By Debashish Banerji
In 1902, Okakura Kakuzo, then forty years of age and the head of the Nippon Bijutsuin, came to India, ostensibly on a mission to take back to Japan the Vedantic thinker and yogi, Vivekananda. This did not materialize, since Vivekananda died that year, but he formed a close friendship with the thinker’s premier disciple, Sister Nivedita, who introduced him to the Tagore household. At this time, the Tagores were a culturally prominent extended family in colonial Calcutta, economically successful as businessmen and feudal landlords, several of whose members had the leisure and genius to explore innovational creative expressions in the Arts. Premier among these was the poet, Rabindranath, who had laid already the foundations for cultural nationalism in Bengal, by adapting themes and idioms from medieval Bengali mysticism to a modern romantic articulation of his own. Okakura was brought into contact with Rabindranath’s nephew, Suren Tagore and stayed at the latter’s home. Here, he encountered another nephew of Rabindranath, by name Abanindranath, an artist who was at the time disillusioned with western Academic Naturalism and seeking new expression. Though their meeting was brief, and Okakura left India shortly thereafter, Abanindranath was profoundly influenced by the contact and embarked upon a artistic direction that owed much to Okakura. According to Abanindranath, Okakura taught him the elements of Japanese composition, and, upon his return to Japan, sent his two favorite students, Taikan and Hishida to the Tagore household, on a “cultural exchange” program. Abanindranath learnt from these artists Japanese brushwork and the moro-tai or “hazy style” wash-technique, which he adapted to his own practice. Subsequently, Abanindranath went on to become the founder of a “national” school of Art, based on a hybrid style, reminiscent of the ideas of Okakura and the practices of his followers. Abanindranath was not to meet Okakura again till 1913, when the Japanese ideologue visited India, shortly before his death, and traveled with Abanindranath to see some of the temples of Orissa.
A case of two Asian thinkers and an influential chance meeting. But distancing oneself and taking the perspectival view of these two lives, one finds surprising similarities of pattern, down, in certain cases, to the fractal wrinkles in the incidentals, so that one cannot help wondering at the significance. There are differences, too, no doubt. Firstly, there is a phase lag, Okakura being about ten years elder to Abanindranath and having lived certain phases of the pattern that were to be re-lived by the latter after their encounter. Then, there are differences in culture, circumstance and psychological response. But these differences only serve to bring out in sharper relief the homologies shaping the temporal structures of these lives. Undoubtedly, the intersection of the lives complicates our ability to isolate their independent movements, but even this chance intersection only goes to amplify the homologous pattern. A study of these homologies
would seem to be historically important then, from the viewpoint of distinguishing the significant dynamics and stages in the play of idea-forces in turn-of-the-century Asia, particularly in the trajectories they disclose in two regions with strong and related surviving cultures of thought and tradition, Japan and India.
19th century Japan and India:
To look at the similarities of trajectory in the two personalities, we need first to situate them in context. Here, we find an interesting difference – in that, all of India came under British rule by the mid-19th century, while Japan remained uncolonized. However, this is only a superficial difference, since, in an ironic reversal of action, Japan, in preparing to defend herself from colonization, was forced to embark upon a process of voluntary westernization in the mid-19th century. Thus the universal legacy of western colonization in Asia was equally the experience of late 19th and turn-of-the-century Japan and India. The voluntary modernization of Japan, in fact, only brings out more clearly the inevitable nature of global westernization through the civilizational expansion of Europe.
Yokohama and Calcutta:
In late 19th century Asia, in their respective countries, these were the two most westernized cities. Yokohama was a port town built on a western plan largely at government expense with the express design of attracting western merchants, and distanced from the mainland to avoid confrontation with increasingly hostile traditional forces. The Japanese who settled here were usually adventurer businessmen who were willing to renounce their traditional social roots in favor of a new and western identity. Calcutta was the British colonial capital in India. An older westernized city than Yokohama, developed by the British East India Company as a trading town from 1609, it had had the time to grow and wear a more settled look by the mid-19th century. After becoming the capital of British India in 1857, enlarged administrative functions were added to its earlier predominantly economic ones. A much larger number of Indians lived and worked in mid-19th century Calcutta than the Japanese in Yokohama of the same period. Moreover, the transition from traditional Indian to modern western in the city was more complex, as a large number of natives translated back and forth between the city and its rural surroundings. An educated native elite class had come into existence from the late 18th century, so that the native response to westernization had developed a variety of manifestations by the mid-19th century. Early attempts to reconcile east and west were conciliatory in nature, emphasizing unitarian principles in Indian and European ideal thought or attempting synthetic formulations. However, by the mid-19th century, distinct forms of resistance to westernization were beginning to be voiced, and as already mentioned, the Tagore family was culturally in the forefront of this movement.
