Abstract
This introductory chapter revisits the existing theoretical and conceptual repertoire for a critical study of early twentieth-century Indian religio-intellectual life. It interrogates the very ideas of, and different approaches to, the esoteric and the mystical in Indic traditions with particular reference to their larger socio-political ramifications against the backdrop of broader historical forces since especially the early twentieth century. The turn towards Indic and Indo-Islamic traditions by a generation of South Asian mystics, thinkers, and scholars in a period characterised by certain worldly asceticism did not necessarily mean a cultural nationalist effort of uncritical imitation of Orientalist projections, or linear attempts at reversing any simplistically formulated European discourse. Theirs were sophisticated creative endeavours to engage with wider cosmopolitan and global processes, sensitised at once to the nuances of ‘Western’ episteme and all the while remaining anchored in their critical understanding of, and approaches to, key aspects of Indic or Indo-Islamic traditions. The present intervention endeavours to better appreciate this global religious history. In the upshot it signals two important characteristics, viz. (i) the need to move beyond conventional understanding of a ‘Western’ contra ‘Eastern’ or ‘coloniser’ contra ‘colonised’ typology and (ii) explore the boundaries of the worlds of mysticism, spirituality, and institutionalised academia, which, in fact, often remained blurred.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Throughout the book, and unless otherwise specified, we use South Asia/India and South Asian/Indian interchangeably, as far as developments prior to India’s independence and Partition in 1947 are concerned. The expression ‘Indic’, by contrast, is used to describe religions and cultures of India with reference to the ‘broad cosmologies of human existence’, not to be reduced to ‘bounded groups self-defined as Muslim or Hindu’ as posited in Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia, eds. David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2000), 2. We do so, moreover, with reference to their modern colonial and post-colonial—as opposed to pre-colonial—iterations.
- 2.
For a recent useful commentary in the field of philosophy, see, e.g., Elise Coquereau-Saouma and Elisa Freschi, “Contemporary Indian Philosophy: Why it is Worth Taking up the Challenge”, Sophia, 57 (2018): 357–361; https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-018-0675-4
- 3.
Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Delhi/Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2006 [2001]), 74, ascribes this ‘construction’ of Indian spirituality to the pioneer Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda (b. Narendranath Dutt; 1863–1902), whose project was arguably at once comparable with contemporaneous developments within the folds of theosophy, anti-Christian radicalism, and spiritualism in Britain. Cf. the emphasis in idem, The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India (Princeton, NJ & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), on spirituality as a key component of modernity in vast parts of the non-West, such as China and India. Spirituality is thus said to have ‘moved from the West to India and China’, found different pathways within the rubric of the burgeoning nation-form, and eventually informed an ‘anti-imperialist secularism’, ‘modern abstract art’ and, not least, ‘critiques of materialism’. Ibid., 35.
- 4.
Responding to critiques by philosophers such as Daya Krishna (1924–2007), who see in such enterprise the centrality of Western episteme and a resultant Western depiction of, for instance, ‘Indian philosophy’, scholars point out how since the late nineteenth century Indians wrote what they saw as works of ‘Indian philosophy’ in English, in what can be seen as ‘an act of appropriation in the service of a modern, indeed cosmopolitan, Indian project’ (emphases in the original). See the ‘Introduction: Whose Voice? Whose Tongue? Philosophy in English in Colonial India’ to Indian Philosophy in English: From Renaissance to Independence, eds. Nalini Bhushan and Jay Garfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), xiii–xxvii, at xiv.
- 5.
Shalini Randeria, ‘Entangled Histories of Uneven Modernities: Civil Society, Caste Councils and Legal Pluralism in Postcolonial India’ in Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives, eds. H.-G. Haupt and J. Kocka (New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009), 77–104, at 80.
- 6.
Monica Juneja and Margrit Pernau, ‘Lost in Translation?: Transcending Boundaries in Comparative History’ in Comparative and Transnational History, eds. Haupt and Kocka, 105–129, at 117.
- 7.
Van der Veer, Imperial Encounters, 11.
- 8.
