IngentaConnect The Extreme Orient: The Construction of `Tantrism' as a Category ...

Abstract:

Although it has now come to be accepted as a basic part of the vocabulary of historians of religions, the category of ‘Tantrism’, as a singular abstract, and clearly defined entity is largely a product of nineteenth-century Orientalist and colonial discourse. Very quickly, moreover, this category was identified as the most extreme form of that tendency toward passion, licentiousness and moral depravity which was thought to characterize the ‘Indian Mind’. Indeed, we might say that Tantrism came to embody the ‘extreme Orient’, the most Other, that which was most diametrically opposed to the rational and progressive mind of the West. This paper traces the genealogy of the category of ‘Tantrism’ within the British colonial imagination, as it was constructed, not only in Orientalist scholarship, but also in administrative writings and in popular Victorian novels. As we will see, the discourse about Tantrism and its sexual licentiousness was part of the much broader discourse about sexuality, which, as Michael Foucault and others have shown, pervaded late nineteenth and early twentieth-century British culture. Finally, this paper will then show the ways in which the Tantras came to be defended rationalized, and ‘sanitized’ by certain more sympathetic scholars of the twentieth century—above all in the work of John Woodroffe. It is largely through the dialectical tension between these two extremes—between the Victorian horror at Tantric licentiousness, and Woodroffe’s defense and de-odorization of Tantric philosophy—that this category came to be inherited by contemporary historians of religions. Copyright 1999 Academic Press

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The Extreme Orient: The Construction of ‘Tantrism’ as a Category in the Orientalist Imagination