Ancestry:
New urban centers like Yokohama and Calcutta provided a context of social structuring outside of tradition. Thus many natives with questionable ancestries found themselves with nothing to lose and could forge for themselves new social identities, often of a hybrid nature. Both Okakura and Abanindranath came from such backgrounds. Okakura’s father was a samurai turned businessman. In fact, his origins are hazed in conjecture, there being some evidence that he might have bought his samurai rank to start with. He abandoned a wife and four daughters to start a new life as the manager of a silk trading house at Yokohama. Abanindranath’s ancestors had been ostracized Brahmins. They had to renounce their ancestral surname and adopt the title “Tagore”. Rumor had it that there were obscure Muslim liaisons with the family. It was Abanindranath’s great-grandfather, Dwarkanath, who had established the family fortune and the mansion at Jorasanko, Calcutta, early in the 19th century, through his mercantile genius. This hazy ancestry and the fresh, though alien social conditions of urban life combined to give both Okakura and Abanindranath a doubtful identity that was both a source of strength and of weakness. Weakness, since it made for a sense of rootlessness; strength, because it liberated them to re-create themselves dynamically in a variety of hybrid identities.
Upbringing and Early Education:
An important difference can be noted here. Okakura’s early years are marked by traditional and familial alienation, characteristic of urban nuclear families with prioritized individualistic achievement in a modern industrial society. The acceptance of a migrant identity seems particularly clear in the case of his father, who deliberately distanced himself from his past, assuming a merchant name, Ishikawaya Kan’emon and taking a new wife, whom he referred to simply as Kono Onno (“this woman”). The mercantile and ignoble connotations of Okakura’s own name, Kakuzo, meaning “corner warehouse” are symptomatic of Kan’emon’s new found industrial identity, as is the scanty attention paid by him or his wife to Okakura. Thus Okakura’s early upbringing was entrusted to the traditionally rooted Tsune, who gave him his an early taste of an extremely different ethical and cultural system – that of the loyalist samurai. Abanindranath, on the other hand, grew up in a caring extended family, which already evidenced a synthesis of western and traditional cultural values. However, here too, the father was much occupied in personal pursuits and the mother in household cares, so that Abanindranath grew up largely in the keeping of servants and poor relatives, visiting for longer or shorter periods from the villages. As with Okakura, these connections opened for Abanindranath a window into another world from that of his parents – a vast world of hunger and death and nature and spirit.
The subsequent boyhood of both Okakura and Abanindranath were spent in the developing awareness of their bi-culturalism. For Okakura, shuttling between studies of Buddhist and Taoist philosophy, poetry and calligraphy at the Choenji temple in Kanagawa and the learning of the English language and western culture and scholarship under American missionaries at the Takashima school at Yokohama. And for Abanindranath, learning (reluctantly) English, mathematics, history and geography under a house tutor and the romantic subtleties of Bengali Vaishnava poetry and philosophy from his largely self-taught cousins and uncles, specially the precocious Rabindranath. They both lost a parent early – Okakura his mother, at age eight; and Abanindranath, his father, at age ten.
However, within the similarities, certain variations of emphasis are observable. Thus, Okakura seems to have grown more comfortable with the English language and western culture in general than with Japanese; while the bi-lingual emphasis in Abanindranath seemed to lean more heavily towards Bengali and later, Sanskrit. Prof. Notehelfer has drawn attention to Okakura’s perfect ease among westerners in contrast with his difficulties of relationship, arising from an “inferiority complex”, with the Japanese. His vastly superior handling of English and his eventual migration to Boston also testify to this. In the case of Abanindranath, his insistence on the use of Bengali as a medium for his theoretical and creative writings and his stationary unwillingness to leave Calcutta add to the more local bias. This early period also left its impression on both, I believe, in terms of pedagogical orientation. Okakura, with his exposure to both traditional and
western institutionalized forms of education, could not but have sensed the differences in approach; while Abanindranath, with a conscious early rejection of western school education for its uncaring and disciplinary normalizing practices, held an abiding distaste for western institutional pedagogy, insisting in its place on an experimental environment of personal attention and self-study, as developed in the traditional gurukula system.
