The Bengali Intervention

Abstract

Chapter 1 departs from the global exchanges that manifest in the Theosophist debate, circling closer and closer to the regional and local contexts connected to it, before finally contextualizing the emergence of Arthur Avalon against that background. The “Bengali intervention” will allow for introducing three of the main strands that meet in the nodal point of the Theosophist exchange: the emergence of the Theosophical Society and its relocation to India, the regional background of Bengali Tantra, and an outlook on the Avalon project and its implication for Indological and South Asianist scholarship until today.