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

1. The Golden Age of the Vedasand the Dark Age of Kàlí: Tantrism, Orientalism, and the Bengal Renaissance

chapter 1 The Golden Age of the Vedas and the Dark Age of Kàlí Tantrism, Orientalism, and the Bengal Renaissance The Tantras [exert] great influence in later days. . . . The worship assumes wild, extravagant forms, generally obscene, sometimes bloody. It is divided into two schools—that of the right and that of the left. The former runs into mysticism and magic in complicated observances, and the latter into the most appalling licentiousness. . . . We cannot go further into detail. It is saddening to think that such abominations are committed; it is still more saddening that they are performed as part of divine worship. Conscience, however, is so far alive that these detestable rites are practiced only in secret. J. Murray Mitchell and Sir William Muir, Two Old Faiths (1891) Now look at the trickery of these stupid popes that whatever is considered to be highly sinful and opposed to the Veda is regarded as virtuous. . . . The use of meat, wine . . . and copulation are considered as means of attaining salvation. Swàmí Dayànanda Saraswatí, The Light of Truth (1927) The origins of “Tantra” or “Tantrism” as a scholarly category are ultimately inseparable from the unique historical encounter between Western and Indian imaginations that took place during the colonial era. Tantra as we know it is to a large degree a complex creation of what Mary Louise Pratt calls the “contact zone,” that is, “the space of colonial encounters . . . in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other . . . involving conditions of coercion, 44 radical inequality and conflict.”1 To reiterate, however: this is surely not to say that Tantra is simply a colonialist fabrication or Orientalist projection onto the colonized Other. Rather, it is to say that the colonial era witnessed a clear “trend toward conceiving of a new entity called Tantrism as a specific modality of Indian religious experience,”2 as the diverse body of texts known as àgamas, nigamas, saFhitàs, tantras, and so on, and the vast body of traditions known as Kàpàlika, Pàñcaràtra, Kula, Krama, Tàkta, Trívidyà, and others, were gradually assimilated into a singular universal entity. In this chapter I will examine the earliest discussions of Tantrism as a distinct entity, which appear in European missionary works, Orientalist scholarship, and the early Indian reform movements such as the Bràhmo Samàj and the Ärya Samàj. What we find here is a fairly consistent dichotomy between different conceptions of “Hinduism” and the “Indian mind”: at one extreme, the ideal of an ancient, pure, and uncorrupted Golden Age, identified with the Vedas and Upaniãads, and on the other extreme, the nightmare of a modern, perverse, and degenerate era, embodied in the licentious idolatry of the tantras.3 Discourse about Tantra, as we will see, was thus bound up with the construction of Western cultural identity, and above all with the problem of sexuality and sexual deviance in modern Europe. As early as the romantic era, the “mystic Orient” has been imagined as the exotic world of forbidden sexuality and dark sensuality, in both its most positive and negative forms.4 However, this fetishization of the sexual, exotic Orient was only continued and intensified during the Victorian era in England. As Foucault has argued, nineteenth-century British men and women were by no means simply the repressed prudes we often imagine them to be; on the contrary, they were in many cases quite fascinated with sexuality , which they discussed in endless detail. Above all, this era witnessed a special fascination with sexuality in its most “deviant,” antisocial forms: homosexuality, transvestism, nymphomania, and all manner of newly discovered psychosexual pathologies. The European fascination with Tantra , I will argue, was very much a part of this larger preoccupation with sexuality and its aberrations in the Western imagination. And just as the broader European discourse about sex, as Foucault has shown, was inseparable from larger issues of “biopolitics,” population control, and national health, so the discourse about Tantra would become enmeshed in larger biopolitical issues of governance in Europe’s colonies.5 But at the same time, the discourse surrounding Tantra would also became a key part of the conceptualization of India and “Hinduism.” The Golden Age of the Vedas 45 When deployed by Indian elites and the leaders of the Bengal Renaissance , Tantra would also serve as a critical element in the...