When Jesus Sojourned in India: The Afterlife of a Forgery, and the Predicament of Shared Narratives of “World Religions”

• In Event: Imagining Origins and Futures: Habitats of Religion and Cross-Cultural Experiments from Modern East and South Asia

Abstract

From around the late nineteenth century there emerged a line of interventions that claimed to have uncovered a Buddhist narrative of Jesus’s sojourns in India. While the narrative gained some niche adherence, it also attracted criticism. It was soon labelled as spurious, and the Buddhist text a forgery. By the early twentieth century, however, this account became the basis of a cluster of narratives in India, albeit with variations, that suggested an Indian origin of Christianity. While discredited in the academia, this family of narratives― despite their fluctuations, still gravitating around the ‘Jesus-in-India’ thesis― has come to have some enduring contemporary relevance especially for the wave of ‘new religions’. In this paper I do not intend to dwell on the question of “historical veracity” of such claims, or the lack of it. Rather, my intention is to understand the many (after-)lives of this narrative not only as a tool for “legitimation”, as recent scholarship underscores, but to see them as part and parcel of a more fundamental historical process: the very conceptualisation of ‘world religions’. For all the quest for the “authentic”, the very idea of ‘world religions’ also entailed reinvigorated interest in the esoteric, and the mystical. Drawing upon case studies within the folds of neo-Vedantism and yoga, and re-reading a rich corpus of non-English sources, this paper seeks to problematize some critical moments in inter-cultural/ inter-religious exercises, in the histories of shared origins, and in the production and consumption of knowledge involving the categories of mythos and logos.

Author

• Soumen Mukherjee, Presidency University, Kolkata, India