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This book provides a comparative analysis of cosmopolitan (esoteric) religious movements, such as Theosophy, Groupe Independent des Études Ésotériques, Anthroposophy, and Monism, in England, France, Germany, and India during the late nineteenth-century to the interwar years. Despite their diversity, these factions manifested a set of common features—anti-materialism, embrace of Darwinian evolution, and a belief in universal spirituality—that coalesced in a transnational field of analogous cosmopolitan spiritual affinities. Yet, in each of their geopolitical locations these groups developed vastly different interpretations and applications of their common spiritual tenets. This book explores how such religious innovation intersected with the social (labor and economic renewal), cultural (education and religious innovation) and political (Empire and anti-colonial) dynamics in these vastly different national domains. Ultimately, it illustrates how an innovative religious discourse converged with the secular world and became applied to envision a new social order—to spiritually re-engineer the world.
When Portuguese explorers first arrived in India, the maritime passage initiated an exchange of goods as well as ideas. European ambassadors, missionaries, soldiers, and scholars who followed produced a body of knowledge that shaped European thought about India. Sanjay Subrahmanyam tracks these changing ideas over the entire early modern period.
Theosophy across Boundaries brings a global history approach to the study of esotericism, highlighting the important role of Theosophy in the general histories of religion, science, philosophy, art, and politics. The first half of the book consists of seven perspectives on the activities of the Theosophical Society in very different regional contexts, ranging from India, Vietnam, China, and Japan to Victorian Britain and Israel, shedding new light on the entanglement of "Western" and "Oriental" ideas around 1900. The second half explores specific cultural influences that Theosophy exerted in the spheres of literature, art, and politics, using case studies from Sri Lanka, Burma, India, Japan, Ireland, Germany, and Russia. The examples clearly show that Theosophy was part of a truly global movement, thus providing an outstanding example of the complex entanglements of the global religious history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This book provides a comparative analysis of cosmopolitan (esoteric) religious movements, such as Theosophy, Groupe Independent des Études Ésotériques, Anthroposophy, and Monism, in England, France, Germany, and India during the late nineteenth-century to the interwar years. Despite their diversity, these factions manifested a set of common features-anti-materialism, embrace of Darwinian evolution, and a belief in universal spirituality-that coalesced in a transnational field of analogous cosmopolitan spiritual affinities. Yet, in each of their geopolitical locations these groups developed vastly different interpretations and applications of their common spiritual tenets. This book explores how such religious innovation intersected with the social (labor and economic renewal), cultural (education and religious innovation) and political (Empire and anti-colonial) dynamics in these vastly different national domains. Ultimately, it illustrates how an innovative religious discourse converged with the secular world and became applied to envision a new social order-to spiritually re-engineer the world. Perry Myers is Professor of German Studies at Albion College in Michigan, USA. .
Based on ten years of research, Santanu Das's India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs recovers the sensuous experience of combatants, non-combatants and civilians from undivided India in the 1914–1918 conflict and their socio-cultural, visual, and literary worlds. Around 1.5 million Indians were recruited, of whom over a million served abroad. Das draws on a variety of fresh, unusual sources - objects, images, rumours, streetpamphlets, letters, diaries, sound-recordings, folksongs, testimonies, poetry, essays, and fiction - to produce the first cultural and literary history, moving from recruitment tactics in villages through sepoy traces and feelings in battlefields, hospitals, and POW camps to post-war reflections on Europe and empire. Combining archival excavation in different countries across several continents with investigative readings of Gandhi, Kipling, Iqbal, Naidu, Nazrul, Tagore, and Anand, this imaginative study opens up the worlds of sepoys and labourers, men and women, nationalists, artists, and intellectuals, trying to make sense of home and the world in times of war.
This book explores Roman Catholic female missionaries and their placement in colonial and postcolonial India. It offers fascinating insights into their idiomatic activism, juxtaposed with a contrarian Protestant raj and with their own church patriarchies. During the Great Revolt of 1857, these women religious hid in church steeples. They were forced into the medical care of sexually diseased women in Lock Hospitals. They followed the Jesuits to experimental tribal village domains and catered for elites in the airy hilltop stations of the raj. Yet, they could not escape the eugenic and child rescue practices that were the flavour of the imperial day. New geographies of race and gender were also created by their social and educational outreach. This allowed them to remain on the subcontinent after the tide went out on empire in 1947. Their religious bodies remained untouched by India yet their experience in the field built awareness of the complex semiotics and visual traces engaged by the East/West interchange. After 1947, their tropes of social outreach were shaped by their direct interaction with Indians. Many new women religious were now of the same race or carried a strongly anti-British Irish ancestry. In the postcolonial world their historicity continues to underpin their negotiable Western-constructed activism - now reaching trafficked girls and those in modern-day slavery. The uncovered and multi-dimensional contours of their work are strong contributors to the current Black Lives Matter debates and how the etymology and constructs of empire find their way into current NGO philanthropy.
This volume surveys democracy broadly as a cultural phenomenon operating in different ways across a very wide range of societies in the nineteenth-century world. In the long nineteenth century, democracy evolved from a contested, maligned conception of government with little concrete expression at the level of the state, to a term widely associated with good governance throughout the diverse political cultures of the Atlantic world and beyond. The geographical scope and public range of discussions about the meaning of democracy in this era were unprecedented in comparison to previous centuries. These lively debates involved fundamental questions about human nature, and encompassed subjects ranging from the scope of the people who would participate in self-government to the importance of social and economic issues. For these reasons, the nineteenth century has proven the formative century in the modern history of democracy. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: sovereignty; liberty and the rule of law; the “common good”; economic and social democracy; religion and the principles of political obligation; citizenship and gender; ethnicity, race, and nationalism; democratic crises, revolutions, and civil resistance; international relations; and beyond the polis. These ten different approaches to democracy in the nineteenth century add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.