Translocal Lives and Religion; Bornet

Edited by

Philippe Bornet [+–]

University of Lausanne

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Philippe Bornet is Senior lecturer in South Asian studies at the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Lausanne, Switzerland. After stays in Tübingen and at the University of Chicago, he completed a PhD in the comparative history of religions on rituals of hospitality in Jewish and Indian texts. His current research deals with interactions between India and Europe and more specifically, Swiss missionaries in South India in the beginning of the 20th century. Recent publications include Rites et pratiques de l’hospitalité, 2010, Religions in Play, 2012 (ed. with M. Burger) and L’orientalisme des marges (ed. with S. Gorshenina), 2014.

This volume examines the intellectual trajectories of remarkable individuals who interacted with religious discourses, doctrines or practices in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Inspired by S. Subrahmanyam and S. Gruzinski’s historiographical model of “connected histories”, this book introduces the approach of “connected religion” and invites the study of cross-cultural and “translocal” encounters by bringing together documents that represent diverse aspects of the story and reconstructing a narrative from diverse standpoints, with analytical potential. Testing this approach through specific cases of interactions between Asia and Europe, the volume explores the little-known stories of actors such as migrants or expatriates interacting with religious discourses, and of religious leaders producing and propagating beliefs and practices. The cases pose questions that can be applied to further contexts, such as: the significance of improved travels and communications for the diffusion of religious content across national, cultural and institutional boundaries; the impact of specific individuals, charismatic or not, well-established or subaltern in the reconfiguration of institutional forms of religion; and the role of the South Asian referent in legitimating the propagation of specific religious views.

Offering both an innovative methodological framework and original cases based on new research, the book will be of interest to scholars of religion, to specialists of South Asia in late modernity and to the broader public.

Series: The Study of Religion in a Global Context

Preliminaries

List of Figures vii

Philippe Bornet FREE

University of Lausanne

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Foreword ix-x

Sujit Sivasundaram FREE

University of Cambridge

Sujit Sivasundaram is Reader in World History and Fellow, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University.

Editor’s Preface xi-xv

Philippe Bornet FREE

University of Lausanne

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Part I: Introduction

1. From Comparative to Connected Religion: Translocal Aspects of Orientalism and the Study of Religion [+–] 3-32

Philippe Bornet £17.50

University of Lausanne

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Introducing the notion of “connected history” and situating it among other related approaches (“global history”, “comparative history”, “entangled history”, “cultural transfers”, etc.), the chapter examines the potentialities as well as the challenges it presents for the comparative study of religions. Building on recent considerations about a critical “comparative religion”, it is argued that a “connected religion” approach has the potential to both criticize classical taxonomies and construct alternative ways to think about concepts and practices about religion. In order to assess the approach, two examples are introduced and contrasted: Looking at F.M. Müller’s involvement with Bengali (Dwarkanath Tagore, Debendranath Tagore, Keshub Chandra Sen), Marathi (Behramji Malabari) and Japanese scholars (Nanjo Bunyu and Kenjiu Kasawara), it is argued that the orientalist project is not only better understood when re-contextualized in this global context, but that it also had consequences beyond the scholarly world, offering opportunities to all involved actors. The second example explores the encounter of a Swiss missionary, Jakob Urner, with specialists of the Vīraśaiva literatures such as Channappa Uttangi. In so doing, attention is paid to the often discordant and oppositional dynamics constitutive of political and religious processes, to the development of scholarly representations (mainstream or marginal), and to their impact on the study of religions as an academic discipline. It is also suggested that such an approach is better carried out in a collaborative framework, since it generally involves dealing with sources that stem from various cultural, institutional or linguistic backgrounds.

Part II: Transnational Trajectories and Individual Appropriations of Religion

2. “In-Between” Religiosity: European Kāli-bhakti in Early Colonial Calcutta [+–] 35-55

Gautam Chakrabarti £17.50

Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt

Gautam Chakrabarti, PhD, is Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at the Kulturwissenschaftliche Fakultät, Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder). He has previously worked for the ERC-Projekt “Developing Theater”, Ludwig-Maximilians- Universität München. He has also taught Berlin- and German Studies, Comparative Literature, English and Anglophone Literature and Culture at the Freie Universität Berlin.

