Tantra and the global religious history of the 19th and 20th century

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Michael Bergunder
• Subject Area: Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 279341174

This project aims to reconstruct the genealogy of a philosophical Tantra that distances itself from sexual practices, within the context of contemporary debates about the relationship between science and religion. This reconstruction will be carried out in the context of a global religious history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will focus on the British colonial judge, esotericist and Tantra scholar John Woodroffe (1865-1936). Although it has received little scholarly attention, Woodroffe's oeuvre was of decisive importance for the global reception of a philosophical Tantra, both in "esoteric" and academic contexts. An extensive analysis of Woodroffe's writings would seek to elaborate his understandings of Tantra, religion and science in the contexts of Indology/Religionswissenschaft, Advaitic Neo-Hinduism, esotericism and Bengali Reform-Tantra. Following on from this, theosophical discourses about Tantra in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, on which Woodroffe depended, would be discussed, in order to understand his ideas as a product of previous global exchanges. On this basis, the double reception of Woodroffe in science and esotericism from the first half of the twentieth century onward will be examined, with a special focus on the emerging works on the boundary between these discourses. Finally, these discourses about Tantra would be discussed in the context of a global history of religions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants