Tantra : Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion
Contents: Preface and acknowledgments. Introduction: diagnosing the "Disease" of Tantra. 1. The Golden age of the Vedas and the dark age of Kali: Tantrism, orientalism, and the Bengal renaissance. 2. Sacrificing white goats to the Goddess: Tantra and political violence in colonial India. 3. India's darkest heart: Tantra in the literary imagination. 4. Deodorized Tantra: sex, scandal, secrecy, and censorship in the works of John Woodroffe and Swami Vivekananda. 5. Religion for the age of darkness: Tantra and the history of religions in the twentieth century. 6. The cult of ecstasy: meldings of east and west in a new age of Tantra. Conclusion: reimagining Tantra in contemporary discourse. Notes. Bibliography. Index.
"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 played a central yet conflicted role in the western imagination ever since the first "discovery" of Indian religions by European scholars. Always radical, always extremely other, Tantra has proved to be a key factor in the imagining of India. This book offers a critical account of how the phenomenon came 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 of the ongoing play between western and Indian minds. Embracing historical detail, textual analysis, popular cultural phenomena, and critical theory, this book shows Tantra as a shifting amalgam of fantasies, fears, and wish fulfilment, at once native and other, that strikes at the very heart of our constructions of the exotic orient and the contemporary west."
