✍ Scribed by Hugh B. Urban
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Orientalist scholarship was progressively constructed as the quintessential 'Other' of the West. Conceived as an essentially passionate, irrational, effeminate world, a land of 'disorderly imagination', India was set in opposition to the progressive, rational, masculine and scientific world of modern Europe. 3 And 'Tantrism', it would seem, was quickly singled out as the darkest, most irrational core of this Indian mind-as the extreme Orient, the most Other. For if Orientalist scholars had identified the Golden Age of India with the Vedas or Upanisads, they also identified its darkest, more perverse age with the tantras-'superstition of the worst and most silly kind', as Sir Monier Williams put it). 4 And yet, although universally condemned as primitive immoral and degenerate, Tantrism also occupied a place of mixed fascination and repulsion in the British imagination, as the topic of enormous popular and scholarly discourse. Following the lead of Michel Foucault, I would suggest that this fascination with the licentious practices of Tantrism was part of the broader discourse about sexuality in nineteenthcentury England. By no means simply the repressed world of puritanical prudes we commonly imagine it to be, Victorian culture, Foucault suggests, was pervaded by a deeper fascination with and an unprecedented proliferation of discourse on sexuality: 'What is peculiar to modern societies . . . is not that they consigned sex to a shadowy existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, exploiting it as the secret'. 5 Nowhere is this paradox more apparent than in the discourse on Tantrism-an object of simultaneous horror and obsession in the Western imagination. 6 In the first half of this century, however, the category of Tantrism underwent a sudden new rehabilitation and revalorization. No longer simply dismissed as a degenerate form of popular Hinduism, the Tantras now came to be appreciated for their deeper philosophical content, as a tradition in equal complexity to the Upanis *ads, Veda ¯nta and other classical systems. The single most important figure in the rehabilitation of the Tantras was Sir John Woodroffe, alias 'Arthur Avalon'-a man who stands out as among the most baffling figures in the history of British India. In his exoteric public life, Woodroffe served as a judge on the court of Calcutta, well respected as an authority on Indian law. Yet in his esoteric inner life as Arthur Avalon, he was also one of the most influential-and even today the most widely read-scholars of the Tantras that the world has ever known. Although he was himself reluctant to use the term 'Tantrism', preferring instead 'S ua ¯ktism' or 'Tantras ´a ¯stra', it was Woodroffe more than anyone else who helped to popularize this as a category in the Western mind. 7 In the process, however, he also appears to have gone to remarkable lengths to downplay or rationalize the more offensive elements of this tradition. In order to be acceptable to Western scholarship, it would seem, Tantrism first had to be significantly sanitized, domesticated and 'deodorized '. In what follows, I will briefly trace the genealogy of this category within the Orientalist imagination in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. My aim here is not simply to produce yet another Foucaultian deconstruction of a familiar scholarly category-an exercise which has become all too easy in recent years; rather, I hope to trace the rather convoluted history of a complex and often grossly abused term, and thereby help us to re-imagine this in a more productive way in contemporary discourse. One need only peruse the shelves of any New Age book store (where we may now find our own Tantric Paths to Ecstasy), or scan the web sites of the internet (where we now may attend the 'Chuch of Tantra' on line), to see that this is very much still a living category in the Western imagination, and one in serious need of careful examination and definition.
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