Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion
Hugh B. Urban
Language: English
Pages: 396
ISBN: B007FRK87G
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A complex body of religious practices that spread throughout the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions; a form of spirituality that seemingly combines sexuality, sensual pleasure, and the full range of physical experience with the religious life—Tantra has held a central yet conflicted role within the Western imagination ever since the first "discovery" of Indian religions by European scholars. Always radical, always extremely Other, Tantra has proven a key factor in the imagining of India. This book offers a critical account of how the phenomenon has come to be.
Tracing the complex genealogy of Tantra as a category within the history of religions, Hugh B. Urban reveals how it has been formed through the interplay of popular and scholarly imaginations. Tantra emerges as a product of mirroring and misrepresentation at work between East and West--a dialectical category born out of the ongoing play between Western and Indian minds. Combining historical detail, textual analysis, popular cultural phenomena, and critical theory, this book shows Tantra as a shifting amalgam of fantasies, fears, and wish-fulfillment, at once native and Other, that strikes at the very heart of our constructions of the exotic Orient and the contemporary West.
The Emergency: A Personal History
Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal
Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal
Impact of Tantra as manifest in the Tantrik Order in America, the “sex magick” of Aleister Crowley, the cult of Osho-Rajneesh, and the growing the search for Tantric ecstasy online, in the strange new world of cyber space. We might even say that the contemporary appropriation of Tantra—with its fusion of spirituality and materialism, sacred transcendence and this-worldly profit—has in many ways become the ideal religion of late-twentieth-century Western consumer culture, or perhaps even the.
Modern men could not but seek to get rid of the filth, superstition and corruption revealed by the searchlight of Christ. . . . There has been a serious attempt, on the part of the orthodox, to destroy, drive underground or deny the worst features of Left-hand Śāktism . . . and unclean superstition. J. N. Farquhar, Modern Religious Movements in India (1915) In the first era of the dissemination of English culture . . . Bengal resounded with opprobrious criticisms of the Tantras. No one among.
Practices among the natives under their rule. As we see in the cases of the Mau Mau in Kenya or in various native uprisings in South America, political rebellion was often believed to be associated with immorality, sexual transgression, and the violation of social taboos. The rebellious colonial subject threatened not only to subvert colonial rule, but to unravel the moral fabric of society itself. As Nicholas Thomas observes, “Colonial rule was haunted by a sense of insecurity,” terrified by the.
East and West, I hear the cry of the whole world hastening with the praise on its tongue to this country, the ancient Mother of the Vedas . . . firmly established in the Aryan country. Abide forever gracious in this land, O mighty One.81 Nothing now can satisfy this terrible Mother but the spilling of blood. The rage of Mother India in her violent form has been unleashed, and it cannot be pacified until it tastes the severed heads of her oppressors. As the radical newspaper Jugantar exhorts.
Post-colonialism. First, it tends to oversimplify the colonial situation, portraying it as a simple Manichean binarism of colonizer and colonized, imperial oppressor and native victim.44 By overemphasizing the radical impact of Western power on the rest of the world, much postcolonial discourse, dividing global history into pre- and postimperial epochs, risks lapsing into a more subtle form of imperialism, viewing all human history from the standpoint of European expansion and the progress of.