Guru English is a bold reconceptualization of the scope and meaning of cosmopolitanism, examining the language of South Asian religiosity as it has flourished both inside and outside of its original context for the past two hundred years. The book surveys a specific set of religious vocabularies from South Asia that, Aravamudan argues, launches a different kind of cosmopolitanism into global use. Using "Guru English" as a tagline for the globalizing idiom that has grown up around these religions, Aravamudan traces the diffusion and transformation of South Asian religious discourses as they shuttled between East and West through English-language use. The book demonstrates that cosmopolitanism is not just a secular Western "discourse that results from a disenchantment with religion, but something that can also be refashioned from South Asian religion when these materials are put into dialogue with contemporary social move-ments and literary texts. Aravamudan looks at "religious forms of neoclassicism, nationalism, Romanticism, postmodernism, and nuclear millenarianism, bringing together figures such as Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Mahatma Gandhi, and Deepak Chopra with Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce, Robert Oppenheimer, and Salman Rushdie. Guru English analyzes writers and gurus, literary texts and religious movements, and the political uses of religion alongside the literary expressions of religious teachers, showing the cosmopolitan interconnections between the Indian subcontinent, the British Empire, and the American New Age.

The essays in Imagining the East explore how Theosophists during the formative period imagined the religions and cultures of the East. The authors examine the relationship of such representations to orientalism, the history of ideas, politics, and culture at large and discuss how these esoteric or theosophical representations mirrored conditions and values current in nineteenth-century mainstream intellectual culture. The essays also look at how the early Theosophical Society's representations of the East differed from mainstream 'orientalism' and how the Theosophical Society's mission in India was distinct from that of British colonialism and Christian missionaries.

Sino-Tibetan Buddhism implies cross-cultural contacts and exchanges between China and Tibet. The ten case-studies collected in this book focus on the spread of Chinese Buddhism within a mainly Tibetan environment and the adaptation of Tibetan Buddhism among a Chinese-speaking audience throughout the ages.