The Orientalist-Nationalist dialog:
Undoubtedly the most decisive relationships in the lives of both Okakura and Abanindranath arose from their encounters with major Orientalist thinkers – Fenollosa in the case of the Japanese and E.B. Havell in the case of the Indian. Orientalism, as a 19th century phenomenon (with its continuing contemporary effects) has been much discussed in recent times, following Edward Said’s influential study of 1978. The major strands of its complex make-up may be summarized:
(1) As an epistemological extension of Colonialism, systematically gathering and classifying information about the “natives”, ostensibly from a disinterested scientific motivation, but in reality, collusively with the manipulative intent of a subjugatory administrative machinery; (2) As a museological construct, backgrounded by a civilizational teleology, which saw in foreign cultures the preserved medieval past of Europe and/or the expression of the alien and the exotic, and wished to “collect” and “eternalize” such cultures through the positing of a static ontology, conducive to political and economic advantage; (3) As an oppositional construct, seeing in the Orient the “other” of the Occident, the “spiritual” opposite of “material” Europe, as a reductionist romantic alternative attempting to inscribe itself as knowledge and policy on native societies, through insistence on the isolation of the “ideal”. In varying measures, these motivations make their appearance in the Orientalism of both Fenollosa and Havell. An ambiguous imperialism combines in Havell with an anti-materialist ideology, based in the British Arts and Crafts movement, to favor a “spiritual” art educational and public works policy in India, aimed at a patristic cultural preservation. Though the officially uncolonized status of Japan invalidates the imperial motive in the case of Fenollosa, an active museological interest mixes with a Hegelian ideological structure to promote an envisioning of the cultural superiority of Japan and the reversal of its westernizing priorities. Modern scholars of Orientalism have also seen the development of Nationalism in colonized territories as often little other than an introjected Orientalism, an acceptance and promotion of its oppositional categories. Indeed, a superficial perusal of the ideas and public lives of Okakura and Abanindranath would seem to indicate this, though subtle differences of motivation, approach and the construction of identity emerge on more careful viewing, pointing to other conclusions. The Orientalist-Nationalist dialog, in the case of both Okakura and Abanindranath, provides a refracting interface for the legitimizing articulation of indigenous preferences within a “civilizational” framework.
The Public Lives:
As in the case of their untimely loss of a parent, a commonalty of their early adulthood, assertive of tradition, was their marriage. Both Okakura and Abanindranath were married at the age of seventeen. In both cases, there were elements of chance, determinative of their influential roles in the field of Art. Okakura had educated himself in Japanese traditional art, music and literature. At the Kaisei Gakko, he prepared himself for a bureaucratic position in the Meiji government by writing a thesis on “The Theory of the State”, but an argument with his wife, led to the destruction of the manuscript and the hurried presentation, in two weeks, of an alternate submission on “The Theory of Art”. Upon graduation, this influenced his securement of a government position, and he found himself in the music section of the Ministry of Education. However, differences with his westernized Japanese superior led him to seek a transfer and brought him into the department of art. In the case of Abanindranath, though an important difference in the lack of necessity or ambition for a public career marks him from Okakura, a similar uncertainty is evidenced in the fact that, like the Japanese, he had an all-round training in Indian cultural arts and engaged in the practice of painting, writing and music. In his reminiscences, he notes that both painting and music vied for primacy in his early attention, but a number of factors, important among which were his encounters with Havell and Okakura, decided his course in favor of art.
In keeping with the Enlightenment aesthetics of Europeanization, the prescribed institutionalized standard for art of the mid-19th century, in both Japan and India, was western Academic Naturalism, using oils on canvas. In Japan, the state sponsored Industrial Art School (Kobu Bijutsu Gakko) was opened in 1876, under the Italian artist, Antonio Fontanesi. In India, by 1867, twenty-two Industrial Art Societies and three Government Art Schools in the major cities – Calcutta, Bombay and Madras – had been established, dominated by the academic policies of the Central School of Industrial Art at South Kensington, London. These insitutions were responsible for a widespread change of taste in the direction of illusionism. The principles of traditional art in both Japan and India had encouraged a simplified two-dimensional modeling, rendering ambiguous the notion of distance, and oriented towards spiritual contemplation and portrayal. In making this assertion, however, I need to point out that it follows characterizations of eastern art as founded by 19th century Orientalists, such as Fenollosa and Havell, in which (a) a common aesthetic is supposed for all “Eastern” art, and (b) the ubiquitous use of the word “spiritual” hides the fact of its relative vagueness to the Orientalist mind, and the lumping of a wide variety of effects and ontologies under its rubric. This issue of a common spiritual ontology and aesthetic would exercise the native ideologues and practicants, such as Okakura and Abanindranath in much more serious and specific ways in their attempt at the formulation of a Pan-Asianism.
