Dr Soumen Mukherjee
Dr Soumen Mukherjee is an Assistant Professor in History at Presidency University, Kolkata. He studied history (BA Honours, Presidency College, 2002; MA, University of Calcutta, 2004), and earned his doctoral degree in the History of South Asia from the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg (2010).
His research interests and publications are in the fields of religious and intellectual history of modern South Asia. As Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge (coterminous with Smuts Visiting Research Fellowship, Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, Lent and Easter Terms 2025), Mukherjee plans to explore a substantial corpus of archival resources that will help him expand on key aspects of his existing research. While his recent monograph, titled Religion, Mysticism, and Transcultural Entanglements in Modern South Asia: Towards a Global Religious History (Palgrave Macmillan 2024), examines the location as well as approaches to the study of religion, spirituality, and mystical traditions in India vis-à-vis wider global flows since the early twentieth century, in the present project he proposes to significantly widen the horizon. Bringing together scholars, religious thinkers and mystics vis-à-vis an equally impressive community of scientists and philosophers, general cognoscenti and public intellectuals across the agora/ academy as well as disciplinary divides in the twentieth century, the project will explore the widening remits, conceptual repertoire, emerging vocabularies, and not least institutional props of contemporaneous intellectual, scholarly, religious, as well as popular discourse as they responded to larger historical exigencies since the interwar years, and especially against the backdrop of the ravages of the two World Wars. In interrogating an array of religious, mystical, and spiritual traditions in conversation with crucial developments in the scientific community, the project will explore the manifold responses to overarching issues confronting humanity, both within and outside the confines of the British Empire and the Commonwealth. Such challenges typically led to critical introspection about the plight of the ‘modern man’, and often stoked different visions of the future. Such visions would at times almost hint at transhuman possibilities, bringing into sharp relief burgeoning ideas of scientific and technological developments impacting the evolution of humanity and planetary future as well as religious, philosophical and spiritual ideas that frequently found expression through heightened organisational initiatives and institutional ventures. Pivotal to this phase of Mukherjee’s research will be a focus in particular on select thinkers, their intellectual lineages, and the nature and form of their conversations with a special reference to the melange of burgeoning ideas that they came to invoke. In other words, then, the project will draw upon select case studies and shed light on genealogies of the different streams of ideas that contributed to such entanglements, their subsequent evolution, and wider ramifications.
Select publications
Books/ Monographs:
- 2024. Religion, Mysticism, and Transcultural Entanglements in Modern South Asia: Towards a Global Religious History. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 978-3-031-49636-3 (Hardcover); 978-3-031-49637-0 (E-Book); https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49637-0 .
- 2017. Ismailism and Islam in Modern South Asia: Community and Identity in the Age of Religious Internationals. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9781107154087; https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316650479.
Edited Books/ Special Issue of Peer-Reviewed Journal:
- 2024. Empire, Religion, and Identity: Modern South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas. Brill. ISBN: 978-90-04-68515-4 (Hardback); 978-90-04-69433-0 (E-Book).
- 2018. Guest edited (with Christopher Harding and with a Foreword by J.N. Mohanty), Special Issue: ‘Mind, Soul and Consciousness: Religion, Science and Psy-Disciplines in Modern South Asia’, South Asian History and Culture, 9, 3 (2018). ISSN: 1947-2498.
[Reprinted as edited collection: 2019. London & New York: Routledge; ISBN 9780367218485].
Articles in Peer-Reviewed/ Refereed Journals:
- 2021. ‘The idea of Viśva Bhāratī: cosmopolitanism, transculturality and education in early twentieth century South Asia’, South Asian History and Culture, 12, 4: 436-444; https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2021.1981673. ISSN: 1947-2498 [Special Article].
- 2020. ‘Sufis, Yogīs, and genealogies of “Islamic yoga”: Broaching religio-cultural encounters in premodern eastern India’, Religion Compass 14, 8; https://doi.org/10.1111/rec3.12368. Online ISSN: 1749-8171.
