The Ideals of the East, famously opens with the line “Asia is one.” Bharucha is careful to unpack the romanticism in that statement, but he doesn’t discard it. Instead, he explores how Okakura and Tagore both used the idea of Asia—not as a continent or race, but as a civilizational metaphor—to think beyond colonial binaries.
Neither man was naïve about the contradictions this involved. But they persisted in dreaming it nonetheless.
What I found particularly moving—and intellectually refreshing—was Bharucha’s refusal to idealize. This is not a hagiography. He is clear-eyed about the limitations, the misreadings, the missed connections. He acknowledges that the dialogue between Tagore and Okakura was fragmentary, sometimes tentative, and often mediated by others.
But that, in a way, is the point. It’s precisely these fragile, half-finished encounters that offer the richest ground for rethinking how we imagine political and cultural solidarity today.
I found myself reflecting on how different this reading of Tagore is from the one I first encountered as a student. Back then, it was all about his ambivalence: ambivalence toward nationalism, ambivalence toward modernity, ambivalence toward his own fame. There’s truth in that, of course, but it’s also incomplete.
Bharucha gives us a Tagore who is not just ambivalent, but active—deliberately seeking out new affiliations, new vocabularies, new futures.
It’s not that he was uninterested in nationalism. It’s that he wanted something more than what nationalism offered. Something more ethical. More enduring. Less prone to violence.
At times, while reading, I wondered why this kind of scholarship wasn’t more widely read or taught. Perhaps because it doesn’t fit neatly into disciplinary boxes. It’s not pure history, nor literature, nor politics. It’s all of them, and something else too: a meditation on loss. A loss of possibility. A loss of cross-Asian solidarity that could have transformed the political map of the 20th century.
When I finally closed the book, I didn’t feel “informed” in the traditional sense. I felt haunted. I felt as though I had just read a record of things that almost happened.
And that feeling, oddly enough, was energizing. It made me want to read Tagore again—not the novels or the poems I already knew, but the essays, the lectures, the letters. It made me want to trace those half-visible lines connecting Bengal to Kyoto, Calcutta to Tokyo. It made me want to imagine another Asia—not as a lost cause, but as a project that remains unfinished.
Even now, a year later, I often find myself returning to certain moments in the book. A phrase here, a footnote there. The idea that Tagore’s “anti-nationalism” was not a withdrawal but an opening.
That Okakura’s Asia was not nostalgic but insurgent. That cultural exchange, when stripped of its state-sponsored banalities, can still be a radical act. I carry these ideas with me—into the classroom, into my writing, into the way I read the news.
And now and then, when I find myself irritated with the slenderness of our political and literary conversations, I think of Bharucha’s book, and I remember: there are always other paths, other dialogues, other Asias waiting to be uncovered.
It was sometime in mid-2023, during a quiet spell between grading essays and preparing for the next academic term, that I finally picked up Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin by Rustom Bharucha.
The book had been on my radar for a while—not because of any pressing pedagogical reason, but because I had long sensed a certain fatigue in the way Tagore was always being read. The predictable binaries. The exhausting West-vs-East framing.
The way Gora or The Home and the World were summoned again and again to illustrate Tagore’s troubled relationship with nationalism, as though the matter could be settled in one or two novels. Bharucha promised something different. And I was ready.
What struck me immediately about Another Asia was that it didn’t read like an academic treatise in the conventional sense. It carried a certain urgency, a sense that something had been missed—consistently, institutionally, even wilfully—by decades of scholarship, and Bharucha was here to ask why. Why have we so persistently ignored Tagore’s connections with other Asian thinkers? Why has Okakura Tenshin, a towering figure in Japanese cultural history, remained a footnote in Indian intellectual discourse? More provocatively, why has the very idea of “Asia” remained so undertheorized in Tagore studies?
Reading this book was like peering through a crack in the wall of a very old house—one I thought I knew well—and discovering a whole other wing that had been bricked off. Bharucha doesn’t just unlock that space; he walks through it with the reader, revisiting letters, essays, photographs, speeches, and marginalia that render visible the shared emotional, intellectual, and political terrain between Tagore and Okakura. This isn’t a comparative literature project in the traditional sense.
There is no neat matching of themes or styles, no forced symmetries. What we get instead is a messy, intimate, and at times almost melancholic exploration of the kind of cultural affinities that could have been—if only history had allowed them to flourish.
One of the most powerful ideas in the book is that of “unfamiliar affiliations.” It’s a phrase Bharucha uses to describe the kind of relationships that fall outside the conventional frameworks of intellectual history. Tagore’s connection with Okakura is precisely that—unfamiliar not because it is unimportant, but because it unsettles the stories we’ve told ourselves about the formation of modern Asian identities.
