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

Hugh B. Urban

University of California Press, Sep 14, 2003 - Religion - 388 pages

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.

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

User Review  - Nick Mather - Goodreads

Good examination of the history of Tantra as a category in the study of religion. Nicely written.

Contents

• Tantrism Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: 44
• Tantra and Political Violence in Colonial India: 73
• Tantra in the Literary Imagination: 106
• Sex Scandal Secrecy and Censorship in the Works of John Woodroffe and Swami Vivekananda: 134
• Tantra and the History of Religions in the Twentieth Century: 165
• Meldings of East and West in a New Age of Tantra: 203
• Reimagining Tantra in Contemporary Discourse: 264
• Notes: 283
• Bibliography: 337
• Index: 367

About the author

Hugh B. Urban is Assistant 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 Bengal (2001) and Songs of Ecstasy: Tantric and Devotional Songs from Colonial Bengal (2001).

Bibliographic information

• Title: Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion
• Author: Hugh B. Urban
• Publisher: University of California Press, 2003
• ISBN: 0520936892, 9780520936898
• Length: 388 pages
• Subjects: Religion / Comparative Religion