Monsoon Asia as the Nexus for the Transfer of Tantra along the Maritime routes

Tantra dominated the Hindu and Buddhist socio-religious landscape across much of southeastern Asia from ca. the 7th to the 13th century.

Once perceived ambivalently by scholars, and often still misrepresented in global pop culture as a form of sexual practice, the study of Tantra has now become a burgeoning academic subfield.

However, the impact of Tantra on the religio-cultural history of Asia is still underappreciated, and disciplinary limitations as well as the Area Studies paradigm, fragmenting Asia into discrete areas, hamper our global understanding of this translocal phenomenon.

Transcending these boundaries, the project will study Tantra from the perspective of cultural contact between different communities across the geo-environmental region referred to as Monsoon Asia, approaching the phenomenon in a global manner and in terms of connected histories rather than in isolation according to distinct regional contexts.

Taking the medieval as its chronological framework, it will investigate textual corpora in Sanskrit, vernacular, and non-Indo-Aryan languages that have seldom been studied in a comparative manner, and complement the textual data with art historical evidence.

In so doing, it will frame the emergence, transfer, and transformation of Tantra as a mobile and multi-centric network of people, languages, and objects that circulated across a vast interconnected region sharing common geo-environmental factors (e.g., the periodical monsoon winds).

Besides uncovering the interactions between elite and nonelite socio-cultural milieus in the constitution of tantric traditions, it will also transcend the asymmetrical framing of premodern cultural relations between South Asia and the remainder of the wider Indic world, and highlight the shared religious heritage in a vast region that hosted the majority of the world population both historically and in the present, which has been artificially fragmented by national and global geopolitical configurations.