Okakura met Ernest Fenollosa in the mid-1870s at the Kaisei Gakko in Tokyo, where he went for higher studies. He studied Philosophy under the American, and was introduced by him to German idealistic thought. He also served as Fenollosa’s interpreter, during the latter’s procurement trips to antique shops and art galleries and for the translation of ancient Japanese manuscripts. Their strategic alliance, combined with Okakura’s official administrative authority, led to the rapid revision of the basis of artistic taste and education in Japan through the 1880s, starting with the closure of the Kobu Bijutsu Gakko in 1882. Swiftly, this was followed by the
museological identification and cataloging of Japan’s “national treasures”, the founding of the very influential art society, Kanga-kai, the reversal of the Ministry of Education’s fifteen-year commitment to the pencil as the instrument of writing in Japan’s elementary schools in favor of the “spiritually expressive” brush and culminating in 1888, with the appointment of Okakura as the head of the art section of the Tokyo Imperial Museum, with Fenollosa serving on its administrative board and the founding in February, 1889 of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko), with Okakura placed at its head in 1890 and Fenollosa as professor of Esthetics and Art History. The influential art historical journal, Kokka, was also launched at this time, by Fenollosa and Okakura. Using the Hegelian model, the professed aim of the school was to arrive at a synthesis of eastern spirit and western technique in art, and a new “national” art movement, Nihonga, was spawned from these ideas. The two most prominent artists to emerge from these students were Yokoyama Taikan and Hishida Shunso. In 1890, Fenollosa’s contract was not renewed and he returned to America, accepting an appointment as the curator of Eastern art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Okakura encouraged a reversal of training techniques: copies, life studies, anatomy, light and shade, perspective all reduced art to “imitation”. “In order for the particular to reveal the universal, eastern artists had not drawn from life. They had observed nature, meditated upon it, and then through the internal process, had been able to abstract the ideal or inner essence of their subject.” [F.Notehelfer, 335]
Abanindranath received training in pastels, watercolors and oils under British and Italian artists in Calcutta between the years 1885-92. Though versatile in western techniques, his customary restlessness with academia got the better of him soon, and he bored of the prevailing styles of western painting by 1895, seeking new sources of inspiration. Though superficially balanced in idyllic familial harmony, unresolved assumptions in his internalized mix of east and west began to surface as dissatisfaction in him and he turned to a perusal of British and Rajput illustrated medieval manuscripts. A series based on traditional Vaishnava literature painted by him around this time, shows a radical departure from the past, with the abandonment of modeling and one-point perspective, in favor of traditional compositional elements. In 1896, he was introduced to E.B. Havell, the newly arrived principal of the Calcutta Art College. To Havell, following William Morris, the Middle Ages in Europe marked its high spiritual period, based in an integrated and holistic context of religious practice. He traced a fall from the “spiritual” art of medieval Europe, through the “insincere” art of the 18th century and leading to the “materialist” art of the 19th. In classical Indian culture, he found a context, similar to that of medieval Europe. Moreover, he drew attention to the anti-naturalistic bias of both European medieval and Indian art, pointing to their dominant concern with the ideal and the “spiritual” as the basis of representation. As one of his first reforms as the principal of the art school, he auctioned all the classical antiques, used so long in the “copy” class, and bought, in their place, a number of original Mughal miniatures. But this was not for the copy class. In fact, that class was replaced by one in which the student visualized, using meditation techniques similar to those outlined by Okakura, and painted, instead, from memory. Havell quoted the Indian silpa-sastras as authority. Abanindranath, already oriented in the direction of a non-illusionistic art, found Havell with his art school originals and enthusiastic