Tantric South Asia Politics Aesthetics Religion

The cultures of South Asia are among the most fetishized in the Western world, and few Indian concepts lend themselves to fetishization better than tantra. In popular culture, tantra is associated not only with images of transgressive sexuality, but also antinomian violence and a glamorization of death. When Western scholars in colonial India discovered tantra, they were horrified to find ritual manuals detailing how one may consume the flesh of corpses, channel the goddesses of the cremation ground, and recite spells to butcher one's enemies. This course begins with a critique of colonial misconceptions and then proceeds to examine tantra in its original South Asian contexts. The term tantra, which translates roughly to 'technology,' or 'technique,' rose to prominence in medieval South Asian culture during a moment of radical historical transformation (300?1200CE). In contrast to the modern image of the state-an orderly, unified, and bureaucratized entity, in which the work ethic of the nuclear family facilitates a highly regulated economy-medieval South Asia was essentially an anarchic space. These tantras emerged in the world of medieval South Asia as a set of techniques for coping with, and accruing power within, a political and social reality perceived to be dystopian, chaotic, and slouching toward decay. But, it was precisely because political unification was elusive that the Indian Subcontinent was fertile ground for radical innovation. In this course, we will examine the complex ecosystem of political, economic, religious, aesthetic, and philosophical institutions of tantric South Asia that challenged-and even reversed-classical Indian gender, familial, caste, religious, and ritual norms. The first section of the course discusses the cultural and literary building blocks of tantra articulated in archaic and classical Indian culture (1000BCE-300CE), including ritual literature, court poetry, and treatises on politics, erotic desire, and warfare. We will then examine the tantric culture of reversals of classical Indian norms during the medieval period (300-1200CE): the Tantric Age. Finally, we will consider the enduring legacies of tantra in South Asian culture in the last section of the course, Tantric Afterlives (1200CE-present).