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Aniket De The Boundary of Laughter: Popular Performances across Borders in South Asia Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 272 pages. Hardcover, 60.00 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 9780190131494. The Boundary of Laughter [...]

Kristin Hanssen, Women, Religion and the Body in South Asia: Living with Bengali Bauls London: Routledge, 2018. 214 pages. Hardcover, $146.00; eBook, $23.50. ISBN: 9781138561892 (hardcover); 9780203710234 (eBook). This book [...]

Frank Heidemann and Philipp Zehmisch, eds., Manifestations of History: Time, Space, and Community in the Andaman Islands Delhi: Primus Books, 2016. 187 pages. Cloth, $59.95. ISBN 9384092045. The cultural history [...]

Mariangela Giusti and Urmila Chakraborty, eds., Immagini, storie, parole: Dialoghi di formazione coi dipinti cantati delle donne Chitrakar del West Bengal [Images, stories, words: Formative dialogues through the painted scrolls [...]

As the verse chosen as a title for this article emblematically shows, esoteric movements have consistently used secrecy as a literary topos in their oral and written cultural expressions for a number of purposes. Scholars of South Asian religions, especially those in field of Tantric studies, have been scrutinizing for decades the need for secretive doctrines and a secret code-language (sandhyā bhāṣā), mostly interrogating textual sources and neglecting the contemporary experience and exegetical authority of living lineages. In this paper, I firstly address ethical and epistemological problems in the study of esoteric religious movements in order to propose innovative methodological strategies. Then, I offer numerous examples drawn from extensive field-work and in-depth literary study of contemporary esoteric lineages of West Bengal (India) and Bangladesh, in order to discuss the local discourse on secrecy. Finally, I review previously assumed notions on secrecy in South Asian religions, and I suggest to take into serious consideration local perspectives on the accessibility of esoteric knowledge, leading to a more nuanced idea of secrecy, constantly subjected to temporal and situational negotiations between silence and disclosure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]