One of the most engaging socio-cultural traits in late 18th- and early 19th-century India was the disarmingly engaged and comparativist manner in which European travellers responded to the multi-layered and deeply syncretic field of devotional spirituality in eastern India. The predominantly-śākta orientation of early modern Bengali configurations of religious devotion led, especially in the vicinity of the rather-heterodox city of Calcutta, to the familiarization of European migrants to the Goddess Kālī, Herself representing a certain subaltern, tāntrika aspect of Hindu devotional practices. Antony Firingi, (Æntōnī Phiringī) originally Hensman Anthony (?‒1836), was a folk-poet/bard, who, despite being of Portuguese origin, was married to a Hindu Brahmin widow and well-known throughout Bengal for his celebrated Bengali devotional songs addressed to the Goddesses Kālī and Durgā, towards the beginning of the 19th century. He was also celebrated for his performance in literary contests known as kabigān (bardic duels) with the then elite of Bengali composers. His āgamani songs, celebrating the return of Goddess Durgā to her parental home are immensely-popular till today and he was associated with a temple to Goddess Kālī in the Bowbazar-area of North Calcutta that is nowadays famous as the Phiringī Kālibāri (foreigner’s Kālī temple). In this essay, the literary-cultural construction of a religious hybridity, operating between and cross-fertilizing Indo-European cultural conjunctions, is examined through the study of individual, “in-between” religious agency, in this case of Hensman Anthony, who comes across as a figure representing the condition of the transcultural subaltern.

3. The Making of the Ideal Transnational Disciple: Unravelling Biographies of Margaret Noble/Sister Nivedit [+–] 57-88

Gwilym Beckerlegge £17.50

Open University

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Gwilym Beckerlegge studied religions at the Universities of Oxford and Lancaster, and is currently Professor of Modern Religions in the Department of Religious Studies at The Open University, UK. His research centres on the growth of sevā within the Ramakrishna Math and Mission and other contemporary Hindu movements. Publications include Swami Vivekananda’s Legacy of Service: A Study of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission (2006), Colonialism, Modernity and Religious Identities(2008) (editor and contributor), and “Sevā: The Focus of a Fragmented but Gradually Coalescing Field of Study.” Religions of South Asia 9(2), 2015.

This chapter departs from the representation of Margaret Noble/Sister Nivedita (1867‒1911) popularized by emic biographies. These have tended to treat her eclectic spiritual life, with all its fluid complexity, as merely preparatory to her meeting Swami Vivekananda (1863‒1902) in London, and to attribute the roots of her commitment to the cause of Indian nationalism, after her initiation as his disciple, to a deep-seated Irish nationalism inculcated by her family. Instead, by extending the concept of “translocalism”, this chapter will explore Nivedita’s life as a “translocal space”. It will be suggested that the distinctive transnational course of Nivedita’s life, between two seats of resistance to British colonial rule via the capital of the British Empire, gave rise to ambivalence and unresolved tensions that she exhibited in relation to her identity and the direction of her career.

4. The Curious Case of the Drs. D’Abreu: Catholicism, Migration and a Kanara Catholic Family in the Heart of the Empire, 1890-1950 [+–] 89-122

Dwayne Ryan Menezes £17.50

Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London

Dr. Dwayne Ryan Menezes is an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, and Honorary Fellow at University College London. He read Imperial and Ecclesiastical History at the LSE and the University of Cambridge, graduating from the latter with a PhD in History. He served as Researcher at the Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR) at the University of Cambridge; Visiting Academic at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford; and as Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Heythrop College, University of London. Dr. Menezes also acted until recently as Consultant to the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth and continues to serve as Founder and Director of Human Security Centre (HSC) and Polar Research and Policy Initiative (PRPI).

