Lecture 2001-04-16

Hariprabha Takeda in Early Taisho Japan

Mr. Monzurul Huq

At the April meeting we were happy to have with us the ambassador of Bangladesh, H.E. Mr. Jamil Majid, who had come to hear one of his compatriots, Mr. Monzurul Huq, address us on the subject of "Hariprabha Takeda in Early Taisho Japan". For this meeting we were back once again in Seisen University, in a season when the garden was resplendent with the azaleas brought in from Kirishima by the Shimazus, the Lords of Satsuma, when this place was their Tokyo residence.

Though Indians had little chance to see the outside world in earlier times, said Mr. Huq, the country became known internationally during the Middle Ages through travellers such as Marco Polo, who devoted a chapter of his "Travels" to Bengal (though it seems now that he was actually describing part of Burma). The insularity of the Indians themselves can probably be attributed to the teachings of Hinduism, which forbade its followers to cross the sea. There was one exception when King Asoka (reigned c.274-232 B.C.) sent out missionaries to bring Buddhism to other countries; but when Hinduism finally drove Buddhism out of India the country reverted to its insularity. Meanwhile, invaders from other parts of Asia brought Islam to India, but even then Indians were not enticed to travel abroad to any extent. It was only with the introduction of a new education system by the British colonial rulers that a gradual shift in attitudes came to be felt, and leading Indian personalities began to visit Europe and bring back newly-acquired knowledge. At the same time Indian labourers were recruited to go and work in the plantations of Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, Jamaica and Fiji.

These last did not pass on any knowledge of the outside world to their home country, and it is only in modern times that writers like V.S. Naipaul have described their attempts to recreate their own India in alien surroundings. It was therefore the upper echelon of educated Indians who provided accounts of their journeys, and a new genre in the form of travel writings emerged. In this, Bengal, centred on Calcutta which was the capital of the whole country during the early years of the British raj, played a prominent role. It was in the forefront of all intellectual and literary movements, though a few more decades would pass before Rabindranath Tagore gave a definitive shape to this genre of writing. He travelled widely, to Europe, the U.S.A. and South America, and left detailed accounts of his journeys, combining his factual and philosophical observations. His account of his first visit to Japan in 1916, brought out in 1919, was considered at the time to be the first book on Japan published in the Bengali language.

But Japan was already familiar to educated Indians in the late 19th century, when the political struggle in British India took organized shape and the Indian National Congress was founded in 1885. At a time when most of Asia had come under colonial rule, Japan was known for having successfully preserved her independence and embarked on a course towards becoming an economic and military power.

Despite its colonial nature, there is no denying the fact that British rule played a crucial role in opening up the floodgates for knowledge to come into India. The year 1780 saw the emergence of Asia's first weekly newspaper, James Hicky's Bengal Gazette, published in Calcutta, and in the early 19th century this was followed by vernacular newspapers in different parts of the country. So we can be sure that by the second half of the 19th century India's urban elites were well aware of what was happening in other parts of Asia, including Japan.

There is no doubt that Tagore's Japan Jatri, as his travelogue is known, focused the attention of people in Bengal on the attempts being made in other parts of Asia to catch up with the West. His first contact with Japan came in 1902, when some members of the Tagore family got to know Okakura Tenshin when he visited India. Tagore finally made his long-awaited trip to Japan in 1916, and his detailed account of that journey excited much discussion. It is interesting to note that while he recorded his unmitigated praise for Japan's economic achievements, he was also openly critical of the strong rising nationalism that he sensed.

But we now know that his was not the first visit to Japan by a Bengali. An obscure housewife from the remote East Bengal town of Dhaka, Hariprabha Takeda, had visited Japan the year before, in 1915, and left an account of her journey which we can reasonably assume to be the first book on Japan written by an Indian and published in India, and probably also the first to have been written by an Asian lady from a territory outside Japan's immediate vicinity. Unlike Tagore's book, it was not intended for wide publication, and remained unnoticed until recently. Not much is known about Hariprabha Takeda. except what she says about herself at the beginning of her book, Bongomohilar Japan Jatra (A Bengali Lady's Visit to Japan). This is a half-demy size 64-page travelogue, first published in Dhaka in 1915, of which the one surviving copy was retrieved recently from the India Office Library of the British Museum, and republished in 1999 as part of a series of books by women.

In 1906 she had married a Japanese businessman, Uemon Takeda, who had first worked in a soap factory in Dhaka and had later established his own factory. From an interview he gave to the Kobe Yushin Nippo, published on December 16th, 1912, we learn that his parental home was in Shimamiya in Kochino town, Niwa county, Aichi prefecture, and that he was 37 years old when he and his 22-year-old wife set foot in Japan (the article had been researched by Mr. Kazuhiro Watanabe and Ms Chihiro Tanaka of the Bengali and Urdu sections of NHK, and Mr. Watanabe was present at the meeting). In November 1912 they sailed from Calcutta on a four-months' trip to Japan, primarily so that Hariprabha could meet her in-laws. As she writes at the beginning of her account, she had always dreamed of meeting her husband's parents and getting their blessing.

