Utopias from Asia

On the 16th and 17th November 2011, the Institute of Indology of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, in collaboration with the ASIATICUM ‒ Association for the Promotion of Studies East and West, and the Visva Bharati University, organised an international and interdisciplinary symposium on “Utopias from Asia” in Santiniketan, India, on the occasion of the 150th birthday anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore. This congress was the third in a series of symposia and workshops which are financed according to the wishes of the Japanese entrepeneur Momoyo Okura, a committed sponsor of international cultural events in humanities, who died in 2008. The present volume contains the papers read on that occasion, supplemented by the papers of the German-Asiatic workshop on “Myths from Asia” in Mainz on the 20th and 21st February 2012, the fourth symposium in memoriam of Momoyo Okura. The papers combine disciplines as different as Japanology and History of Japanese Art, Indology, South Asian Anthropology, Vedic and Iranistic Studies, Chinese Studies, Buddhology, Modern Bengali and Urdu Literature, Sinhalese Studies, Tibetology, Film Studies, and Political Studies.