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, several Catholics from South Kanara in British India, whether as British subjects or Indo-Portuguese Catholics, journeyed across the wider British, Portuguese and Catholic worlds. Wherever they travelled or settled, they often strategically deployed their Catholicism (more precisely, Roman Catholicism), distinctive Anglo-Luso-Brahmin culture and ambiguities about their racial heritage to overcome structural barriers to the mobility and assimilation of South Asians. Catholicism, with its numerous institutions, lay and clerical transnational networks, and doctrinal emphasis on universalism emerged as a particularly valuable tool that some could deploy for the purpose of assimilation. Catholicism would not only facilitate intermarriages with Catholics of other ethnicities, but also enable racial “passing” and other forms of strategic ethnic reidentification. By focusing on the d’Abreu family from Mangalore, members of which journeyed to the British Isles since 1890, this study shall uncover the forgotten history of an Indo-Portuguese Catholic family that embedded itself within the heart of British society. It shall explore how, by strategically emphasizing the Catholic and Portuguese markers of their multifaceted identities and connecting to Catholic institutions and networks, the pioneering d’Abreu immigrant could embed himself within local Catholic society in Birmingham as a successful, presumably Portuguese, medical doctor, while his sons could acquire an education at Stonyhurst, become prominent surgeons, and marry into the British gentry and aristocracy. It shall explore both the transnational practices and networks of Catholicism and investigate the extent to which Catholicism could facilitate migration and aid assimilation.

5. Religion and the “Simple Life”: Dugald Semple and Translocal “Life Reform” Networks [+–] 123-148

Steven J. Sutcliffe £17.50

University of Edinburgh

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Steven Sutcliffe, University of Edinburgh, is Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion at the University of Edinburgh. He specialises in the study of alternative religion in modernity and in the modern history of the study of religion/s. He is author of Children of the New Age: A History of Spiritual Practices (2003), co-editor (with Ingvild Sælid Gilhus) of New Age Spirituality: Rethinking Religion (2013) and co-editor (with Marion Bowman) of Beyond New Age: Exploring Alternative Spirituality (2000). He also edited Religion: Empirical Studies (2004) and is a co-editor for the Bloomsbury Advances in Religious Studies monograph series. His current research includes the archive of the Scottish conscientious objector and ‘simple life’ practitioner, Dugald Semple (1884-1964), and the social and cultural history of the Gurdjieff-Ouspenskii movement.

This chapter presents a case study of a Scottish exponent of the “simple life”, Dugald Semple (1884−1964), within early 20th-century networks of life reform or Lebensreform. It argues that the underlying thread in Semple’s “life reform” is a non-conformist, anti-clerical religious individualism which incorporated Transcendentalism with a Tolstoyan and Gandhian pacifism. A case study of Semple’s career in dialogue with his English and continental interlocutors demonstrates the value of empirically based transnational enquiry at the level of individuals and networks for understanding the varied inflections of “life reform”, particularly the religious roots of the phenomenon. It also contributes to the historiography of important currents in “alternative religion” which fed the post-world-war-two “new age”, “eco” and commune movements.

6. Re-discovering Buddha’s Land: The Transnational Formative Years of China’s Indology [+–] 149-168

Minyu Zhang £17.50

Beijing Foreign Studies University

Dr. Minyu Zhang is lecturer at the Department of Area Studies, School of Asian and African Studies, Beijing Foreign Studies University. He studied Indian language and literature at Peking University. He researches early modern north Indian literature, Indian religions, and China-India cultural contacts. He is a key investigator of “Translation and Study of Sursagar” (Ministry of Education Grant Project, PRC) and “Translation of Chinese-Indian Classic and Contemporary Works” (China-India Governmental Cooperation Project). His recent publications include: “Evolution of Indian Sahajayāna”, “The Defeat of Asuras in Surasagar”, “Myth and Identity: reflection on the neo-Buddhist movement in Maharashtra, India”.

