Religion, Mysticism, and Transcultural Entanglements in Modern South Asia: Towards a Global Religious History

This book explores the location of spirituality and mysticism in modern Indian religious and intellectual life. It examines select personalities and their ideas since the early twentieth century, their role in the interwoven spheres of socio-religious and political thought, and in burgeoning spiritual imaginaries, often at the intersection of academic and public discourse. As part of a global ecumene connected by affective bonds, these spiritual cosmopolitans often defied binary frameworks (East/ West; imperial core/ periphery; colonizer/ colonized), and in the upshot reappraised and recast the very concept of religion in response to overarching ’this-worldly’ exigencies.

Soumen Mukherjee is Assistant Professor in History at Presidency University in Kolkata. He is the author of Ismailism and Islam in Modern South Asia: Community and Identity in the Age of Religious Internationals (2017), which won the 2021 Karim and Rosemin Karim Prize for its contribution to understudied areas of Ismaili Studies.