Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin, by Rustom Bharucha, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006, 236 pp., $35 (cloth)

This book examines the friendship engendered between two significant thinkers — one Indian and the other Japanese — who were highly representative of their time when they met in Calcutta in 1902. The great Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), was then approaching the peak of his reputation and would go on to win the Nobel Prize in literature in 1913, the first author laureate from the continent of Asia. That same year, the influential art historian and curator, Okakura Tenshin (1862-1913), would reach the end of his shorter life, though his writings would outlive him.

Though the two distinguished men met only on a few occasions, the friendship born between them endured, and the ramifications of it deeply involved the artistic and intellectual movements of the early 20th century. Rustom Bharucha endeavors to establish a context for all of this, not only in terms of the age, and the countries that the two men came from, but also in terms of Asia as a whole.

The idea of "Asia" was then a recent notion, positing a common inheritance and purpose among the countries of the East to counter the dominance of the West. The eventual result would of course be liberation from imperial control, and independence, but this would not be a straightforward matter. We learn, for example, that the "authentication of Indianness," came primarily through "the assertion of upper-caste Brahminical Hindu cultural values." But in Okakura's 1903 volume, "The Ideals of the East," "Asia was less a political entity than a metaphysical and spiritual realm," according to the author of this study.