- 2018. ‘Recovering wisdom of the “ancient rishis”: Girindrasekhar Bose, Indra Sen, and the psy-disciplines in modern India’, South Asian History and Culture, 9, 3: 296-322; https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2018.1488369. ISSN: 1947-2498.
- 2018. ‘Epilogue’, South Asian History and Culture, 9, 3: 364-371; https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2018.1488367. ISSN: 1947-2498.
- 2014. ‘Universalising Aspirations: Community and Social Service in the Ismaʻili Imagination in Twentieth-Century South Asia and East Africa’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Series 3, 24, 3: 435-453; doi:10.1017/S1356186314000315. ISSN: 1356-1863. [Reprinted in: 2015. Justin Jones and Ali Usman Qasmi (eds), The Shiʻa in Modern South Asia: Religion, History and Politics. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, pp. 105-130].
- 2011. ‘Being “Ismaili” and “Muslim”: Some Observations on the Politico-Religious Career of Aga Khan III’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 34, 2: 188-207; doi: 10.1080/00856401.2011.587507. ISSN: 0085-6401 print; 1479-0270 online.
- 2010. ‘Two Accounts of the Colonised “Other” in South Asia: Re-exploring Alterity’, South Asia Research, 30, 2: 165-184; doi: 10.1177/026272801003000204. ISSN: 0262-7280.
Book Chapters/ Papers in Conference Proceedings:
- 2024. ‘Religion, identity, and South Asia’s global entanglements since the fin de siècle: An introduction’ in Soumen Mukherjee (ed.), Empire, Religion, and Identity: Modern South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (Leiden & Boston: Brill), pp. 1-38. ISBN: 978-90-04-68515-4 (Hardback); 978-90-04-69433-0 (E-Book).
- 2023. ‘Towards the Genealogy of an Indic Sittlichkeit: Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan on Dharma and the Idea of Civil Religion’ in Kingshuk Chatterjee (ed.), Eurasia, India and the Spaces in Between: Essays in Memory of Hari Shankar Vasudevan (Delhi: Primus Books), pp. 243-281; ISBN 978-93-5687-868-6 (Hardback).
- 2020. ‘“Renaissance Man”-er sandhāne: Īśvarcandra Vidyāsāgar-Rāmjay Tarkabhuṣaṇ Samvād’ in Krishna Ray and Sumanta Mukhopadhyay (eds), Iśvar Pārābāre. Kolkata: Bethune College/ Sopān, pp. 28-32 [in Bengali]; ISBN: 978-81-948279-1-7.
- 2017. ‘Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s Jesus and the Rediscovery of “Lost Tribes”: Towards a Manifesto for Connected and Fantastic Histories’ in Kingshuk Chatterjee (ed.), Contours of Relationship: India and the Middle East. New Delhi, KW Publishers Pvt. Ltd./ University of Calcutta CPWAS/ IFPS, pp. 13-44. ISBN-13: 978-9386288615. [Reprint edition: 2019. London & New York: Routledge; ISBN 9780367344078].
- 2017. ‘Die internationalen Netzwerke des Aga Khan Development Network: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen eines muslimischen Kosmopolitismus’in Bernhard Gißibl & Isabella Löhr (Hg./ eds), Bessere Welten: Kosmopolitismus in den Geschichtswissenschaften. Frankfurt/ M & New York: Campus Verlag, pp. 343-372. [Trans. into German by Felix Kurz & Bernhard Gißibl]. ISBN 9783593506135.
- 2015. ‘Modular Projects: Socio-Religious Sensibilities and Political Imagination among the Daudi Bohras in Modern South Asia’ in Radu Carciumaru (ed.), Negotiating Conflict and Accommodating Identity in South Asia (in Heidelberg Papers in Comparative & South Asian Politics Series), New Delhi, Samskriti, pp. 167-201. ISBN: 978-81-87374-83-1. [Originally published as HPSACP Working Paper No. 45, 2009.]
Further links
https://www.presiuniv.ac.in/web/staff.php?staffid=157