Ibid., 10–11.
- 9.
J. Barton Scott, Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2018 [2016]), 6.
- 10.
Van der Veer, Imperial Encounters, see esp. ‘Chapter Two: The Moral State: Religion, Nation, and Empire’ and ‘Chapter Three: The Spirits of the Age: Spiritualism and Political Radicalism’.
- 11.
Lisa Lassell Hallstrom, Mother of Bliss: Ānandamayī Mā (1896–1982) (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 216. However, her āśramas ‘hold to strict brahmanical purity regulations and a certain kind of division of labor based on gender’. Ibid., 219. This ambiguity can be perhaps better understood with reference to reception of ideas and their translations as opposed to ideas per se. While this process, in this particular case, is not exactly within the purview of the present discussion, it remains an important reminder of the need to critically examine the journeys ideas make and the ramifications they bear.
- 12.
Ibid., ix, 56ff.
- 13.
Thus, Hiltraud Rüstau, ‘“The Hindu Woman’s Right to Saṁnyāsa”: Religious Movements and the Gender Questions: The Sri Sarada Math and the Ramakrishna Sarada Mission’ in Hinduism in Public and Private: Reform, Hindutva, Gender, and Sampraday, ed. Antony Copley (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 143–172 surveys this history with reference to its inner complexities and distinguishes its ideational loyalty to Vedānta from the modern political articulations of Hindu agenda. For an overview of the role of female gurus in both Asian and global contexts, see Karen Pechilis, ‘Introduction: Hindu Female Gurus in Historical and Philosophical Context’, in The Graceful Guru: Hindu Female Gurus in India and the United States, ed. Karen Pechilis (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
- 14.
Hallstrom, Mother of Bliss, 3.
- 15.
See, for instance, the anthology: Women and the Hindu Right: A Collection of Essays, eds. Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1995). Quite different still, by contrast, is the realm of personal laws for minorities in particular where, buttressed by the state and within a post-colonial context, women’s agency is noted to have remained critically subservient to the demands of religion within the rubric of legal codes. See, e.g., Samita Sen, ‘Toward a Feminist Politics? The Indian Women’s Movement in Historical Perspective’, Policy Research Report on Gender and Development, Working Paper Series No. 9 (Washington DC: World Bank, 2000). Available online at http://www.worldbank.org/gender/prr (last accessed 08.04.2023).
- 16.
See, e.g., Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2004 [1989]), for an insightful account of the role of women in late Victorian spiritualism. Cf. Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (Harmondsworth/London: Viking, 1999), for a critical study of the small town of Lourdes as a key pilgrimage site in nineteenth-century France at a time when the Catholic Church was under much attack. Challenging a linear secularism thesis Harris illustrates how Lourdes stood at the very heart of nineteenth-century debates on medicine, science, religion, and mysticism with women playing a pivotal role in the process.
- 17.
See, e.g., the conversation between Anandamayi Ma and the nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945) against this wider backdrop in Chap. 5.
- 18.
See Sachidananda Mohanty, Cosmopolitan Modernity in Early 20th-Century India (New Delhi: Routledge, 2015), for a useful account of these manifold intersections and the filaments that linked the many nodes. More specifically, the site of education remained as a crux. Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) is thus said to have invited Mirra Alfassa (1878–1973), subsequently ‘the Mother’ of Pondicherry’s Sri Aurobindo Ashram, to take charge of his educational enterprise in Shantiniketan but the latter politely declined citing her own spiritual quest. Ibid., 107. Among other illustrative cases, mention may be made of the theosophist Mohini Mohun Chatterji’s (1858–1936) financial aid to Sister Nivedita’s (b. Margaret Elizabeth Noble; 1867–1911) educational initiative for girls, while Tagore and Paul (1870–1961) and Edith Geheeb (1885–1982)—who were at the forefront of Progressive Educational movement in Europe—exchanged notes about their respective educational visions and methods. For the former, see Mriganka Mukhopadhyay, ‘Mohini: A Case Study of a Transnational Spiritual Space in the History of the Theosophical Society’, Numen, 67, 2–3 (2020): 165–190, at 187. For the latter, see Martin Kämpchen, Indo-German Exchanges in Education: Rabindranath Tagore Meets Paul and Edith Geheeb (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020).
