Tantra : sex, secrecy politics, and power in the study of religions / Hugh B. Urban.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Urban, Hugh B.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Tantrism.

Tantric Buddhism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (390 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, c2003.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Illustrations

Preface and Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction: Diagnosing the "Disease" of Tantra

1. The Golden Age of the Vedas and the Dark Age of Kàlí: 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

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 337-366) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9786612359613

9781417525533

9781282359611

1282359614

9781597349321

1597349321

9780520936898

0520936892

OCLC:

475929268