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

2. Sacrificing White Goats to the Goddess: Tantra and Political Violence in Colonial India

chapter 2 Sacrificing White Goats to the Goddess Tantra and Political Violence in Colonial India Secrecy goes with savagery. Sir George MacMunn, The Religions and Hidden Cults of India (1932) Rise up, O sons of India, arm yourselves with bombs, dispatch the white Asuras to Yama’s abode. Invoke the Mother Kali. . . . The Mother asks for sacrificial offerings. What does the Mother want? . . . A fowl or sheep or buffalo? No. She wants many white Asuras. The Mother is thirsting after the blood of the Feringhees. . . . [C]hant this verse while slaying the Feringhee white goat: with the close of a long era, the Feringhee Empire draws to an end, for behold! Kali rises in the East. Jugantar, Bengali newspaper (1905) Imagined as the most radical, dangerous, and transgressive of spiritual paths, in explicit violation of accepted ethical boundaries, Tantra was soon to be associated in both the Western and Indian imaginations with the possibility of political violence. If Orientalist authors began to shift from “Indophilia” to a more critical “Indophobia” in the years after 1833, this suspicious attitude was even more pronounced in the years following 1857, during the “crisis of the raj” in the wake of the Indian Mutiny. And it reached its peak in the tumultuous years of the early twentieth century, in the face of a growing, often violent nationalist movement whose struggle for independence was sometimes bloody.1 Throughout the late nineteenth century, Tantra was increasingly iden73 tified with the most dangerous subversive movements, such as the criminal Thuggee and the political extremists of the nationalist movement. “Tantrism acquired a new political dimension as British fears about civil unrest and mutiny were excited and linked to the supposed degeneracy of the natives.”2 However, to use Taussig’s terms, we might say that the colonial paranoia about Tantric savagery was as much a projection of the “barbarity of their own social relations” as it was a reflection of any actual Indian reality: “The magic of mimesis lies in the transformation wrought on reality by rendering its image. . . . In the colonial mode of production of reality . . . such mimesis occurs by a colonial mirroring of otherness that reflects back on the colonists the barbarity of their own social relations, but as imputed to the savagery they yearn to colonize.”3 For Indian authors of the nineteenth century, conversely, the attitude toward the radical practices of Tantra was more complex and ambivalent . For the reformers and the more conservative members of the nationalist movement, Tantra was typically seen as a terrible embarrassment , a major reason for India’s backwardness and lack of political power, one of the things most in need of eradication on the road to selfgovernance . Yet, remarkably, for the more radical, extremist wing of the nationalist movement, Tantric forms and symbols could also be used positively , as a source of revolutionary inspiration. Many Indian authors, such as the young Aurobindo Ghose, would appropriate and exploit the terrifying image of Tantra, and particularly the violent goddess Kàlí, as the most powerful embodiment of their political cause. As a powerful dialectical category, Tantra could not only be employed by colonial authors as proof of Indian backwardness, barbarism, and savagery; it could also be turned around and redeployed as the symbol of India in violent revolt against her colonial masters. In this chapter, I will explore, first, the paranoid fears of Tantric secrecy and violence that emerged in the colonial imagination, as we see in British descriptions of the goddess Kàlí and the criminal gangs of the Thuggee. I will then examine the ways in which some Indian authors in turn appropriated the images of Kàlí and Tantra as revolutionary weapons, exploiting their terrifying power in the colonial imagination. As we will see in the case of complex figures like Aurobindo, the Goddess could symbolize both Mother India, in violent rebellion against her colonial oppressors, and the Divine Mother, seeking some kind of harmony with the West in an age of postcolonial compromise. 74 Sacrificing White Goats to the Goddess the pathos of the underworld: tantra, crime, and dissent It is just this presence of some ancient horror, existing beneath the surface of perfectly reasonable political aspirations , which has been a source of trouble to many a kind Viceroy desiring only India’s good. Sir George MacMunn, The Underworld of India (1933) Based in large part on the...