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The Body–Mind Challenge: Theology and phenomenology in Bengal-Vaishnavisms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 July 2018

SUKANYA SARBADHIKARY
SUKANYA SARBADHIKARY*
Affiliation:
Presidency University Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Recent studies of Asian religious traditions have critiqued Western philosophical understandings of mind–body dualism and furthered the productive notion of mind–body continuum. Based on intensive fieldwork among two kinds of devotional groups of Bengal—claimants to an orthodox Vaishnavism, who focus on participating in the erotic sports of the Hindu deity-consort Radha-Krishna in imagination and a quasi-tantric group, which claims to physically apprehend Radha-Krishna's erotic pleasures through direct sexual experience—I demonstrate that, although these devotional groups stress on combating theologies, with emphases respectively on the ‘mind’ and the ‘body’, in their narrations of religious experiences, however, both groups allude to rarefied phenomenological states of cognition and embodiment. So, while influenced by ideas of (mental) ‘purity’ and (bodily) ‘actuality’, respectively, practices of both groups rely on similar states of mind–body continuum. So I argue that the mind–body complex has intensely nuanced articulations in the discursive and experiential domains of these non-Western religious contexts. Through my analyses of the texts and embodiments of these opposed devotional groups, I show that theology gets both organically entangled with as well as challenged by phenomenological experiences. I further argue that explorations in the tenor of religious studies sharply enrich the anthropology of religiosities. Also, such engagements between theology and anthropology have been relatively lacking and need more emphasis in studies of contemporary South Asian religions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 6 , November 2018 , pp. 2080 - 2108
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

*I thank Nirmalya Guha for teaching me some ways of understanding Indian philosophical thought; my students, for their discussions in the course on ‘Sociology of the Body’, which I teach at Presidency University; and faculty and students of CSSS, JNU, especially Harish Naraindas and V. Sujatha, for their comments during a presentation of an earlier draft of the article. I thank the three reviewers and editorial team of Modern Asian Studies for their most sincere comments and criticisms. Upal Chakrabarti has provided valuable insight about the organization of the arguments. Sandipan Mitra has helped in the final stages of editorial work. This article is an attempt at ‘thinking across traditions’, and I am grateful to Prathama Banerjee and Sudipta Kaviraj for their deliberations, and our engaging discussions about such prospects and philosophies.

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