From Interwar Idealism Through ‘Perennial Philosophy’: Concluding Reflections

This concluding chapter will help readers better connect the core issues of the present book to not only the larger context of modern Indian intellectual life with a particular focus on their subsequent ramifications but also the global religio-cultural processes of the twentieth century. Select ‘Eastern’ traditions thus came to be reappraised in the ‘West’ and were occasionally invoked alongside Christianity, in general, or at times with specific strands of esoteric or mystical ideas in academic and broader intellectual discourse in their endeavour to resolve socio-political issues of the time. A delicate balance between ideas of religious diversity and universality became a hallmark of many of these projects. Working both within East/West dichotomy as well as outside of it, many South Asians frequently emerged as key interlocutors in such ventures and fostered, in the process, vibrant transregional and global networks. While the intellectual outcomes of such experiments included, for instance, a quest to retrieve a ‘perennial philosophy’ à la Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), for instance, the more discursive side of the process foregrounds the reinvigorated efforts to develop a variety of templates of a religious and/or spiritual order that our protagonists thought to be relevant for and responsive to contemporaneous social and political exigencies. In the process, one notes, the emergence of a cluster of ideas about a transformative self and collective, with promise of an alternative future for humanity, against the backdrop as well as part of widening global religio-intellectual flows.