The Quest for ‘medieval mysticism’ and Vaiṣṇava Vedānta: The Tagore-Sen-Underhill Circle, and the Chicago Moment of Mahanambrata Brahmachari

A distinctive characteristic of the nationalist project to recover perceived core values of an ‘Indian civilisation’—e.g., non-violence, diversity, and harmonious social order—frequently drew upon a burgeoning spate of scholarship on medieval religious literature in the vernacular, at times drawing upon a vast corpus of oral traditions. Their creative rereading of such literary traditions contributed to their rebuttal of Orientalist construction of Indian religions, and religiosity, as well as their different derivatives that posited the issue of religious identity in strictly binary terms. While appreciating the specificities of the colonial South Asian context, this chapter draws upon select case studies and situates this narrative in a larger transcultural canvas. In the process, we also appreciate how contemporaneous scholarship on mystical traditions reflects a wider interest in the antinomian promise latent in mysticism. Furthermore, the chapter illustrates how critical engagement with mysticism by religious practitioners and scholars—at times rolled into one—vis-à-vis and with reference to religious denominations (sampradāyas) held a promise to broach the realm of the universal in ways that many of our protagonists felt structured religious orders did not adequately appreciate. This then is a history of exploring the creative possibilities in the realm of mysticism, not just with regard to the promise of transcendence and individual spiritual quests but also in terms of its contemporaneous topicality.