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

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

This panel explores an array of complexities that have characterised the development of the ‘world religions’, including their subsequent ramifications. The papers will do so by drawing upon case studies from two crucial theatres in this historical process, viz. nineteenth and twentieth century East and South Asia. While hegemonic strands of scholarship argue that the conceptualisation of ‘world religions’ entailed a marginalisation of religion’s “others,” the present panellists, from different disciplinary backgrounds (Literature, History, Philosophy), will focus on various aspects of religion’s often ambivalent equations with these “others”. This includes not only the non-religious “secular” or profane, but also the so-called “false religions”, and the mystical. The panellists thus examine a cluster of issues: the nostalgia for (often mythical) origins and anxieties about the future, as well as idioms and modes of cultural and religious exchange along inter-Asian and Asian-European axes. Contemporary ramifications will be explored by panellists who look at new religious movements. Following are the case studies: pseudo-histories and legends of Buddhist missionary networks in East Asia in an age of hyper-diffusionism (Hashimoto); early twentieth century religious networks connecting India and Japan with significant pan-Asianist implications (Okamoto); reception, customisations, and recycling of the ‘Jesus-in-India’ thesis in vernacular cosmopolitan intellectual circles, especially within the frameworks of neo-Vedantism and yoga, in India and their implications for new age religions (Mukherjee); the Indian mystic saint Sri Ramakrishna’s Vedantism and cross-cultural theodicy (A. Maharaj); and critique of Western modernity and Protestantism by Carl Jung through his invocation of Asian religio-cultural traditions (Richter).

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing-Diaspora

Session Organizer

• Soumen Mukherjee, Presidency University, Kolkata, India

Chair

• Toshio Akai, Kobe Gakuin University

Individual Presentations

• The Asian Discovery of America? A Pseudohistory and Its Propaganda of Japan’s Manifest Destiny in America - Yorismitsu Hashimoto, Osaka University

• Religious Ties Envisioned in Early 20th-Century Asia: Okakura Kakuzo, Oda Tokuno and an Asian Religion Conference - Yoshiko Okamoto, International Christian University

• When Jesus Sojourned in India: The Afterlife of a Forgery, and the Predicament of Shared Narratives of “World Religions” - Soumen Mukherjee, Presidency University, Kolkata, India

• Toward a Cross-Cultural Theodicy: Sri Ramakrishna’s Vedantic Response to the Problem of Evil - Ayon Maharaj, Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda University, Belur

• Carl Jung, Eastern Philosophy and Synchronicity: A Critique of Protestantism - Claudia Richter, Independent Researcher