explanations, just what he needed. A close tie and strategic alliance developed between the two, similar to that between Okakura and Fenollosa. Though not a student of the art school, Havell included Abanindranath’s works in the school exhibitions. In 1901-2, Aban’s paintings on Hindu themes won a gold medal at the Congress Industrial Exhibition at Calcutta and in 1903, his painting “The Last Days of Shah Jehan”, done in oils, but in a Mughal miniature style, won awards at several exhibitions and high applause from critics as heralding a new age in Indian painting. It was around this time that he was to meet Okakura, and incorporate important elements of the Nihonga style in his work. Though Abanindranath had no formal credentials, in 1905, Havell manipulated his entry as vice-principal of the Calcutta art school. Aban further de-structured the teaching methods, fostering an experimental creative atmosphere. In 1907, Aban and his elder brother, Gagan, founded the Indian Society of Oriental Art. Similar in many ways to the Fenollosa-Okakura founded Kanga-kai, the membership of the ISOA read like a Who’s Who of influential patrons and officials of Calcutta. In the meantime, with the escalation of the struggle for independence, this art became appropriated by the nationalist politics of the time. Much again, as in the case of Fenollosa, less then a year after the establishment of his native protégé in the seat of power, Havell left India, at first on sick leave, later to be declared “unfit for service in India”; and Abanindranath became the Acting Principal of the art school. Prominent among Aban’s first batch of students were the artists Nandalal Bose, Venkatappa and Kshitin Majumdar. Scenes from Indian mythology, history and nature were the principal subjects, done in inks, tempera or gouache, using traditional metaphors and emphasizing mystical mood through rhythmic delineation and tonal density, effected through color washes.
Decline and Withdrawal:
At the Tokyo Bijustsu Gakko, Okakura’s hour of supremacy was short-lived. In 1896, he invited Kuroda Seiki, a Paris-trained, immensely popular and influential western-style artist to join the school and start a section on western-style (yoga) painting. The political manipulations of Seiki, coupled with other elements of ideological polarization within the school and personal disturbances in his life, led to Okakura being eventually forced to resign from the school as also from his position at the Imperial Museum. Seventeen fellow faculty members resigned with him, and it was with this entire group that, supported by the financial generosity of influential patrons such as William Bigelow, Okakura founded the Nippon Bijutsuin under his personal leadership in 1898. As in the School of Fine Arts, a model similar to that proposed by Havell in India was sought to be emulated, in which art and craft were given equal importance as aspects of a coherent culture. Okakura had houses built for himself and the artists in the vicinity of the Bijutsu-in at Yanaka Hatsune-cho, where a close working and living relationship between artists and students was fostered, similar to that of the traditional schools of apprenticeship or the Indian gurukula. It was during this period that two of the senior students of the Academy, Taikan and Kanzan, developed the ‘hazy’ style or morotai, under Okakura’s influence, making, in his words, “tonal impression the main ingredient of painting.”
But Okakura’s personal restlessness, which had begun to surface after his father’s death in 1896, did not desert him. By 1901, the Bijutsuin was in serious financial difficulty, and Okakura seems to have sought an escape from its responsibility. Okakura decided to accompany an American lady, Miss McLeod and a Buddhist priest to India, with the ostensible intention of convincing Vivekananda to visit Japan. But there were other reasons. For one, from the time of his studies in art with Fenollosa, he had developed the notion of Indian culture and art, specially that of Ajanta, being one of the spiritual root-sources for Japan; and for another, conscious now of stiff personal and political opposition to his ideas, he sought wider support in the idea of a Pan-Asianism, resting on the nationalistic resurgence of other politically and/or culturally subject Asian nations, such as India. In India, he found the occasion to write “The Ideals of the East” and “The Awakening of the East”, two books expressive of his anti-western and pan-Asian sentiments.