Since its reopening up in the 1840s, China came again into contact with India, the former “Buddha’s land,” which was at that time a conquered frontier of new powers. In that particular historical context, knowledge about India not only entails purely intellectual interests, but entangles with questions about China’s cultural self-identity and political ideology. Modern Indology was brought into China as a part of Western studies, first indirectly via Japanese scholarship and later directly from the Europe-US Western world. The internalized Buddhist legacy and the work of diligent Buddhist intellectuals added Chinese indigenousness to this branch of Western studies. Early scholars’ encounters with Western oriental studies paved the way for Ji Xianlin, who later studied Indology in Göttingen and brought back the German academic tradition to China. Other future Indologists, including both laymen like Jin Kemu and Buddhists like Baihui, turned towards India, following the Chinese diaspora along the revived China-India trade route. For the leftists who were anxiously seeking solutions to end China’s miseries, however, India provided only bitter lessons about how a “backward oriental culture” can weaken a nation. Pragmatic concerns intervened in scholarly life when China had to rely on the Allies’ strategic supply provided via India during the later years of World War II. As a result, the government established a Hindi programme in the new National Institute of Oriental Languages, which was later incorporated into Peking University. Hindi scholars like Yan Shaoduan and Liu Anwu preferred secular writings, those of Premchand and Yashpal in particular, depicting a progressive India that invoked a non-religious common affinity between the two countries. Thus, in the formative years of China’s Indology, Chinese intellectuals developed their perspectives within three important transnational networks; the revived Buddhist ancestral China-India connection, the scholarly network around Western, particularly German orientalists, and the political network based on socialist and anti-imperialist ideology. The internalization of these streams resulted in a distinct appearance of China’s Indology and still influences China’s perception of India.

Part III: Religions on the Move

7. Charles Pfoundes and the Forgotten First Buddhist Mission to the West, London 1889-1892: Some Research Questions [+–] 171-192

Brian Bocking £17.50

University College Cork

Brian Bocking is Professor emeritus of the Study of Religions at University College Cork, Ireland and formerly Professor at SOAS, University of London. In recent years he has been researching the emergence of global Buddhism, collaborating with Alicia Turner (Toronto), Laurence Cox (Maynooth) and Yoshinaga Shin’ichi (Kyoto) on the study of two ‘forgotten’ Irish Buddhists; U Dhammaloka (?1856‒?1913) and Charles Pfoundes (1840‒1907).

The Irishman “Captain” Charles James William Pfoundes (b. Wexford, Ireland 1840, d. Kobe, Japan 1907) emigrated from Ireland in 1854 and joined the colonial navy in Australia. By the age of 23 he was a seasoned mariner with experience of captaining a Siamese naval vessel. He arrived to live in Japan in 1863 and quickly learned Japanese. Embarking on what would be a lifelong interest in Japanese customs and culture he became a well-known intermediary between Japanese and foreigners in the troubled period around the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and contributed to the new Japanese merchant shipping industry. In 1878 he returned to the UK, in the 1880s acquiring a reputation as a prolific speaker on Japan in London. In 1889 he launched, under the aegis of the newly-formed Kaigai Senkyō-Kai (Overseas Propagation Society) in Kyoto, a Buddhist mission in London called the Buddhist Propagation Society which operated until 1892. This forgotten but highly active Japanese-sponsored Buddhist mission to London, the cosmopolitan hub of the global British empire, predates by ten years the so-called “first” Buddhist missions to the West led by Japanese immigrants to California in 1899 and by almost two decades the “first” Buddhist mission to London of Ananda Metteyya (Allan Bennett) from Burma in 1908. Recent research into Pfoundes’s 1889 mission, including his confrontations with Theosophy and links to Spiritualism and progressive reform movements, offers new insights into the complex, lively and contested character of global religious connections in the late 19th century and particularly the early influence of Japan in the development of emerging “global” Buddhism(s). This chapter builds on existing published material to raise a number of issues surrounding Pfoundes’s Buddhist activities in London, with questions which may resonate for researchers dealing with other “transnational encounters” in the field of religion.

