“We see,” David Shulman writes:

reflections almost everywhere we look in South Asia, in all artistic media and, perhaps above all, in ritual forms … One level — verbal, rhythmic, sonar, or semantic — may be superimposed, with varying degrees of completeness and precision, on another. In effect, two relatively independent relational systems may thus coincide … Correspondence and coincidence of this sort [stem from] the impulse to reconnect and recompose.⁴¹

Shulman is an American who teaches in Jerusalem, one of those many astonishingly knowledgeable non-Indian Indologists through whom I’ve learned much about my tradition. The global engine of academia is — for the moment — dominated by Western money and scholars, and Indians can get very prickly about being once more subjected to powerful foreign gazes. Tempers have flared over interpretations of Indian history, religion, and metaphysics. But vigorous debate has always been the preferred Indian mode of discovery, and perhaps these arguments too are a kind of mirroring, a reconnection. The world is a web, a net, as is each human being nested within the world, holding other worlds within.

Shulman writes that in India, reiterations and ring compositions

speak to a notion of reality, in varying intensities and degrees of integrity, as resonance, reflection, or modular repetition understood as eruption or manifestation (āvirbhāva) from a deeper reservoir of existence, a restless domain driven by the undying urge to speak (vivakṣā).⁴²

Language itself wants to speak. In speaking, there is pleasure, and by speaking, knowledge is created, and thus the world we know. “Language cuts forms in the ocean of reality,” the Rig Veda tells us.⁴³ This is why grammar—vyakarana—is the science of sciences.

At the beginning of Red Earth and Pouring Rain, a young man picks up a rifle and shoots a monkey. The monkey lives, and when he regains consciousness he finds a typewriter and begins typing. He reveals that in a past life he was a poet who abandoned poetry for revolution. Now he tells — or types — the story of this long-ago life.

The monkey will live as long as his audience finds pleasure in his stories. He transforms memory into story, and gives delight so that he may live.

Abhinavagupta tells us that his teacher said, “Rasa is delight; delight is the drama; and the drama is the Veda,” the goal of wisdom.⁴⁴

8 MYTHOLOGIES AND HISTORIES

The privileging of pleasure as a mode of knowledge has an ancient pedigree in India, particularly within the many streams of Tantra. “Tantra” derives from the root tan, to expand or stretch, and literally means “extension” or “warp on a loom.” At its simplest, the word can just mean “handbook” or “guide,” and so not all texts with “Tantra” in the title are Tantric — the Panchatantra is a collection of animal fables. There is no one practice or ideology or cosmology that we can identify as “Tantric”—there are monist Tantrics and there are dualist Tantrics. There is Hindu Tantrism, Buddhist Tantrism, even Jain Tantrism. So what is Tantrism? Attempts at definition have resulted in expanding lists of typical characteristics; one scholar notes six identifiers, another eighteen. At the very minimum, one would note that Tantric lineages, transmitted through gurus, use ritual practices, bodily disciplines, and social norms that deviate from Vedic orthodoxy, all in the service of ultimate spiritual liberation and worldly attainment. And, as Sanjukta Gupta puts it, “Tantric sādhāna (practise, discipline) is a purely individual way to release accessible to all people, women as well as men (at least in theory), householders as well as ascetics.”¹

Most scholars would date the rise of Tantric systems to the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era.² There is much evidence of the commingling of elements taken from Vedic philosophies and desi rural or tribal traditions. Hugh B. Urban says about the Tantra centred on the shakta-pitha or “Seat of Shakti” at the Kamakhya temple:

The Assamese tradition is by no means a simple veneer of Hinduism slapped onto a deeper tribal substratum. Instead, it is the result of a far more complex negotiation between the many indigenous traditions of the northeast and the Sanskritic, brahmanic traditions coming from north India that resulted in what is among the oldest and most powerful forms of Tantra in South Asia.³

The eponymous Shakti worshipped at Kamakhya is the Renowned Goddess of Desire. Inside the temple, “Kamakhya is represented not by any human image, but by a sheet of stone that slopes downwards from both sides, meeting in a yoni-like depression.”⁴ The yoni is the vulva; the goddess is believed to menstruate three days a year, during which time the temple is closed. “On the fourth day after her menstruation, the temple doors are reopened, and red pieces of cloth representing the bloody menstrual flow are distributed to the thousands of pilgrims who thereby receive the power and grace of the goddess.”⁵ A majority of these pilgrims are women.

It would be a mistake to reduce this worship of Shakti to only an acknowledgment of biological reproductive power, or of genital sexuality. Urban very correctly argues that

the Indian concept of kama contains a vast range of meanings that include, but far exceed, the level of sexual desire that has so long preoccupied modern observers. So too, the concept of shakti contains yet far transcends mere political power, also embracing the vital energy that pervades the cosmos, social order, and human body alike.⁶

In the Tantras, descriptions of sexual practices comprise a tiny fraction of the whole, which usually includes wide-ranging discussions of rituals, metaphysical speculations, and enumerations of deities and the powers they represent; people who have been told that Tantra is “exotic sex” are usually bored witless when they actually try to read one of these texts. Medieval Indians wouldn’t have found the sex, qua sex, especially titillating; kama was one of the legitimate aims of life, and sex within the constraints of dharma or ethical conduct was often depicted quite frankly. For instance, the Girvanavanmanjari, a seventeenth-century “Easy Sanskrit” primer, is set up as a dialogue between a husband and a wife, which swiftly turns into a teasing erotic game in which each partner accuses the other of being too bashful; the book ends “in the climax of śṛńgāra, with the happy union of the Brāhmana householder and his wife.”⁷

The deviance of the Tantric systems has more to do with their cosmology and their soteriology. Many of the Tantric lineages are shakta—they worship the goddess as the ultimate reality — and many of them regard kama not as something to be avoided or discarded on the road to salvation, but as an essential motive force in the human quest for the ultimate reality. So, in these systems, pleasure is good — the joys of the body and mind are not distractions or illusions. According to the Kularnava Tantra,

[In other systems] the yogi cannot be a bhogi [enjoyer, epicure], and a bhogi cannot be a knower of Yoga. However, O Beloved [Goddess], [the path of the] Kaula [lineage], which is superior to all other systems, is of the essence of bhoga [enjoyment] and yoga. O Mistress of the kula [family]! In the kula teaching, bhoga becomes yoga, and the world becomes a state of liberation.⁸