Monsoon Asia as the Nexus for the Transfer of Tantra along the Maritime routes

Introduction

Tantra dominated the Hindu and Buddhist socio-religious landscape across much of southeastern Asia from ca. the 7th to the 13th century. Once perceived ambivalently by scholars, and often still misrepresented in global pop culture as a form of sexual practice, the study of Tantra has now become a burgeoning academic subfield.

Underappreciated Impact

However, the impact of Tantra on the religio-cultural history of Asia is still underappreciated. Disciplinary limitations, as well as the Area Studies paradigm, fragmenting Asia into discrete areas, hamper our global understanding of this translocal phenomenon.

Project Overview

Transcending these boundaries, the project will study Tantra from the perspective of cultural contact between different communities across the geo-environmental region referred to as ‘Monsoon Asia’. It will approach the phenomenon in a global manner and in terms of ‘connected histories’ rather than in isolation according to distinct regional contexts.

Methodology

Taking the ‘medieval’ as its chronological framework, the project will:

1. Investigate textual corpora in Sanskrit, vernacular, and non-Indo-Aryan languages that have seldom been studied in a comparative manner.
2. Complement the textual data with art historical evidence.

Focus Areas

In so doing, it will frame the emergence, transfer, and transformation of Tantra as a mobile and multi-centric network of people, languages, and objects that circulated across a vast interconnected region sharing common geo-environmental factors (e.g., the periodical monsoon winds).

Socio-Cultural Interactions

Besides uncovering the interactions between elite and non-elite socio-cultural milieus in the constitution of tantric traditions, the project will also transcend the asymmetrical framing of premodern cultural relations between South Asia and the remainder of the wider Indic world.

Shared Religious Heritage

It will highlight the shared religious heritage in a vast region that hosted the majority of the world population both historically and in the present, which has been artificially fragmented by national and global geopolitical configurations.