Esotericism, Mysticism and the Politics of Transcendence in Modern Asia

The seminal edited collection examines histories of esotericism, mysticism and occultism in modern Asia, understood here as the period roughly stretching from the late nineteenth through the twentieth century, and paving eventually the way for the so-called ’New Age’. The idea of ’histories’, in plural, has to do with the complexities of their lineages, the many pathways through which their affinities, encounters and entanglements flowed and/or developed during the period under review.

Contributors to the anthology hail from different disciplines -history, literature, religious studies, philosophy and so forth -and broach the subjects from the vantage points of their fields. Their studies bring to the forefront the need to transcend the neatly demarcated, and frequently overdrawn and binary, idioms of East-West, colonizer-colonized, or modernity-tradition. By drawing upon case studies of individuals (esotericists/mystics/scholars), movements and/or networks (including but not restricted to Theosophy/Sufism/Sufis, for instance), and institutionalized academia (epistemologies of religion contra esotericism contra mysticism contra occultism, Eastern/Western/or otherwise), contributors to the edited collection bring out the many facets of these categories and processes in modern Asia. They examine how at times far from being counter-modern/peripheral/fringe escapist, these processes came to mark a less-explored side of modernity. Thus, systems of knowledge and frameworks conventionally rejected in triumphalist Enlightenment narratives often came up with their own understanding of modernity, humanity. They frequently endeavoured, through their politics of spirituality and transcendence, to lend voice to their critical commentaries on wider socio-political problems of the times. This edited collection examines esoteric, occult and mystical traditions and their politics of spirituality and transcendence in modern Asia against the larger backdrop of intra-Asian and global flows from a truly multi-disciplinary perspective.
The anthology will be useful for postgraduate students, research scholars and academics in general, working in the fields of religious studies and/or Asian religions, history, and philosophy of Asian religions. In addition, even those broadly interested in encounters across cultures and religions will also find this collection to be of great value.

Soumen Mukherjee (Dr. phil. 2010, University of Heidelberg) teaches History at Presidency University, Kolkata. His publications include the Karim and Rosemin Karim prize-winning book Ismailism and Islam in Modern South Asia: Community and Identity in the Age of Religious Internationals (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Toshio Akai is Professor of Humanities at Kobe Gakuin University with expertise in and publications on Theosophist activities in Ireland and India, and Irish impact on the interwar years Japanese culture. He is the co-author of The Cosmic Movement: Sources, Contexts, Impact (Ben Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2020) and other books.