The year 1912 had seen the death of the Emperor Meiji, which had a destabilizing effect. The new emperor was physically weak, and incapable of making political decisions, with the result that in the "Taisho Political Crisis" the army now felt freer to press its demands. The political situation in India too was turbulent, and there had been an attempt on the life of the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, in the same year. As a result, the colonial government imposed more restrictions, and Indians became wary of expressing political opinions. Hariprabha's political views are unknown, but at any rate she refrained from expressing any comments on Indian or Japanese politics; she may have avoided making trouble, or she may simply not have known the situation in Japan; and anyway she was merely an ordinary housewife on a family visit. She does, however, speak of the Emperor Meiji (whom she styles 'the Mikado') when she describes visits, first to a museum in Ueno where she saw his coffin, and then to the site of his grave at Momoyama near Kyoto, where a mausoleum was under construction.

Tagore also avoids any direct references to the political situation in his travelogue, but his philosophical observations indicate his thinking on certain phenomena that he found disturbing. For instance, State Shinto, he says, lacks spiritual content, but recognizes the emperor and his ancestors as gods; therefore the authorities can use this to deepen the feeling of patriotism among citizens. On the social side, Hariprabha's description of Japan is more lively and elaborate than Tagore's. Few Japanese outside the big cities had seen an Indian, and in the rural villages "everybody rushed towards me to have a look at the 'Indojin' ", and children used to cry out "Indojin!" until her father-in-law chased them away. She gives detailed information about the food (which she tried for two weeks and afterwards started cooking Indian food for herself!) and the clothing of the Japanese people, including a description of the kimono. Some of her observations show that she was contrasting Japan with her own country. The friendly and helpful policemen in the koban were not the object of fear that the British Indian police force were. About Tokyo she says that "as a capital city, Tokyo doesn't seem to be gorgeous at all" (she had to trudge through muddy streets there), and she probably had the cosmopolitan centre of Calcutta in mind when she wrote.

Tagore's comparisons, though equally indirect, are more significant. He did not find any distinctive character in urban Japan. He observed that, as in India, men adopted western dress when they went to the office, and left their Japanese clothes at home. This trend was making the world an uglier place to live in. So it was the women in their kimonos that caught his eye, and made him feel that they represented the true Japan. In noting that the Japanese do not waste time and energy in useless quarrels, he finds that the Japanese character is epitomized in the haiku. A hint is enough to convey a message. The restrained expression of emotion in Japan forms a total contrast to the situation in India. Despite occasional critical looks at matters related more to spiritual thinking, Tagore did not fail in his praise and admiration for Japan. In this, he was conceivably contrasting India's backwardness with Japan's success in catching up with modern developments.

Hariprabha's book obviously lacks any such deeper sense of understanding, as her primary purpose in visiting was to meet relatives, not to understand the country. In that sense, her descriptions of Japan are free of any extraneous colouring. At the same time, her book is not a mere guide book, and there is no shortage of personal opinions on the norms and behaviour of Japanese people, a fact which lends strength to this tiny volume. Unfortunately, nothing is known about what happened to Hariprabha and her husband after they returned to India and she published her book a couple of years later. According to one report, Mr. Takeda was interned as an enemy alien during World War II, while another suggests that they returned to Japan and Hariprabha was involved in anti-British activities under Subhas Chandra Bose, though this seems unlikely. Attempts to trace their whereabouts are made more difficult by the fact that the Brama Shamaj of Dhaka, a society of educated and forward-looking Hindus that Hariprabha and her parents belonged to, virtually went out of existence; after the partition of India in 1947 large numbers of Hindus moved to India, and after the liberation war of Bangladesh in 1971 the society's library and office building were destroyed. We also know nothing about the family home of Mr. Takeda, apart from what is contained in the article in the Kobe Yushin Nippo. (The small town of Kochino has now been incorporated into Konan city ).

The value of Hariprabha's book lies in the insight it gives us, not only into how Indians viewed Japan in the early 20th century, but also into the position of women in both Indian and Japanese society. It may be wondered why the book failed to attract attention when it came out, and was soon forgotten. First, it was written for the Brama Shamaj society, which helped finance the trip and also published the book, although it had not originally been intended for publication. Second, Dhaka at the time was a remote provincial town, far from Calcutta. Third, the towering figure of Tagore made it virtually impossible for any newcomer to make a breakthrough with a single book, whatever the subject might be. And finally, the flaws in Hariprabha's language and style, not to be expected in a serious writer of a travel report, made it plain that she did not give any real thought to making the book available to the general reader. But despite such drawbacks, the book has now at last made a comeback as an important historical document shedding light not only on relations between Japan and India but also on those between Japan and Asia as a whole.

A lively question time followed, and the meeting closed with a vote of thanks proposed by Prof. Hugh Wilkinson, who took the opportunity to speak of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, an offshoot of the venerable Asiatic Society of Bengal, founded in 1784 by Sir William Jones, Chief Justice at Fort William in Calcutta, who was among the first to point out the relation between Sanskrit and Greek and Latin, an observation that started up the study of comparative philology.

Adapted from "The Asiatic Society of Japan Bulletin No. 5", May 2001, compiled by Prof. Hugh E. Wilkinson and Mrs. Doreen Simmons.