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

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 sex tremely 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 fulfillment, at once native and other, that strikes at the very heart of our constructions of the exotic Orient and the contemporary West.

Hugh B. URBAN is Associate Professor of Religion and Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of The Economics of Ecstasy: Tantra, secrecy, and power in Colonial Begal (2001) and songs of ecstasy; Tantric and devotional songs, form colonial Bengal (2001).