- 19.
Ashis Nandy, ‘Woman Versus Womanliness in India: An Essay in Cultural and Political Psychology’ in idem, Exiled at Home (Comprising At the Edge of Psychology; The Intimate Enemy; Creating a Nationality) (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 32–46, at 41.
- 20.
See Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
- 21.
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Global Intellectual History Beyond Hegel and Marx’, History and Theory, 54 (2015): 126–37.
- 22.
For a conceptual manifesto, see Michael Bergunder, ‘Global Religious History in Theory and Practice’, Method and Theory in the History of Religions, 33 (2021): 441–62.
- 23.
Michael Bergunder, ‘Experiments with Theosophical Truth: Gandhi, Esotericism, and Global Religious History’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 82, 2 (2014): 398–426, at 401.
- 24.
See, for instance, Julian Strube, Global Tantra: Religion, Science, and Nationalism in Colonial Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). For reflections on the methodology of global religious history, see esp. 16ff.
- 25.
Peter Heehs, ‘Shades of Orientalism: Paradoxes and Problems in Indian Historiography’, History and Theory, 42, 2 (2003): 169–195, at 169.
- 26.
Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and ‘The Mystic East’ (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), at 14, 17, 20ff. For a useful genealogical account of the term, its contested meanings, and its premodern history, see Chapter 1 (‘The Power of Definitions: A Genealogy of the Idea of “The Mystical”’), esp. 14ff.
- 27.
Ibid., 27–28.
- 28.
Ibid., 21.
- 29.
This is the core argument in Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 2015).
- 30.
Ibid., 3.
- 31.
Ibid., 113.
- 32.
Newton’s second edition of the Principia thus situates ‘God’ very much as part of natural philosophy. Ibid., 148.
- 33.
Ibid., 153ff.; 186.
- 34.
Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000 [1986]), 80. Cf. the idea of ‘mystical union’ as ‘deception’, or an ‘impotently inward trace of the forfeited revolution’ in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (ed. G. Schmid Noerr), Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 31.
- 35.
Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 2007 [2004]), 21.
- 36.
Ibid., 254.
- 37.
Ibid., 255–256.
- 38.
Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2007).
- 39.
Sugata Bose, ‘Different Universalisms, Colorful Cosmopolitanisms: The Global Imagination of the Colonized’ in Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas, eds. Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 97–111, at 98.
- 40.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’, Critical Inquiry, 23, 3, ‘Front Lines/Border Posts’ (Spring, 1997): 617–639, at 618.
- 41.
Gerard Delanty, ‘The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Social Theory’, The British Journal of Sociology, 57, 1 (2006): 25–47.
- 42.
See, Pnina Werbner, ‘Vernacular Cosmopolitanism as an Ethical Disposition Sufi Networks, Hospitality, and Translocal Inclusivity’ in Islamic Studies in the Twenty-First Century: Transformations and Continuities, eds. Léon Buskens and Annemarie van Sandwijk (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 223–240, at 223–224.
- 43.
See, for instance, Jane Haggis, Fiona Paisley, Clare Midgley, and Margaret Allen, Cosmopolitan Lives on the Cusp of Empire: Interfaith, Cross-Cultural and Transnational Networks, 1860–1950 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer International, 2017).
- 44.
Scott, Modern Hinduism, 2, 87. Cf. how the essence of the Kantian project, and indeed Enlightenment, is thus aptly summarised as the promise of ‘an unconditional freedom from tutelage’, a concern that resurfaces in Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1844–1900) thought in somewhat different form, celebrating certain ‘higher-self’, the ‘Overman’, and hence the principle of autonomy, in an endeavour that does not hesitate to replace the idea of ‘God’. See Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 90.
- 45.
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 6.
- 46.
Ibid., 6; see 6–11.
- 47.
Scott, Modern Hinduism, 3.
- 48.
