The Interaction of Bengali and Japanese Artistic Milieus in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (1901■1945): Rabindranath Tagore, Arai Kanp■, and Nandalal Bose

摘要

In both India and Japan, the literature on twentieth-century art history has been elaborated within the framework of nation-building. Japan enjoyed independence during the first half of that century, while India endured colonial rule. However, the difference between polities did not prevent intellectuals from the two cultural spheres from engaging in intensive in- teractions. This essay focuses on Okakura Kakuzō (Tenshin), author of The Ideals of the East (1904), and the painters Yokoyama Taikan, Hishida Shunsō, and Arai Kanpō. Yokoyama and Hishida were invited to India through Okakura's agency, and Yokoyama subsequently recommended Arai for an expedition to India. Exploring their deeds in this essay, the author seeks to shed new light on these figures' relationships with Rabin- dranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, and Nandalal Bose. Okakura and these Japanese painters provided technical and iconographic inspiration to Nandalal, and as they did so they were exposed to early twentieth-century India. Their engagement with modern India does not exclude ideological dimensions, and the author touches on those here, as well. Fitting into a project that has a reevaluation of Asian modernism as its ultimate objec- tive, this essay locates these examples of mutual influence between Japan and Bengal within the larger context of Asian intellectual history in the first half of the twentieth century.