Performing Asia: The Affective affinities of Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin

Performance theorist Rustom Bharucha delivers a lecture on his unique research into the friendship between Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore and Japanese curator Okakura Tenshin. These two remarkable figures from the early twentieth century were drawn to each other’s distinctive personal style, belief in art, and desire to revitalise Asian culture. His recent book Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin is an inter-Asian study of Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin, within the larger contexts of nationalism, pan-Asianism, and cosmopolitanism.

Prof. Rustom Bharucha is an eminent writer, director and cultural critic based in Delhi and Kolkata, India. As a free-lance director, dramaturge and writer for almost twenty five years, Bharucha has engaged in a series of interventions in the educational, activist, performance and fine arts sectors in different parts of India as well as in the Philippines, South Africa, Brazil, the United States and the Netherlands. He is the author of numerous books including Theatre and the World, The Question of Faith, In the Name of the Secular, The Politics of Cultural Practice, Rajasthan: An Oral History and Terror and Performance.

This talk is part of research project Tagore, Pedagogy and Contemporary Visual Cultures, a partnership between Iniva and Goldsmiths, University of London, which looks at Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore’s legacy in relation to cultural translation, curatorship, education, and historical precedent.

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