In the dominant narrative, Tagore’s internationalism is filtered through his friendships with European figures like Rothenstein, Yeats, and Romain Rolland. These names come up like clockwork in every secondary text. But Okakura? He is often absent. And when he appears, it’s fleeting, more as a cultural curiosity than a fellow thinker.
Bharucha's intervention is to shift the frame entirely. This isn’t about East meets West, or even East vs. West. It’s East converses with East. It’s Asia as a space of political imagination, of cultural negotiation, of shared anti-imperial longing. And this, perhaps, is the real provocation: to imagine Tagore not as an isolated genius or a reluctant nationalist, but as one node in a much wider and more complex web of Asian modernities. That notion alone made me reevaluate years of accumulated assumptions.
I kept thinking about how we read The Home and the World—so often reduced to a debate between Nikhil’s liberal humanism and Sandip’s fiery nationalism, with Bimala caught in the middle as metaphor.
But what if we’ve been reading it all wrong, or at least too narrowly? What if Tagore’s disavowal of nationalism wasn’t merely personal or philosophical, but part of a larger, transnational conversation with thinkers like Okakura, who were also grappling with the demands of cultural self-assertion under imperial scrutiny?
Bharucha doesn’t force this reading, but he nudges the reader toward it. And once the door opens, it’s impossible to shut.
There’s also a methodological shift in the way Bharucha approaches his subject. Where literary criticism often clings to close reading and aesthetic analysis, Another Asia leans into the archive—the speeches, the forgotten letters, the unpublished notes, the fleeting mentions in journals. This isn’t the Tagore of lyrical abstraction or philosophical universals.
This is the Tagore who travelled, who listened, who wept, who misjudged, who changed his mind. There’s something deeply human in this portrayal. He emerges not as a marble bust on a university lawn, but as a restless seeker—wary of nationalism, skeptical of empire, unsure of Europe, and increasingly drawn to a different kind of solidarity: one rooted in Asia.
Okakura, too, is rendered with nuance. Not simply as a Japanese nationalist or art historian, but as a cultural activist who saw in India not just a spiritual muse, but a geopolitical ally. His own work, The Ideals of the East, famously opens with the line “Asia is one.” Bharucha is careful to unpack the romanticism in that statement, but he doesn’t discard it. Instead, he explores how Okakura and Tagore both used the idea of Asia—not as a continent or race, but as a civilizational metaphor—to think beyond colonial binaries.
Neither man was naïve about the contradictions this involved. But they persisted in dreaming it nonetheless.
What I found particularly moving—and intellectually refreshing—was Bharucha’s refusal to idealize. This is not a hagiography. He is clear-eyed about the limitations, the misreadings, the missed connections. He acknowledges that the dialogue between Tagore and Okakura was fragmentary, sometimes tentative, and often mediated by others.
But that, in a way, is the point. It’s precisely these fragile, half-finished encounters that offer the richest ground for rethinking how we imagine political and cultural solidarity today.
I found myself reflecting on how different this reading of Tagore is from the one I first encountered as a student. Back then, it was all about his ambivalence: ambivalence toward nationalism, ambivalence toward modernity, ambivalence toward his own fame. There’s truth in that, of course, but it’s also incomplete.
Bharucha gives us a Tagore who is not just ambivalent, but active—deliberately seeking out new affiliations, new vocabularies, new futures.
It’s not that he was uninterested in nationalism. It’s that he wanted something more than what nationalism offered. Something more ethical. More enduring. Less prone to violence.
At times, while reading, I wondered why this kind of scholarship wasn’t more widely read or taught. Perhaps because it doesn’t fit neatly into disciplinary boxes. It’s not pure history, nor literature, nor politics. It’s all of them, and something else too: a meditation on loss. A loss of possibility. A loss of cross-Asian solidarity that could have transformed the political map of the 20th century.
When I finally closed the book, I didn’t feel “informed” in the traditional sense. I felt haunted. I felt as though I had just read a record of things that almost happened.
And that feeling, oddly enough, was energizing. It made me want to read Tagore again—not the novels or the poems I already knew, but the essays, the lectures, the letters. It made me want to trace those half-visible lines connecting Bengal to Kyoto, Calcutta to Tokyo. It made me want to imagine another Asia—not as a lost cause, but as a project that remains unfinished.
Even now, a year later, I often find myself returning to certain moments in the book. A phrase here, a footnote there. The idea that Tagore’s “anti-nationalism” was not a withdrawal but an opening.
That Okakura’s Asia was not nostalgic but insurgent. That cultural exchange, when stripped of its state-sponsored banalities, can still be a radical act. I carry these ideas with me—into the classroom, into my writing, into the way I read the news.
And now and then, when I find myself irritated with the slenderness of our political and literary conversations, I think of Bharucha’s book, and I remember: there are always other paths, other dialogues, other Asias waiting to be uncovered.
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