Mind, Soul and Consciousness : Religion, Science and the Psy-Disciplines in Modern South Asia

This comprehensive volume explores histories and modern reworkings of the ideas of mind, soul and consciousness in South Asia.

It focuses on the burgeoning ‘psy-disciplines’ – psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy – and their links with religion, science, philosophy, and modern notions of the mystical and spiritual, not just in South Asia, but around the world. The authors explore the global flows of ideas that gathered pace during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including: the idea(s) of self within ‘Hindu modernities’; the history of relativity of consciousness in Jaina epistemology; Jungian critiques of Cartesian rationalism; Islamic reform vis-à-vis Sufi mysticism; and the re-examination and invocations of key strands of the fields of ‘Indian philosophy’ and the ‘psy-disciplines’ in modern India. Together these chapters stoke a critical engagement with existing conceptual boundaries and categories of mind, soul, consciousness, and body-mind relationship in modern Asian and European spiritual and intellectual traditions.

This book will interest scholars and students of cross-cultural philosophy, intellectual history, history of religion, religious studies, and history of the mind sciences. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal South Asian History and Culture.

Soumen Mukherjee teaches History at Presidency University, Kolkata, India. His research interests lie widely in the fields of socio-religious and intellectual history of modern South Asia. He has published in these fields and is the author of Ismailism and Islam in Modern South Asia: Community and Identity in the Age of Religious Internationals (2017).

Christopher Harding is Senior Lecturer in Asian History at the University of Edinburgh, UK. His published work includes Japan Story: In Search of a Nation (2018), Religion and Psychotherapy in Modern Japan (co-edited collection; 2014), and Religious Transformation in South Asia: The Meaning of Conversion in Colonial Punjab (2008).