Subhas Ranjan Chakraborty and Shyam Sundar Bhattacharya (Eds.). An Encounter between Two Asian Civilisations: Rabindranath Tagore and the Early Twentieth Century Indo-Japanese Cultural Confluence

Abstract

In the initial pages of the book, the Consul General of Japan in Kolkata Mr. Masayugi Taga stated how Rabindranath Tagore’s description of the Japanese culture in Japan Jatri, after his visit there in 1916 onwards, was one of the best descriptions of the Japanese culture even today. In fact, one is often surprised by the places visited by the great sage and his depth of knowledge about these areas. Now, a 100 years have passed after this event, at the suggestion of Prof. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, the former Vice Chancellor of Visva-Bharati University, a conference was organised to assess this event on 15 March 2017 at the Asiatic Society. In reflection, this meeting of Tagore with other cultural ambassadors of Japan was one of the series of interactions between the Japanese and the Indians before and after this event. The introduction lays the historical groundwork for the first of Tagore’s visits to Japan, so full of misgivings on the part of the British government. The government was especially suspicious of C. F. Andrews and W. W. Pearson who had absorbed so much of Oriental culture that they had become anti-British. These two gentlemen accompanied Tagore during this visit. Tagore was also a philosopher in search of an ideal, which he knew was not attainable easily or acceptable to all. Tagore hearkened to a past in an address to the Imperial University (p. 2–3),