DIALOGUES IN ARTISTIC NATIONALISM
Tapati Guha-Thakurta dwells on the traffic of ideas, styles and aesthetic engagements between artists in Japan and India in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and makes a case for re-imagining the idea of Asia in richer and more complex ways.

Prologue

IN THE MUSEUM AND LIBRARY OF Kala Bhavan, Santinketan, there lies a large assortment of Japanese paintings and prints: rolls of scroll paintings on silk and paper, folios of brush and ink sketches, a large diptych painted screen, and several albums of paintings and wood-block prints on rice paper. A few of the scrolls and the large screen painting are the signed work of Kampo Arai (1878-1945), the Japanese painter who, on Rabindranath Tagore's invitation, visited Calcutta and Santiniketan and travelled around India between 1916-1918. Apart from Kampo Arai's own paintings, the collection also has copies he made of the works of the two most famous Japanese 'Nihonga' painters of the period, Yokoyama Taikan and Shimomura Kanzan. Enamoured by the paintings of Taikan and Kanzan, Rabindranath Tagore, during his stay in Japan in 1916, had a few of their works copied for him by Kampo Arai to take back home. It was at the garden house of the Japanese millionaire industrialist and art-collector, Tomitaro Hara, at Yokohama, where Rabindranath Tagore stayed for several months during the summer of 1916, that this painter from the Nihon Bijutsuin was commissioned to make copies of the works of these two grand masters of the 'Nihonga' school. There are several such histories of copying, gifting or collecting attached to this body of Japanese paintings and prints at Kala Bhavan. But these histories remain elusive and obscured, gradually erased from institutional and public memory with the passing of the individuals who had once enthusiastically accumulated this material. Uncatalogued and unused, this Japanese art collection at Kala Bhavan is waiting for its history to be recovered and told.

This essay makes a small move towards revisiting this largely forgotten history of an intimate and lingering encounter that had brought into contact a remarkable group of intellectuals and artists of Japan and Bengal during the first decades of the 20th century. There is a long art trail to be followed here, of the travels and training of Japanese artists in India and of Bengali painters in Japan. My main concern lies in drawing out of this trail a comparative framework for thinking about the contours of a new national modern art that simultaneously emerged at the turn of the 20th century in the very different historical settings of these two countries. What, we could ask, both holds together and sets apart the complementary careers of the nationalist modern art movements of India and Japan and of their newly fashioned entities of 'Japanese' ('Nihonga') and 'Indian' painting? What was the particular thrust of the pan-Asian ideology and aesthetics that produced the thick rhetoric of resisting the colonization of Western art and culture, even as the 'West' remained the key witness for a 'renaissance of Asiatic art' that was staged in these select institutional venues in Bengal and Japan? More specifically, how did the stylistic ingredients of the old and new schools of 'Nihonga' painting inflect the changing nature of the new 'Indian' art at Jorasanko and at Santiniketan?

 

 

 

 

I make no claims to addressing all these questions in this essay. I raise these only to set out the larger canvas against which I will highlight a few moments in this history of the artistic dialogue between Japan and India.