Iqbal Singh Sevea, The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal: Islam and Nationalism in Late Colonial India (New Delhi/Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013 [2012]), 133.
- 49.
Daniel Brown, Rethinking Tradition in Modern Islamic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [1996]), 3.
- 50.
Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), thus exercises much caution in his seminal work on Bhudev Mukhopadhyay (1827–94), Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838–94), and Swami Vivekananda when he associates ‘revivalism’ in nineteenth-century Bengal with ‘a movement led by a small group of self-consciously “traditionalist” intellectuals’ but also adds that he would not ‘use the term “revivalist” in relation to any one of them’. See xii.
- 51.
Ibid., 9.
- 52.
Tapan Raychaudhuri, Perceptions, Emotions, Sensibilities: Essays on India’s Colonial and Post-Colonial Experiences (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 99. See ‘Chapter 5: Transformation of Religious Sensibilities in Nineteenth-Century Bengal’, and esp. 96 ff.
- 53.
Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, 55.
- 54.
Ibid., 55ff.
- 55.
Ibid., 55.
- 56.
Richard King, ‘Colonialism, Hinduism and the Discourse of Religion’ in Rethinking Religion in India: The Colonial Construction of Hinduism, eds. Esther Bloch, Marianne Keppens and Rajaram Hegde (London & New York: Routledge, 2011 [2010]), 95–113; at 97. The very idea of ‘religious studies’, with its roots in Enlightenment metanarrative, allegedly had its share of debilities, indeed an ‘iatrogenic’ effect whereby ‘religious phenomena and emic explanations’ have come to be subordinated to ‘a secular meta-discourse’. See King, Orientalism and Religion, 42–43; more generally on the nature of ‘iatrogenesis’ in modern studies of religion, ibid., 41ff.
- 57.
Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Philosophical Understanding (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2017 [original German edn 1981; English trans. 1988]), 258.
- 58.
Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bhāratendu Hariśchandra and Nineteenth-Century Banaras (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2017 [1997]), 5.
- 59.
Jonardon Ganeri, ‘Freedom in Thinking: The Immersive Cosmopolitanism of Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya’ in The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy, ed. Jonardon Ganeri (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021 [2017]), 718–736. Cf. Samuel Scheffler, ‘Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism’ in idem, Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2002 [2001]), 111–130, at 129. Scheffler’s is an endeavour to bring two lines of cosmopolitanism—that of justice on the one hand and of culture and the self on the other—vis-à-vis one another and call to attention the fact that they are not mutually exclusive. In the upshot, Scheffler also foregrounds the discursive aspect of the process, not merely abstract ideas.
- 60.
Ganeri, ‘Freedom in Thinking’, 724.
- 61.
Rajat Kanta Ray, ‘Introduction’ to Mind, Body and Society: Life and Mentality in Colonial Bengal, ed. Rajat Kanta Ray (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1995), 17.
- 62.
Ibid., 20.
- 63.
Ibid., 21. Emphasis mine, for reasons that will become clear from the following discussion, and critically reexamined more elaborately in the next chapter.
- 64.
Akṣay Kumar Dutta, Bhāratbarṣīya Upāsaka Sampradāya (Kalikātā: Basumatī Karyalaya, 1911 edn), Ibid., 227, 234. For a study of Dutta’s intervention, with all its inner tensions, against the backdrop of contemporaneous intellectual life, see Sumit Chakrabarti, Local Selfhood, Global Turns: Akshay Kumar Dutta and Bengali Intellectual History in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge & New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2023), esp. 212ff. Nevertheless, Dutta’s scholarly rigour and empirical richness makes it an important text.
- 65.
Dutta, Bhāratbarṣīya Upāsaka Sampradāya, 229–231.
- 66.
Dutta himself noted the inappropriateness of several Bāul practices and their language (aślīl) and exhorted his readers to endeavour to go deeper into the inner recesses of such metaphors and imageries and seek profound experience (anubhava). Ibid., 234.
- 67.