After his return to Japan, Okakura sought to escape once more from the turbulent intrigues of Tokyo. He moved to the northern seaside town of Izura, and the principal artists of his school moved with him. But here too, Okakura could not stay for long. On February 10, 1904, Okakura left for the U.S.A. with Taikan, Shunso and others to arrange for exhibitions of these artists’ paintings. It was during this trip that Okakura accepted the position of Advisor to the Chinese and Japanese Department, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. After this, Okakura began dividing his year between Japan and the U.S. From now he concerned himself less and less directly with the art movement that he had given birth to in Japan, and spent more of his energies making addresses in the U.S., about the cult of inner beauty and spirit of the samurai way. The two books that he wrote during this period are The Awakening of Japan” and “The Book of Tea”. In these two books, some subtle shifts in Okakura’s views are observable. In “The Awakening of Japan”, the anti-westernism, though present, is more muted than before, a self-questioning tone having entered into his assessment of modern Japan. “The Book of Tea”, Okakura’s last major work, seems to be a departure from his series of eloquent denouncements of the west. Here, no attempt is made to reiterate the earlier historical arguments, the narrative being a simple telling of the aesthetic perfection of Teaism. But seen in the context of his previous works, this very reticence is meaningful. “Much comment has been given lately to the Code of the Samurai – the Art of Death which makes our soldiers exult in self-sacrifice; but scarcely any attention has been drawn to Teaism, which represents so much of our Art of Life”, he comments in this book. This book along with his increasing distancing from Japanese cultural politics, gives one to believe that in Boston in his last years, Okakura perhaps found a more universal framework for the resolution of the complex contradictions of east and west in his life, a framework however, which he did not have the strength to fully articulate. Soon after a last visit to India, Okakura died in 1913 at his mountain villa at Akakura.
In India, Havell’s departure only served to increase the reputation of Abanindranath and his school. Havell continued to publicize his protégé in England, introducing the work of the school in prestigious international art journals. Moreover, in India, the rise of print journalism, combined with nationalistic espousal, served to widely propagate the art and work of the school. New indigenous and western critics, such as O.C. Gangooly and Ananda Coomaraswamy added their voice to the support of the school, and Abanindranath himself now emerged as a major critical force, with his epigrammatic and poetical ‘mystic’ comments on art and its practice. However, oppositional voices were not lacking. Aban seemed to have stirred a hornet’s nest with his ideas and practice and a battle of opinion raged in India and England as its result. Abanindranath’s principalship was not made permanent, and an Englishman, Percy Brown was brought in in his place in 1909. Though Percy Brown seems to have initially attempted to maintain some cordiality with Abanindranath and his followers, tensions increased with time, mainly over teaching methods and Abanindranath took a long leave of absence on medical grounds. Finally, he resigned from the school in 1915, over a trivial matter. In a pattern reminiscent from Okakura’s life, all his students left the school with him, the center of the Bengal School now shifting from the Art College to the veranda-atelier of Abanindranath in Jorasanko, under the auspices of the ISOA. The method of teaching now followed an even greater informality and intimacy than what Abanindranath had established at the art school. It was an attempt to emulate under modern conditions the traditional teaching structure of India, where the students stayed with the master, learning not merely techniques, but ways of being through a holistic interactive context and the communication of intangible non-verbal messages. Though in this case, the students did not live with Abanindranath, they spent a good amount of time together with him, in his environment. Classes were held, both morning and evening in the south-facing veranda.
The Indian Society of Oriental Art received lavish funding from many sources, including the Government of Bengal. In 1914, a travelling exhibition of two hundred of the school’s works through Europe received mixed though largely favorable reviews. What was held against the school resembles the criticism against Nihonga. In England, The Times observed “Mr. Tagore, like many of his pupils, lacks power of line”, while another critic felt “there is a vagueness of outline which conceals the indefiniteness of thought and sometimes also a weakness of type.” In the 1920s, Abanindranath’s principal students relocated to various parts of India as art college principals and teachers.
