Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion

3. India’s Darkest Heart: Tantra in the Literary Imagination

chapter 3 India’s Darkest Heart Tantra in the Literary Imagination The follower of the Tantric cult professes no austerities. He seeks to kill desire by an unlimited indulgence which brings satiety and extinction of emotion. The indulgence is enjoined by his so-called religion; and his depravity is commended as a great virtue. F. E. F. Penny, The Swami’s Curse (1929) Flee even now—don’t you know that the tàntrika’s worship consists of human flesh? Bankimcandra Caååopàdhyày, KapàlakuJjalà (1866) Much of our richest and most colorful material for the imagining of Tantra comes not from scholarly sources, but from the realm of drama and the novel. In both India and Europe, the morbid, sexual tales of Tantra quickly sparked the imaginations of many creative authors, serving as the vehicle for the expression of intense fears, fantasies, and repressed desires. In a wide array of Victorian British and Indian fiction, we find virtually all the themes discussed so far in this book, brought together in the most vivid and entertaining way: the fears of social degeneracy, the threat of sexual pollution, the paranoia of criminal or subversive activity . Yet the novelists not only adapted these images of Tantra from Orientalist literature; they also contributed a new imaginary layer of their own—an often hyperexaggerated layer of fantasy—that in turn fed back into the Orientalist imagination even as it disseminated the image of Tantra to a popular audience. As Pratt argues in her analysis of colonial travel narratives, “The fruits of empire . . . were pervasive in shaping 106 European domestic society, culture and history”; yet at the same time, “Europe’s constructions of subordinated others [were] shaped by those others, by the constructions of themselves . . . that they presented to the Europeans.”1 What we find in these novels is a complex feedback loop between “serious” scholarship and popular culture, between the “hard facts” of Orientalist research and the vivid play of literary creations. And it is also a dynamic interplay between Indian and English narrative imaginations. This sort of fictional portrayal of Tantra is not, of course, entirely a byproduct of the colonial era. As we have already seen in examples like BàJabhaååa’s Kàdambarí (see the introduction), many early Sanskrit works do contain colorful, often quite funny, descriptions of various yogis and ascetics who later came to be identified as tàntrikas. The most notorious of these are the Kàpàlikas, or skull-bearers—wandering ascetics who take a vow to imitate Lord Tiva in his terrible form of Bhairava, as he travels the earth smeared in ashes and carrying a skull for a begging bowl. Feared for their awesome occult powers, the Kàpàlikas were also ridiculed for their alleged practice of the most transgressive rituals , such as intercourse with lower-class women and offerings of human sacrifice. Although they seemed to have disappeared by the thirteenth century, the Kàpàlikas survived as buffoons and favorite targets of satire in Sanskrit fiction. We have already encountered the drunken Kàpàlika Satyasoma , the main character in Mahendra-varman’s comic farce (see the introduction). For Satyasoma, enjoyment of wine and women is the surest road to divine bliss: “The infinite incomparable bliss that wise sages first discovered, is now as close as one could wish, for we have added a special measure. No need to abandon the life of a lover. This bliss includes all sensual pleasure.”2 Indeed, consumption of alcohol becomes for Satyasoma the true elixir of Soma that is consumed at the highest sacrificial rite: “This liquor shop equals the majesty of the sacrificial enclosure . Here the flag pole equals the sacrificial post; the liquor cup equals the soma; the drinkers the priests. . . . The thirst of the drinker is the sacrificial fire.”3 Later in the eleventh century, KKãJamiMra includes an amusing satire of a Kàpàlika in his drama Prabodhacandrodaya. Inhabiting cremation grounds, drinking wine from skulls, and offering human sacrifices, the Kàpàlika is portrayed here as the epitome of all impurity and transgression . Amid a theological argument between a Buddhist mendicant and India’s Darkest Heart 107 a Jain monk, the Kàpàlika appears and describes himself in rather aweinspiring terms: an inhabitant of cremation grounds and a lover of human flesh, he sees nothing...