8. Travelling Through Interstitial Spaces: The Radical Spiritual Journeys of Pandita Mary Ramabai Saraswathi [+–] 193-217

Parinitha Shetty £17.50

University of Mangalore

Parinitha Shetty, Professor and Head of the Department of English, Mangalore University.
Areas of Research: Gender Studies, Missionary Studies. She has published a number of articles, among which “Missionary Pedagogy and the Christianisation of the Heathens: The Educational Institutions established by the Basel Mission in Mangalore”, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 45 (4), 2008:509-551 and “Medical Mission and the Interpretation of Pain.” In Cultural Ontology of the Self in Pain, eds. Siby K. George and P.G. Jung: 269-83. New Delhi: Springer, 2016.

An extraordinary woman of her times, Pandita Ramabai, lived in the latter half of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century. The exceptional circumstances of her life did not allow her to be rooted within any socio/religious space that existed in her world and denied her the certainties that come with such a sense of belonging. Her early life was nomadic as it was spent travelling across India and later to England and across America. This, in conjunction with the difficult circumstances of her life, forced her to inhabit radically disjunctive socio-cultural, experiential spaces, simultaneously. To be incessantly travelling is to be pushed into continually re-imagining and re-making the templates which naturalize and normalize the practices of embodied existence. It is to dwell in the interstices of the familiar and the yet-to-be-made familiar. It was from these liminal locations that Ramabai contoured a spiritual interiority centered on her personal emotional and spiritual needs, that would simultaneously shape and legitimize the radical material and institutional transformations she sought to bring about in her society. After the death of her husband she travelled to England where she converted to Christianity. Later she travelled across America. Existing at the cusp of histories, cultures and religions, not at ease within the institutionalized religions that she traversed, there emerged in her a radically alienated, critical seeing that shaped her attempts at creating an egalitarian and humane world for those she considered the most oppressed in her society. When she returned to India she established institutions and homes which broke denominational and caste mappings in an attempt to provide a livable community for those at the extreme margins of her society.

9. A “Christian Hindu Apostle”?: The Multiple Lives of Sadhu Sundar Singh (1889-1929?) [+–] 219-251

Philippe Bornet £17.50

University of Lausanne

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The chapter deals with Sadhu Sundar Singh and the way his life and experiences have been shaped by multiple influences, co-constructed by himself and his admirers, and made possible by a concept of sādhu that functioned as a key to unlock an “interstitial space” that was not controlled by any authority. In order to delineate the contours of that space it is necessary to go back to Sundar Singh’s early years in India, to re-contextualize his biographical trajectory in the framework of early 20th century revivalist (politico-)religious movements and to consider him in relation with initiatives to delink Christianity from its colonial background. Focusing then on his tour in Switzerland, 1922 – a tour out of which came an impressive number of publications that had a lasting effect – it is argued that the tour’s organizers were both projecting intentions on Sundar Singh, and overwhelmed with the actual performance and its effects. Furthermore, members of several religious movements were equally attending the meetings, producing various kinds of encounters: some leading to creative reconfigurations and some to open conflict. In sum, Sundar Singh is an excellent case study for a “connected religion” framework: since he made himself available for interpretations reflecting the different intentions of his interlocutors, the sources telling us about his biography are often written from very divergent standpoints – making a “connected religion” approach that brings the pieces of the puzzle together particularly appropriate.

10. The Chen Jianmin (1906-1987) Legacy: An “Always on the Move” Buddhist Practice [+–] 253-271

Fabienne Jagou £17.50

Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient

Fabienne Jagou (PhD Paris, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) is associate professor at the École française d’Extrême-Orient. She teaches at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon and at the Lyon Institute of Political Studies. She is author of Le 9e Panchen Lama (1883‒1937): Enjeu des relations sino-tibétaines (EFEO, 2004), published in English under the title The Ninth Panchen Lama (1883‒1937): A Life at the Crossroads of Sino-Tibetan Relations (Silkworm/EFEO, 2011), the editor of “Conception et circulation des textes tibétains”, Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 15 (2005), co-editor (with P. Calanca) of “Border officials”, Sinologie française, 12, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju (in Chinese, 2007) and editor of The Hybridity of Buddhism: Contemporary Encounters between Tibetan and Chinese Traditions in Taiwan and the Mainland (EFEO “Études thématiques”), 2018.

