Mantras in Religion, Media and Society in Global Southern Asia

Over 4 million people in Europe, including Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh minorities and Yoga practitioners, use mantras—sacred utterances, formulas, or syllables—for the purposes of ritual, prayer, contemplation and wellness. The term “mantra” itself has entered the vocabulary of most modern European languages. But how do mantras work? Where do they come from, and how did they spread around the globe? Despite their ubiquity and relevance, mantras have seldom been studied in their own right. This project will produce an unprecedented global history and anthropology of mantras, grounded in the PIs’ expertise on the very places and traditions where mantras originate–southern Asia, where mantras have been used in rites, meditation, worship, and healing for more than 3000 years. As mantras have been transmitted through diasporic networks, new religious movements, yoga and the internet, they have become central to religion and culture worldwide, while they also play a key role in traditional medicine and identity politics. Most scholarship to date has approached mantras through language and philology, privileging Sanskrit texts from elite contexts. Yet mantras have always been diverse, multimodal and multisensory, manifesting in manuscripts, on stones, in the voice through chanting, in the mind through meditation, and on the body through amulets, tattoos, and clothing. Bringing together leading scholars working across disciplines and cultural regions, this 6-year project will create sonic, visual and digital textual archives on the transcultural and multisensory lives of mantras, together with an exceptional array of academic deliverables and a museum exhibition. Raising awareness of mantras’significance from their origins in ancient South Asia to their modern ramifications in the global North, the MANTRAMS project will produce the first-ever scientific project entirely dedicated to understanding the relevance of mantras at a global scale.