Maria Moritz
Biography
Maria Moritz is a Ph.D.-candidate in the Intercultural Humanities - Program of Jacobs University, Bremen/Germany. Additionally, she is a member of the research group ‘Agents of Cultural Globalization around 1900’ which is funded by the German Research Foundation and based in Berlin. Before joining Jacobs University she completed her M.A. in Modern South Asian Studies and German Literature at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She has recently conducted extensive fieldwork in India and Sri Lanka and will finish her thesis by the end of next year.
Title of Paper
A South Asian cosmopolitan: Bhagavan Das and the critique of the Theosophical Society, (1913-1914)
Abstract
A key aim of The Theosophical Society was to found a ‘Universal Brotherhood of Humanity’ based on a cosmopolitan agenda which allowed everyone into its global network of branches ‘irrespective of race, class, creed or gender’.
Rather than focusing on the organisation as a unit of analysis, however, the paper offers the case study of an Indian affiliate thus empirically substantiates the perspective of an individual in a global network of belonging.
Though Bhagavan Das never left India he was a ‘Citizen of the World’. Due to his profound reflection of the global dimension, his membership in the transnational theosophical network and the indigenous globally oriented elite as well as his background in a traditional, regional form of global awareness, he developed a multifaceted transnational identity.
Starting from the concept of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ the paper examines how Das combined these entangled, interfering and conflicting cosmopolitan influences in his individual form of transnational identity on the theosophical platform and how he got into conflict with the Society’s universalizing aspirations.
By highlighting the dynamics of a specific cultural interaction this paper aims to contribute to an understanding of the global awareness of non-European social actors within an integrating world.