According to his website, Chen Jianmin followed thirty-seven masters before establishing his own school, called “Adi Buddha Mandala”. Chen Jianmin’s Buddhist life impressed a large range of people, from his co-disciples in the 1930s and 1940s to his today’s Taiwanese and American disciples. He first lived among Tibetans in Khams province before spending 25 years in Darjeeling meditating and producing hundreds of Buddhist booklets. He created new Buddhist symbols mixing Tibetan and Chinese traditions, and finally died in the United States. His remains are kept in Taiwan. The aim of this paper is to follow the life of Chen Jianmin and to analyze the way his created Buddhist legacy is practiced and understood among his followers, Taiwanese people mainly, who founded yet another Buddhist identity revealing a mechanism of religion that is “always on the move”.

PART IV: In Summary

11. Afterword [+–] 275-289

Maya Burger £17.50

University of Lausanne

Maya Burger, University of Lausanne, studied Anthropology, Indology and History of religions in Switzerland, India and United States. She is presently professor for Indian Studies at the Department of languages and civilizations of South Asia. Her field of specialization is pre-modern Hindi literature, history of yoga, history of the relations between Europe and India, as well as Indian religions. Recent publications include Religions in Play. Games, Rituals, and Virtual Worlds, Philippe Bornet, Maya Burger (ed.), Zürich : Pano Verlag, 2012. India in Translation through Hindi Literature. A Plurality of Voices, Maya Burger, Pozza Nicola (éd.), Worlds of South and Inner Asia, Berne : Peter Lang, 2010.

Response to previous chapters; commentary

End Matter

Index 291-301

Philippe Bornet FREE

University of Lausanne

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Reviews

This landmark collection of essays takes the reader on a journey into the connected history of religions in late modern Asia and Europe. With its focus on individual lives lived in local contexts and integrated into a larger global framework, the book adds a new and fascinating dimension to studies of religious transfers and adaptations.
Professor Karénina Kollmar-Paulenz, University of Bern

For opening up such a rich vista of histories of experience while fore-grounding religion, which surely is a key theme in late modern history, while placing these at the heart of connected approaches, the authors of this volume deserve congratulations. This is a volume that is worthy of wide reading by Asianists, global historians and scholars of religious studies and should be read from start to finish; the intertwining of cases generates an assembly which is telling for this age. This assembly gets to the contortions of this period with subtlety and nuance.
From the Foreword by Sujit Sivasundaram, Professor of World History and Fellow, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University

This book reminds us that the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries was a time of lively spiritual experimentation. Perhaps all periods are times of lively experimentation! Too many people in our contemporary world think that they’ve invented a new meditational technique, or hit upon a particular lacuna in someone’s religio-philosophical belief system, that has never been invented or filled before. In a certain sense, that’s possible, but I believe that mostly people take old wine skins and put new wine in them. These skins don’t last forever. Eventually new wine skins are fashioned, and that’s the wonderful thing about studying religion in the field of Religious Studies—there’s no end to innovation, as this book demonstrates.
Nova Religio

An evident strength of this edited collection is how challenging it is to capture its complexity, nuance, and substance in this short review. There is so much that points to further research and discussion. This volume is a fine contribution and insightfully highlights the impact a focus on translocal lives and “religious exchanges” (xv) can have on the study of religion(s).
Journal of Contemporary Religion

Offers insights into unexplored vistas of religious transfers between Asia and Europe in the late modern period.The rare photographs in the support of writing are what make it more significant for a student of history. Together, all ten stories seem to argue that interaction with micro settings is the key to unlocking the in-depth religious experience of a particular persona.
Reading Religion

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Books and Journals in Humanities, Social Science and Performing Arts

Translocal Lives and Religion

Connections between Asia and Europe in the Late Modern World

Philippe Bornet [+–]

University of Lausanne

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