Cf. the selective (re)reading of key early Indian figures, their ideas, and concepts—revolving around the core values of non-violence, sacrifice, and so forth—in what has been seen as modern India’s search for ancient roots as part of an anticolonial movement and nation-building process that eventually, and substantially, shaped India’s post-colonial political discourse. See, for instance, Upinder Singh, Political Violence in Ancient India (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 2017).
- 68.
Throughout the present book, in line with an established scholarly convention and to foreground the protean nature of the terminology, we use the lower case ‘t’ for ‘theosophy’ or ‘theosophist’ (unless it is otherwise in a quote), while we reserve the upper case ‘T’ for the use of the term as a proper noun, i.e., understood in a particular form as professed and upheld by, or for references to, the ‘Theosophical Society’. Thus, a critique of the Theosophical Society’s idea of ‘Theosophy’ was occasionally accompanied with a celebration of a theosophy in tune with the best of Vedāntic tradition. See, e.g., Jason Ānanda Josephson, ‘God’s Shadow: Occluded Possibilities in the Genealogy of “Religion”’, History of Religions, 52, 4 (2013): 309–339. We shall revisit this later in the course of the present book.
- 69.
Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’ in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, eds. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1997), 152–160, at 153.
- 70.
Christopher A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge & New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 184. In many ways Dutt’s project is emblematic of the time. For a critical study of his journey from the Indian Civil Service through his emergence at once as a foremost critique of the English economic policy, a stalwart in the Bengali literary world, an interlocutor striving to carve out a history of early India on the bases of Sanskrit literary literature, see ibid., 180–185, 198–200.
- 71.
G.W.F Hegel (1770–1831) is thus widely known for not only his defence of ‘understanding’ (Verstand) against ‘philosophy, literature, and theology of immediacy, feeling, and faith’ but also his emphatic ‘message to the age of reason and enlightenment that reason must be transformed into spirit’; his seminal intervention, Phenomenology of Spirit (original German edition: 1807), thus sought to establish ‘that it is a fundamental misjudgment to take reason as the highest human faculty, the fundament of moral and legal action, and the goal of history’. See Ludwig Sipe, ‘Practical Reason and Spirit in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Reader, eds. Dean Moyar and Michael Quante (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 173–191, at 173. For an elaboration of the ethical and moral aspect of his idea of ‘spirit’, see esp., ibid. 175–186. For Hegel, overcoming the ‘one-sidedness’ of Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) philosophy of reason, with its two-pronged approach to its theoretical and practical dimensions, elicited ‘a transformed appropriation of the Greek concept of ethical life’. Ibid., 174. Cf. ‘That the True is actual only as system, or that Substance is essentially Subject, is expressed in the representation of the Absolute as Spirit—the most sublime Notion and the one which belongs to the modern age and its religion. The spiritual alone is the actual …’ (italics in original). See G.W.F. Hegel (analysis of the text and Foreword by J.N. Findlay), Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977 edn), see esp. ‘Preface: On Scientific Cognition’, at 14. Cf. ‘Reason is Spirit when its certainty of being all reality has been raised to truth, and it is conscious of itself as its own world, and of the world as itself’. Ibid. 263. Also see 263ff. for elaborate discussion on the notion of ‘Reason’ and ‘Spirit’.
- 72.
This is a core thesis in Bertrand Russell’s (1872–1970) understanding of the mystical and the scientific ‘impulses’ in the world of metaphysics represented, with varying emphasis, by the likes of Heraclitus (c. 500 BCE), Plato (428/427 BCE–348/347 BCE) et al. This was complemented with an effort to bring the scientific and the mystical in dialogue in such a way that the mysticism emerging in the upshot—manifesting itself first in the works of Parmenides—may be ‘called “logical” because it is embodied in theories on logic’. See Bertrand Russell, ‘Mysticism and Logic’ in idem, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1959 edn [First published as Philosophical Essays, 1910]), 1–32, at 8.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mukherjee, S. (2024). Mystics, Scholars, and Spiritual Cosmopolitans in Modern South Asia: An Introduction. In: Religion, Mysticism, and Transcultural Entanglements in Modern South Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49637-0_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49637-0_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-49636-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-49637-0
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)