From this point, Abanindranath’s involvement with his school grew progressively more distanced. On invitation from the Calcutta University in 1920, Abanindranath delivered a series of lectures, which have been compiled as “The Bageswari Lectures on Art.” Delivered in Bengali, these lectures are Aban’s last major critical pronouncements on art. Here, we find a deliberate diavowal of art as propaganda. Here, he also distances himself from the philosophy of revivalism, regretting that a mannered ‘national’ and ‘revivalistic’ style had become an unnatural obsession, losing touch with reality. As an artist also, his paintings began to show departures in style from the 1920s. Experimentation with brighter color, architectonic and decorative qualities, neo-Folk simplifications and expressionistic distortion entered his work. These changes coincided with changes in the environment and context of Abanindranath. His former students having departed, he was left in greater reflective solitude. In 1930, his elder brother Gaganendranath was struck with paralysis, the shock of this event causing him to stop painting temporarily. Gaganendranath finally passed away in 1938. The changing social conditions had had their effect on the family fortunes of the Tagores, and in stages, the acquisitions of the family had to be sold, ending with the sale of the mansion at Jorasanko in 1941. Abanindranath had to move to a rented house on the outskirts of Calcutta. From 1940, Abanindranath found a new creative pursuit in the fashioning of semi-abstract toy sculptures from found objects, such as pieces of wood, stone, glass or metal. After a few minimal modifications, he would name the piece. The interplay between name and form would give rise to an epiphanic flash of identification in the mind of the viewer. This was an entirely new and personal expression, with no stylistic precedent in Indian or other history. But the principles at work in this art form were no different from what he had practiced all his life – the suggestive play of form and poetry, revealing mystery in nature. It was thus in his last years that Abanindranath transcended the mysticism that was tied to national history, finding the beginnings of an universal idiom. However, his state of withdrawal and his age, along with the investment of energy in founding a national style had left him exhausted, unavailable for a clearer articulation. Abanindranath died on December 5, 1951
The Japan-India Connection:
As already mentioned, both Nihonga and Aban’s school were criticized for similar deficiencies: (1) A deliberate ignoring of modern social reality; (2) a predominant nationalistic historicism; and (3) a washed-out vagueness of form, based in the moro-tai techniques. What drew Abanindranath to adopt these ideas from Okakura? The obvious arguments pertaining to Orientalism and Nationalism have been noted. But it seems to me there were other attractions, related to specific connotations of “spirituality” for both the Japanese and the Indian. A related question that may be asked is “What drew Okakura to seek out Vivekananda?”
Vivekananda was not a Buddhist, but an Advaitin. Advaita is an Indian spiritual philosophy that has been translated as Non-Dualism. According to it, all semblance of multiplicity and differentiation is an illusion, characteristic of phenomenal appearance, but Reality is undifferentiated and unborn. The seeker after Truth arrives at it after a systematic negation of reality to all differentiation. Okakura however, had his own more embracing idea of Advaita, similar to certain Buddhist notions. To him, “the word adwaita means the state of not being two, and is the name applied to the great Indian doctrine that all which exists though apparently manifold, is really one. Hence all truth must be discoverable in any single differentiation, the whole universe involved in every detail…”[Ideals of the East, 235] The emergence of phenomena out of the undifferentiated Oneness would be the natural ontological basis of such a philosophy and its art would naturally seek to capture this ontology. The play of appearance and invisible Presence in Nature has, of course, been a common thread in all traditional Chinese and Japanese art, but the moro-tai gives it a specific formulation. Here, appearance is inundated and rendered porous by Presence through a color emotionalism symptomatic of romantic mood. Steven D. Owyoung has pointed out that, contrary to critical opinion, such effects have a long history in Chinese and Japanese painting [Nihonga, 149]
The Indian school of philosophy that Abanindranath was most influenced by was Bengal Vaishnavism. The Advaitic basis of this sees phenomena as the differentiation of One Person who has multiplied Himself into the many for the sake of Play. Ontologically, here, phenomena are informed with the intense emotionalism of the moods of Divine Love. Thus, it is quite natural that Abanindranath adapted this technique to his purposes. Additionally, the creative exigencies of colonial resistance drew both Okakura and Abanindranath to a self-conscious recognition and amplification of homologous spiritual elements, conducive to the formation of Pan-Asian hybrid identities. My intention here has been to show that the connotational implications of spirituality were much more deliberate, specific and ontologically concrete than has been usually supposed.
The personal lives of Okakura and Abanindranath also afford numerous homologous examples of legendary eccentricities and aberrations, based on such oppositional hybrid identities.
Conclusion:
From the foregoing, clear homologous patterns can be seen in the lives and identities of Okakura and Abanindranath. The bi-culturalism, the opposition to a civilizational teleology, the formation
of hybrid identities, the articulation and social/cultural enactment of a resistant position, aided by an Orietalist-Nationalist dialog, the partial success of its revisionary attempt, the inevitable withdrawal from the institutional center of things, the experimental attempt at alternate social and cultural models reproducing traditional forms in modern contexts, and finally, the further withdrawal to individual and universalistic states of contemplation and expression are the more distinct stages of this pattern. In observing this, I do not read it as a story of quixotic failure, but of the incidence of important repeated strands in the continuing assimilative process of an east-west cultural dialog.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anjan Chakraverty. Indian Miniature Painting. Lustre Press, Benares.
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